Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House, met with President Donald Trump and other congressional leaders at the White House on Monday. Afterward, she spoke with reporters at the Capitol Building about Trump’s decision to reinstitute a U.S. policy—known as the “global gag rule” or “Mexico City policy”—that strips foreign NGOs of federal money if they educate people abroad about abortion.

“It’s no surprise, it’s no surprise,” she said. “We didn’t really talk about the [global] gag rule because well, you know, what do you expect?” She depicted his decision as a predictable, but unfortunate part of the ebb and flow of partisan politics. “Reagan did that and Obama reversed that and then now it’s been reversed by this president.”

She was right: The reimplementation of the policy wasn’t surprising. But in a different sense, this is a perfect example of how political elites take certain outcomes for granted—to the point that these outcomes don’t even merit debate on Capitol Hill and in the press, and thus, the voting public is never made aware of it.

The global gag rule is just one policy, and it would’ve been odd if it drove a bunch of news cycles during the campaign. But to the extent that few reporters in Washington were surprised by this Trump executive order, it represents a broader failure on the part of the political press to convey the stakes of this past election clearly. Major policy differences between the two parties are second nature to much of the media, yet somehow weren’t laid out clearly before voters, which may be why the early days of the Trump era have been so disorienting—even for Trump’s supporters.

The institutional failures that allowed Trump to win the GOP nomination and then the presidency have largely been glossed over, including by employees and managers of big media outlets. But their defensiveness is belied by developments that surfaced only after the election.

