The postmortem on the Donald Trump phenomenon was well under way long before early voting began. Casting their nets too close to shore, the establishment punditry targeted the obvious suspects: cable news outlets who let Trump commandeer their microphones; Hillary Clinton for being a secretive and undynamic candidate; the Republican Party establishment for not doing more to derail Trump at the outset.

Too few political reporters bothered to examine how crony capitalism infects both major political parties or were willing to explore how these two parties have mismanaged globalization, abdicated responsibility on the national debt, and been AWOL on formulating immigration policy. Yes, the wealth-flaunting Trump was an unlikely populist champion, but it shouldn’t have been a surprise that working-class Americans who haven’t had a pay raise in a generation were a restive voting bloc.

Instead, the “flyover country” voters who upended the Republican Party in 2016 were generally portrayed as dupes and bigots who morphed into a snarling mob that chose Trump as the GOP standard-bearer. In this construct, blame must be assigned. But to whom? That depends on whom you ask.

Hillary Clinton targeted Trump voters themselves, memorably calling half of them irredeemable “deplorables.” Clinton cabinet official Tom Vilsack, a former Iowa governor, was more diplomatic: He blamed Trump, comparing The Donald to an infamous con man. “Donald Trump is sort of to politics what Bernie Madoff was to investment,” Vilsack said to NBC. “He is selling something that people don’t fully understand and appreciate what it actually means.”

Max Boot, a thoughtful foreign policy conservative, blames the GOP’s habit — going back to when Dwight Eisenhower ran for office — of dumbing down its rhetoric: “masquerading as the stupid party,” in Boot’s memorable description.

The most convoluted explanation was proffered by Democratic financier Steven Rattner, who told Republican lawmakers, “You created the anger that lifted his candidacy.” How did they do this? By not voting for Big Government programs pushed by President Obama. Most prominent liberal television and newspaper commentators take a more direct approach. They accuse the party of pandering so hard and for so long they could no longer control the process.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman blames the GOP leadership for “renting” themselves out for years to any entity that could energize the base and help keep their party in power. Dana Milbank of The Washington Post went further. “Trump may be a monster,” he wrote, “but he’s the monster Republicans created.”

In this telling, the GOP is the party of “dog whistles” to closeted racists, a political organization hostile to gays, immigrants and minorities — a party that doesn’t even protect women, let alone embrace ethical and cultural pluralism. A large number of Democrats and media outlets take this contention to its ultimate — and ultimately extreme — conclusion: Merely questioning Hillary Clinton’s ethics or campaign style, they say, is evidence of sexism. Likewise, to oppose President Obama’s policies is racist.

Knowing deep down that this sounds so hyper-partisan as to be loony, these liberals began taking pains to extol Republican presidents and presidential nominees not named Trump.

“There’s something there I miss today,” Chris Matthews was heard saying on MSNBC during the 2011 budget battles. Bet you can’t guess what it was: The liberal talk show host was waxing nostalgic for Ronald Reagan’s ability to negotiate with Matthews’ former boss, House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill. On the same show, leftist writer Joan Walsh said, “President Obama is actually the Reagan figure here.”

Meanwhile, “I miss Reagan” bumper stickers started popping up, and Barack Obama himself appropriated Reagan’s “city on a hill” imagery at the Democrats’ 2016 nominating convention, albeit as a way of attacking Trump. Likewise, prominent Democrats and their media loyalists spent the better part of this year extolling their heretofore unacknowledged appreciation of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and both presidents named George Bush.

“He was in it for the right reasons,” Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s 2012 deputy campaign manager, said recently about Romney. “He truly believed in wanting to make this country better.”

“Compared to Donald Trump,” Francis Fukuyama, wrote in Time magazine, “George W. Bush looks like a paragon of statesmanship.”

And so it goes. But here’s the problem. This is not how progressives spoke about these Republicans when they were running for president or holding high elective office. Ronald Reagan was routinely described in the media as a bellicose dummy who fiddled while gay people died and whose attitudes toward the Soviet Union threatened the stability of the world.

As Reagan scholar Steven F. Hayward has noted, Democratic Rep. William Lacy Clay of Missouri claimed Reagan was “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from ‘Mein Kampf.’” Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad depicted Reagan as a young Hitler, planning a fascist putsch in a darkened Munich beer hall. While on book tour a few days before Reagan died, Donna Brazile, now the interim Democratic Party chairwoman, characterized the 40th U.S. president as a man who had initiated “the politics of telling poor people they are worthless.”

In 1988, Brazile accused George H.W. Bush of running a “racist” campaign, based on the prison furlough ads run against Michael Dukakis. (Brazile was pushed out of her role in the Dukakis’ campaign for spreading rumors about Vice President Bush’s married life.) The truth about the supposedly racist furlough ads is that they were shot in sepia tones by the Bush campaign in Utah, of all places, precisely to avoid racial overtones. Yet, the Willie Horton ads hardened into a prevailing media narrative for more than two decades.

By 2000, calling George W. Bush a racist was the liberals’ standard operating procedure, a tactic used against Romney as well. In the interim John McCain lost his soul — or maybe, according to Vanity Fair, he never had one — by picking Sarah Palin and committing other partisan sins.

The point is not that Democrats and the media are insincere in their attacks on Donald Trump, or even that their criticism is misplaced. But if the media are assigning responsibility for the havoc wreaked by his candidacy, we should start by looking in the mirror.

If Reagan and George W. Bush are routinely portrayed as warmongers, if both Bushes (and Reagan and Romney) are painted as bigots, if we write that John McCain has no core values, how do we expect rank-and-file conservatives or grassroots independents to respond when Trump is dubbed by the media as an existential threat to democracy? In other words, once you’ve compared the most popular Republican president in the 20th century to Adolf Hitler, what have you got left in your rhetorical arsenal that any open-minded person would possibly believe?

The result was predictable: The Trump voters tuned us out. We earned that disregard, and we should have seen it coming. To Russ Schriefer, a top Romney adviser in 2012, the Democrats and their media cheerleaders are a classic example of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

“Don’t be surprised,” Schriefer told the Associated Press, “when your accusations against Trump are falling upon deaf ears and aren’t working, when you’ve used them in the past against a person for whom the descriptions didn’t fit.”

Carl M. Cannon is executive editor and Washington Bureau chief of RealClearPolitics.