“Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States.” That’s a sentence I thought I’d never type in my whole lifetime. The shock of the situation is genuine. The pundit class is now trying to assess how they could have possibly been so wrong about the results.

There has been much talk of a “confirmation bias,” which is when you only seek out similar points of view and you become out of touch with the world around you.  

Words have meaning, and that’s why you can’t use terms like “fascist” and “Nazi” lightly. You have every right to use these terms, but using them to describe someone who is ideologically different is flat out dumb. If you label everyone as “Hitler in the making,” no one is Hitler. If every republican is called sexist or racist simply for disagreeing with you on certain issues, the terms will lose legitimacy when used in the proper context. 

This election is very much a case of the boy who cried wolf. The American people were beaten over the head by the media with ideas that the last two republican presidential nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney in the 2008 and 2012 elections respectively, were unacceptable for America. However, both former candidates are now desired options. When the pundits pounded the same ideas into the American public against Trump, it fell on deaf ears.

Don’t believe that voters who swung from Obama to Trump did so because they suddenly became racist. It’s a lot more nuanced than that.   

John McCain was labeled as a man unfit for office. He was a madman who could not be allowed to have his finger on the nuclear launch button. He was going to propel us into nuclear war without hesitation. McCain, a long-time politician, who was willing to go across the aisle and not be as extreme as Jeff Sessions or Ted Cruz in the Senate, was portrayed as a monster. However, if you follow the president-elect on Twitter, and I highly suggest you do, you see just how impulsive he really is. If foreign leaders do anything he doesn’t approve of, the tweet storm will be popcorn worthy.

Now there’s our good old sweater-vest-wearing Mitt Romney.  Again, he was savaged by the left as a monster. He was an evil capitalist who laid off people and was labeled as subhuman for being a successful business magnate. The Senate majority leader at the time, Harry Reid, said Romney hadn’t paid taxes for years on the floor of the Senate with no evidence. Romney was accused of waging a war against women because a committee delivered to him ‘binders full of women’ who were qualified for positions because he was seeking diversity while he was governor. Joe Biden, everyone’s favorite meme darling, warned a black audience that Romney “wanted to put y’all back in chains.”  

Now that a man like Trump, who only gives off the illusion of being a successful businessman, has become president-elect, swing voters should remember the similar comments made about the last guy. The pundits warned that Trump wouldn’t be stable enough to be in charge of the military. The American people simply shrugged and thought, “you said that about a veteran.” When Trump actually doesn’t pay his taxes, people are skeptical, even without verifiable proof. When Trump pussyfoots around on condemning white supremacists and appoints one as a senior advisor, and it’s those same language abusers whose say all republicans are racist and that they use dog whistles it doesn’t pack the same punch. When Trump demeans women and confirms he’s a misogynist through his actions, it’s perceived as normal.  

The boy cried wolf one too many times. Now the flock is about to be mauled by a wolf, and it’s the boy’s fault. The democrats have to own up to this, by deflecting the blame to others like James Comey, director of the FBI, it sounds a lot like sour grapes. Trump is the president-elect and now those same republicans who’ve been the targets of these attacks are the moderates in a polarized party that doesn’t know where it’s heading. As unlikely as it may seem, Secretary of State Mitt Romney has a nice ring to it.