Article content continued

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

On the pure narrow ground of what change he has brought to politics that most defines his White House occupancy I say, without irony, that it is his consistent and so far unfailing capacity to unset, even to derangement, the minds of those who most disparage and despair of him. His impact on the Democratic-friendly media — most of the big channels and a slew of their cable epigone — has been fundamental. He has made them forget that a tradition of neutral journalism was even an accepted standard, evacuated their once proud sense of balanced, fair judgment, and turned many of its large-name performers into frothy caricatures of what journalists are supposed to be.

To his opponents in the Democratic Congress that impact has registered as well. The poor, sad Democrats who could not even conceive that a bloated, loud-mouth bumpkin, with no political experience and a blustering mega-aggressive approach to both life and politics, had the slightest chance of wrecking the ambition of their House queen and empress, that vessel of unappeasable ambition and guile, Hillary Clinton.

That he did of course. He put a full-stop on a career started as early as her university days, took away that final step to the top of American politics that in her second effort to reach it was supposed by the fates, the press, and everyone of sane mind to be inescapably, ineluctably hers for the taking.

Photo by Jacquelyn Martin/Pool/Reuters

Both Democrats and their media allies have not, from the night of the election itself, to this very minute, been able to accept the fact, to digest the news, to accommodate the reality, that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton; that he was president, she was not.