But it is important to understand that millions of Americans got a vastly different impression of what happened. Here is how Rush Limbaugh summed it up for his listeners:

Folks, it was masterful. It wasn’t scripted. It was nothing that the president had to think long and hard about. He didn’t have to make notes and memorize them and go out. It was improv. It was spontaneous. We had a caller in the last half hour who mentioned how good that was. It was the truth. When you’ve got the truth and when you’re telling people the truth of what you really think, you don’t have to remember it. It’s in your heart. It’s like anything else you believe, you don’t need a cram course on what you believe. You don’t really need advisers to tell you what you believe. You believe it, it’s in your heart, it’s in your mind, and you can easily explain it to people, you don’t have to remember it. And that’s who Donald Trump was today. And they came at him from everywhere.

Here is what Sean Hannity told Fox News viewers who didn’t flip on their TV until later in the evening:

Limbaugh and Hannity have been misleading their sizable audiences daily for years. That is nothing new. Perhaps there are members of those audiences who also read The Daily Caller or The Federalist. But those outlets see their role as a counterweights to the mainstream media. Relatively little of their press criticism aims at the right, and both would also like to have their staffers invited onto Fox News regularly.

Here's how The Drudge Report spun its audience:

Inside the New York Post, in a column titled, “Sorry media — this press conference played very different with Trump’s supporters,” Michael Goodwin gave POTUS a good review:

Far from dead, he was positively exuberant. His performance at a marathon press conference was a must-see-tv spectacle as he mixed serious policy talk with stand-up comedy and took repeated pleasure in whacking his favorite pinata, the “dishonest media.” “Russia is a ruse,” he insisted, before finally saying under questioning he was not aware of anyone on his campaign having contact with Russian officials. Trump’s detractors immediately panned the show as madness, but they missed the method behind it and proved they still don’t understand his appeal. Facing his first crisis in the Oval Office, he was unbowed in demonstrating his bare-knuckled intention to fight back. He did it his way. Certainly no other president, and few politicians at any level in any time, would dare put on a show like that. In front of cameras, and using the assembled press corps as props, he conducted a televised revival meeting to remind his supporters that he is still the man they elected. Ticking off a lengthy list of executive orders and other actions he has taken, he displayed serious fealty to his campaign promises. Sure, sentences didn’t always end on the same topic they started with, and his claim to have won the election by the largest electoral college margin since Ronald Reagan wasn’t close to true. Fair points, but so what? Fact-checkers didn’t elect him, nor did voters who were happy with the status quo.

Back in October, in “How Millions of Good People Can Vote Differently Than You Will,” I asked readers to imagine that they are someone else from a different family and city:

All your friends are totally different in their personal backgrounds, education levels, and political leanings. You’ve never once read any of the newspapers or magazines that you read, let alone the individual articles that have influenced you the most during this election; in fact, you get almost all your news from television, mostly from channels or shows that you’ve almost never watched in your current life. The unfamiliar hosts highlight totally different stories. Finally, imagine that your social media feeds are populated by media content and commentary from friends that is 97 percent different. You believe multiple lies you now know to be true and know truths you regard as lies.

Since then, I have written a series of articles arguing that if members of the coalition that opposes Donald Trump want to persuade the public, they’ll have to resist the temptation to vilify all his supporters, and to formulate a strategy that includes earnest efforts at loving outreach and persuasion.