Donald Trump made scores of promises that he not only will not fulfill but, with ontological certainty, cannot fulfill. To take one small example, he told an audience that he would grow jobs in the coal industry, and also jobs in the fracking industry. Never mind that these two goals are opposed—if America consumes more coal, it will require less fracked natural gas, and vice versa.

Then there is Trump’s promise to restore the easy prosperity of America’s mythic mid-century past, and his ur-promise, the fascist one: ethnic cleansing and the ushering in of boundless national glory. When these things do not appear—when, instead, his rise ushers in global financial panic and geostrategic chaos—his worshipful admirers are unlikely to blame him, let alone themselves. They learned from watching The Apprentice that “Mr. Trump” is all-knowing and omni-competent, and will blame those whom Mr. Trump instructs them to blame: The quislings in the media. The (Jewish) financiers. The immigrants. The Muslims. The liberals. The “Republican establishment.” Nasty women. A spiral of violent recrimination may well ensue; rinse, lather, repeat.

Enduring and resisting this onslaught will be traumatic. We will need unflinching assessments of exactly what it is we are going through. But our nation, indoctrinated into an Oklahoma City-museum conception of trauma and healing, is woefully unprepared. And our mainstream media is the most unprepared of all.

Years ago, amidst President George W. Bush’s worst depredations of the rule of law, I used to fantasize about confronting mainstream media sachems with a thought experiment: Imagine you are a commentator in Weimar Germany. A dynamic new political party comes on the scene. They pursue their goals via means that are, shall we say, extra-parliamentary. Their leader’s book promises that he alone can fix the nation’s problems. And that the fault lies not in ourselves, but in our resident aliens.

At what point, I wanted to ask, would you consider it your moral duty to break from the settled routines of “fairness” and “objectivity”—gotta hear both sides!—to inform your audience that what was going on was not normal?

During Bush’s terms, my daydream felt a little unfair and over the top. No longer.

On election night, I heard commentator after commentator on NBC talk about this like any other election: Whether Trump could reach across the aisle. How he would staff his transition. Whether Democrats could “cut deals” with him. And, yes, how it all could be explained because, after eight years of a Democratic president, the nation simply wanted “change.”

The week before, a reporter from USA Today called to ask for historical examples that could inform our quest to heal and unite the country after a divisive campaign. When I responded that adults understand that true healing only happens when a problem is forthrightly acknowledged, that working through our divisions means we should confront our trauma before coming out the other side. His response suggested a sci-fi robot: That does not compute! He asked me to re-explain my answer, as if he had never heard such a strange thing.

For this is not how mainstream media professionals are trained to think. They think like those museologists in Oklahoma City. Americans “come together.” Consensus is in our DNA. Here, ugly things, racist things, violent things, sexist things, are epiphenomenal.

We’ve always been this way: Even in 1836, when America’s crisis over slavery was bringing the country closer and closer to civil war, Congress’s response was to outlaw any debate over slavery in Congress. Southern slaveholders pushed it, but I bet respectable Whigs welcomed it. So much less unpleasantness if you pretend a crisis doesn’t exist.