Trust those reporting the world the way it is, not the way they’d prefer it to be

Illustration: Johannes Leak.

Donald Trump keeps proving the so-called political, media and academic elites wrong and, like an old punching clown, they keep popping back up to be knocked down again. They never learn.

That is why whoever wins this presidential contest — and the odds (late on Wednesday) are overwhelmingly in favour of the incumbent — the real winners are mainstream voters and the real losers are the polit­ical/media class.

The same dynamic that plays out in the US plays out in this country. The same chasm exists between mainstream values and concerns, and the way the debate is marshalled in most mainstream media.

The disconnect is fatal for left-of-centre political parties. Joe Biden went to this election — like Bill Shorten at our federal election last year — with policies to increase taxes and implement massive, uncoated climate gestures.

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And working families did not eagerly line up to support him: who woulda thunk that? These people never learn.

Worse, Biden and the Democrats ran sanctimonious lines on issues of identity politics, on race, gender and immigration — sound familiar? They insult as bigots anyone who considers voting for the other side, then wonder why they do not woo them across.

And they are surprised when voters show a preference for practical measures, such as jobs for minor­ities or educational opportunities. Take a knee or take a job?

Biden actually had the gall to tell African-Americans that if they did not vote for him they were not really black. Just because most journalists gave him a leave pass on such condescension did not mean that voters failed to notice.

On top of all this, in this year of coronavirus, Biden hid in his basement, wore a mask even when he was outdoors and metres away from anyone else, and promised more lockdowns and economic pain. Trump was slammed for his handling of the pandemic (they really­ meant his loopy rhetoric) but mainstream Americans have shown they understand the need to keep their societies and economies open: it is all about relative risk and proportionate measures.

Now all of this has been plain in the public and political debate for many months, as I have shared with you previously. That so many in the media have not been able to see this, or have chosen to hide it, is not just an indictment on their abilities, it is a tragic revelation of their jaundice and belligerence.

If you did not read this or other News Corp newspapers or watch Sky News, you would be totally surprised by the outcome in the US. You would have been convince­d by the supposedly dispassionate experts on the ABC and at Nine Newspapers that Biden would win in a landslide and Trump would be ignominiously consigned to history.

This is a gross breach of the pact between journalists and their audienc­es. They have not only misled them, and failed to gather the information they have a duty to comprehend, but they have deceived­ audiences by ignoring realit­y and reporting the world as they would prefer it to be.

They rail against Trump because­ he describes them as the enemy of the people. But they treat the choices and preferences of the people with disdain, giving his point some credence.

There are senior comment­ators in this country, many on the public payroll, who were wildly wrong on Trump in 2016, then horribly wrong on the Brexit referendum, then said Scott Morrison could not win, and now have picked the 2020 US presidential election completely wrong too. The US media is full of the same types. Yet they all keep their jobs.

It is as though they believe their job is to choose the issues and can­dida­tes that matter, then admonish the voters for getting it wrong. They sneer at the mainstream.

I am not talking about commentators who might have suggested Biden would sneak a narrow win in a hotly contested election — that was a sensible view, of course — but they have been telling us that Trump was an affront to democracy, a danger to the world, and an insult to a nation eager to cleanse itself of him. How could they not attune themselves to the obvious issues and logic of Trump’s positions?

You do not have to like Trump or agree with him to comprehend that a focus on law and order, support­ for police, a priority on cheap reliable energy, a strong stand on China, a preference for jobs and lower taxes, and a realistic attitude to a pandemic that is troubling all nations would reson­ate with people who want the best for their families.

The Democrats (and other left-of-centre parties) are obsessed with post-material issues, virtue-signalling policies for people who are not particularly worried about job security or electricity bills.

So Trump’s performance is a victory for democracy. Ugly and unorthodox as his politics are, Trump is not the enemy of democracy, he has enlivened it by giving voice to the mainstream — as Robert Menzies would have it, the Forgotten People.

Trump values people over pollsters, voters over bureaucrats, and workers over journalists. His ­Supreme Court appointments and the opposition they raised showed he values the nation’s institutions more highly than the Democrats, who want to change them to suit their own ideological ends.

Sure, he does not have the grace or character of Menzies or Ronald Reagan, but he has the same connection to the silent ­majority in the places that matter. To that extent, rather than rail against him and offer four years of fevered resistance, the political left would have done better to learn pertinent lessons from his 2016 win. They did not learn a thing.

Biden was an appalling candid­ate, cowering from public view, hiding his policies and yelling at people to expunge the President. A young and centrist candidate, focus­ed on the same aspirations — jobs, law and order, secure borders — would have swamped Trump, the abrasive disrupter.

As it is, Trump has proved his point convincingly, even if somehow, through court challenges and post-election-day counting, Biden snatches what would be a controversial win. If Trump does take up his second term, I am just optim­istic enough to think he could dial down his rhetoric and seek to be more unifying, given he will no longer be permanently in campaign­ mode.

We might hope also the ­Democrats look at their own performanc­e rather than fuel protests­ and grievances in order to try to delegitimise a president.

Maybe even the media, in the US and in Australia, will find a way to reconnect journalists to those they serve. Because the real divide in US and Australian politics is not between left and right, black and white, male and female, or native-born and immigrant, it is between the so-called political/media elites and the great mainstream.

WATCH: The Kenny Report live from Washington DC tonight at 5pm on Sky News