When it comes to the journalists, they've also gone without
serious opposition for a very long time. They rolled around and had all the fun they wanted during Clinton's years, they essentially used Bush's administration as a glorified punching bag, and Obama's terms gave them all but free reign to do whatever they wanted, provided that it wasn't something that pissed his administration off or
they'd come after your ass.
Because no one was doing anything about it, the "leak culture" in Washington continued to broaden until it had reached the point where politicians were just treating it as a matter of course because there just "wasn't anything that could be done" about it, and that wound up leaving most of these journalists in a position where they never really
needed to do any leg-work because they had so many federal employees or politicians feeding information to them that "boots on the ground" reporting wasn't something that had to be done.
When the leak network got knee-capped, they floundered.
The vast majority of them have never
had to do serious, investigative reporting. Hell, in most situations they didn't even have to write their own stories, they just blindly copy-and-pasted them from other outlets who copied them from other outlets who were probably just handed a fucking PDF that they were told to publish. Even setting aside all of their blatant activism, the reason that they never do any legitimate, investigative journalism is probably because
they don't even know how to do it.
The Democrats have a similar problem in that the Religious Right was probably the easiest fucking Strawman to keep whacking at for the duration of their stay in power. The majority of the American public couldn't stand them and their constant stonewalling of things like gay rights and religiously-motivated denials for abortion didn't play well with a public that was becoming decreasingly religious and increasingly interested in personal liberties. That's without having to get into the fact that every time you turned around, the Jesus Folks were trying to ban some movie or game or book or... Basically, fucking with people's entertainment is
generally not popular.
They couldn't have asked for an easier opposition during Clinton's era, then Bush wasn't exactly a fan of putting up a hard fight against media narratives, and then for the entirety of Obama's terms all that the only messages that the Right could get to reach the public were about how Obama's a secret Muslim and he was born in Kenya or some damn thing, so we have an entire political class that have either softened with age, cut their teeth on
incredibly soft targets, or a combination of the two. I'm sure that they had
plenty of other things to say, but they never found a way to navigate around that "media blockade" so that the messages reached the general public.
They got so comfortable where they're sitting because the media helped them drive any narrative that they wanted in any direction that it needed to go. They just don't know what to do against someone who
completely steps around their stranglehold on the media, and by the time that they figure it out he's going to be finished with his second term because these politicians do
not quickly adapt to change. When Trump kicked the door down, gave everyone an atomic wedgie and took their lunch money, they had no idea how to handle that.
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