On Nov. 5, the Democrat-media alliance died when Donald Trump—Literally Hitler, to hear them tell it—was re-elected. 

On Nov. 7, a Washington Post story showed why the alliance needed to die and will not be missed.

David Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, came to Michigan to follow around Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson as she administered The Most Important Election of Our Lives, in one of the seven swing states that would decide the election. 

“She fought to restore trust in an election system Trump attacked. Then Trump won,” read the headline.

The headline presents “then Trump won” as some type of plot twist, something that wasn’t supposed to happen. As if Benson was there to ensure a specific result, and not to do her job, which was to oversee the election.

I get why Mariniss would be confused. A traditional Secretary of State would act on behalf of all 10 million Michiganders. Benson acts as a partisan Democrat. When RFK Jr. wanted off the ballot, Benson kept him on. When Cornel West wanted on the ballot, Benson fought to keep him off. Whatever was good for the Democrats is what she did. So yes, it might come as a shock that such a person could administer an election in which her team lost. But it’s actually common in Michigan. 

Ruth Johnson did it in 2018 when Democrats won the governorship, Secretary of State’s office, and Attorney General’s office all at once. This is a feature of election administration, not a bug. 

“As disappointed as she might have been by the national result, her faith in democracy compelled her to accept it,” Maraniss wrote.

The piece starts with a Benson election-night press conference in which she managed expectations about the timing of the vote count. Despite laws that allow early processing of absentee ballots, Benson had claimed it would take 24 hours—until about 8 p.m. Wednesday night—to count votes.

Because the national landslide came so fast, Michigan didn’t matter. Benson and her fellow Democrats could take as long as they wanted counting votes in Cobo Hall. Because the American people had spoken, and they wanted Trump.

I’m old enough to remember when “dog bites man” wasn’t news, because dogs bite men. Fish swimming is not news because fish swim. A secretary of state managing an election with integrity is not newsworthy.

Maraniss arrived in Michigan with his narrative in hand and did not trouble it with research or a scan of recent headlines. Had he, Maraniss might have used days of access to Benson to ask about the Chinese national who just voted illegally, whose vote will count. 

He might have asked about Ruth Johnson’s reporting that nearly 35,000 newly-registered voters in Michigan did not have valid Social Security numbers. 

Instead the reader is subjected to a what-Benson-said stenography that can only go as deep as Benson herself. Which is to say, shallow. 

“She is a preacher in the secular religion of one person, one vote,” Maraniss wrote. Never did he wrestle with the fact that the Chinese man got one vote too many, and as a result someone’s legal vote was canceled out. How does that land with preacher Benson? We don’t know. Because Maraniss didn’t ask, and if he did, he didn’t tell. 

When Benson danced in the streets outside a polling precinct, Maraniss reported that she “said she’d never seen this level of energy.”

It was the most accurate line in the story. The enthusiasm was real, just not in the direction the Democrat and her repeater had hoped. Trump didn’t just win America, he won Michigan by nearly 80,000 votes. 

Think of all the Democrats who shrieked about Trump for years. Our governor, Gretchen Whitmer, pretended to be the victim of a kidnapping plot to paint Trump as an extremist. Benson cast his election skepticism as a Threat to Our Democracy. Former Republicans claimed they had to join the blue team as Trump dragged the party too far afield.

The media cast Trump as a sore loser and insurrectionist. They all but equated election doubts with Holocaust denial, calling both The Big Lie. Every time a Democrat claimed, without evidence, that Trump was Literally Hitler, a repeater was eager to run the quote. 

In the end, none of it mattered. The Democrat-media outrage was fake. It came from government offices and newsrooms; it did not exist in the hearts and minds of our neighbors. 

Trump won because Michiganders don’t believe Democrats when they talk, or the media when they quote them. 

Trump won because you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. 

This David Maraniss piece should not be tossed in the circular file, as was my instinct. It should be preserved in amber so posterity can see what the end of an era looked like through the eyes of Election Barbie.

James David Dickson is host of the Enjoyer Podcast. Join him in conversation on X @downi75.