“Elite” journalists in the mainstream media continue to paint a Donald Trump presidency as the beginning of the end of American politics, a doomsday scenario that belies the public’s optimism for 2017.

“There is one overarchingly huge story, a very bigly story … that is the upending of American politics. The story is of the outs coming in and the ins going out. The story is trying to explain to the American people what’s happened to their two main parties,” The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg told CBS’ Face The Nation.

“The deeper story is globalization and technological disruption and anxiety born of rapid change, rapid destabilizing change, the fragility of institutions – all of that is there undergirding the larger more immediate story of how did Donald Trump become president of the United States and what it means for not only how America understands itself, but also how the world understands America,” he continued.

Goldberg suggested that America may abandon its role as a world peacemaker under President Trump.

“We are at a hinge moment in history,” he claimed. “Since 1945, we have played a certain role in the world, and it’s not entirely clear that after Jan. 20 we are going to play that same role.”

Goldberg appeared on the program as part of a panel that also included former NPR journalist Michele Norris, as well as Michael Gerson of The Washington Post, and David Frum with The Atlantic. The group cast a very dire picture of America under Donald Trump that seems to contradict the public’s optimism about the future and exposes why many American’s are tuning out the mainstream media.

In a New Year’s poll conducted by the Associated Press, only 18 percent of Americans believe the country improved in 2016, compared to about 55 percent who expect things to improve for them with The Donald as president.

“People will have more jobs and they’ll have more money to spend,” Harlem resident Bourmea Tamboura told the news service.

Regardless, Norris told Face The Nation that technology has eroded the mainstream media’s role as information gatekeeper and suggested that Trump is capitalizing on the situation to speak directly to Americans who support his vision to Make America Great Again.

“As journalists, we have to learn how to operate in a world where there is no longer a common set of facts. People get their news in such a way that usually affirms or confirms everything that they already believe,” Norris said.

“We have somebody who is about to occupy the Oval Office who is dismissing many of the publications that we work or have worked for and is trying to bypass us and go directly to people,” she said. “So, as we try to explain this surreal universe, we find ourselves in almost a room of funhouse mirrors trying to figure out how to describe what’s going on.”

Frum added that the demise of democracy is at hand, as evidenced by the European Union “cracking apart” and the rise of nationalist parties in places like France, as well as other democratic institutions “falling apart” in Hungry, Poland, and Croatia.

“And the United States has a new president to be who has made it clear he is not going to be bound by traditional rules against corruption, traditional rules against foreign influence, traditional rules in just about any way …,” Frum said. “We are living through a crisis of democracy unlike anything seen since the second world war. So that’s the story, and it’s not an American story, it’s a global story.

“It’s a story of American non-exceptionalism.”

He also insisted that “the only way that things will be okay is if we all understand how not okay they are.”

“If we are sufficiently inflamed, we may be able to put the fire out,” Frum said.

Gerson agreed with his esteemed colleagues, and predicted there “is pretty much an even chance that we are going to have a constitutional crisis or have a completely incompetent presidency that doesn’t know how to exercise power …”

“Donald Trump has a White House with almost no skill at governing. He has a chief of staff who has never been in government, which is absolutely extraordinary,” he said. “He’s elevated people – generals and corporate heads – who have no experience in this extraordinarily complex business of how you put together an administration, run a bureaucracy, produce ideas, so I think there’s a deep concern about the possibility of overreach.

“But I think we should also be concerned about the possibility of an entirely ineffective government that doesn’t value governing experience, that doesn’t value what government should do, what it can do under the right circumstances,” Gerson continued.

And aside from the alleged political crisis facing the country and the world, the panelists believe Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign slogan is really a coded call to return to the country’s painful past of racial discrimination. In essence, Norris argued, Trump’s campaign promises allude to a return to “white prosperity” at the expense of minorities.

“In the phrase ‘Make America Great Again’ there is one word that if you are a person of color that you sort of stumble over and it’s the word is ‘again,’” Norris told Face The Nation. “Because you are talking about going back to a time that was not very comfortable for people of color. They did not have opportunities. They were relegated to the back of the line.

“And this was a country that, to be honest, was built on the promise of white prosperity above everything else,” she said. “And for a lot of people, when they hear that message ‘Make America Great Again,’ deeply encoded in that message is a return to a time when white Americans could assume a certain amount of prosperity.”