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    The US is ‘absolutely’ ready for a female president, Harris says in NBC interview

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    Kamala Harris said that she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, insisting that Americans care more about what candidates can do to help them, rather than presidential contenders’ gender.The vice-president’s statement came during an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson, who asked whether she thought the country was ready for a woman, and a woman of color, to be in the Oval Office. “Absolutely,” Harris said. “Absolutely.”“In terms of every walk of life of our country,” Harris said, “part of what is important in this election is really, not really turning the page – closing a chapter, on an era that suggests that Americans are divided.“The vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us and what the American people want in their president is a president for all Americans,” she said.Harris was asked why she hasn’t leaned into the historic nature of her candidacy – that she is a woman of color running for the presidency.“I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”“That is why I spend the majority of my time listening and then addressing the concerns, the challenges, the dreams, the ambitions and the aspirations of the American people,” Harris continued, saying that Americans deserve a president focused on them, “as opposed to a Donald Trump, who is constantly focused on himself”.Harris also said she was aware that Trump might potentially try thwarting the presidential election results, noting that her team “will deal with election night and the days after as they come”.Harris said that she is focused on campaigning over the next two weeks while noting “we have the resources and the expertise and the focus” on any potential threats to election results. Jackson noted that Trump declared victory before all the votes were tallied in 2020.Trump, who has refused to accept the 2020 election results and claimed the race was stolen, has been stoking fears with unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud in the 2024 cycle. “This is a person, Donald Trump, who tried to undo the free and fair election, who still denies the will of the people who incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol, and 140 law enforcement officers were attacked, some who were killed. This is a serious matter,” Harris told Jackson.Trump supporters on 6 January 2021 stormed the US Capitol in an effort to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s victory. That day, four people died at the Capitol and a police officer working during the insurrection died several days later; four other police officers posted at the building on 6 January 2021 committed suicide, according to CBS News.“The American people are, at this point, two weeks out, being presented with a very, very serious decision about what will be the future of our country,” Harris also said.Jackson also asked about voters’ concerns about the economy, noting that many blame the US president for rising prices.Harris said her policies “will not be a continuation of the Biden administration” and with inflation, “I bring my own experiences, my own ideas to it.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJackson noted that if Harris won, her victory might coincide with Republican control of Congress, which would thwart protecting abortion at the national level.“What concessions would be on the table?” Jackson asked.“I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body,” Harris said.Harris said she would not “get into those hypotheticals” when asked if a pardon might be on the table for Trump.“I’m focused on the next 14 days.”Harris was pressed on the pardon topic, asked if she thought it could help the country move forward together and be less divisive.“Let me tell you what’s going to help us move on: I get elected to president of the United States.” More

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      US news organizations urge Biden and Trump to agree to TV election debates

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      Twelve US news organizations are urging Joe Biden and Donald Trump to agree to TV debates ahead of the November presidential vote, a typical feature of an election year and one that can sometimes play a crucial role.“If there is one thing Americans can agree on during this polarized time, it is that the stakes of this election are exceptionally high,” the organizations including ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, PBS, NBC, NPR and the Associated Press said in a statement.“Amidst that backdrop, there is simply no substitute for the candidates debating with each other, and before the American people, their visions for the future of our nation,” they added.But the two major candidates have so far resisted debating rival candidates from their own parties, with Trump refusing to participate against the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and others, and Biden resisting calls to set foot on a TV stage with rival Democratic candidates, who have since abandoned their electoral efforts to challenge him in the party.The news organizations said it was not too early for each campaign to say publicly that it will participate in the three presidential and one vice-presidential TV showdowns set by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.In 2020, Biden and Trump debated twice, with a third debate canceled after then-president Trump tested positive for Covid-19.Last week, the Trump campaign called for presidential debates to be held earlier and more frequently so voters “have a full chance” to see the candidates in action. Trump campaign managers have argued that by the time of the first scheduled debate, on 16 September, more than 1 million Americans will likely have already voted, with more than 8.7 million voting by the third debate, penciled in for 9 October.Trump has said he is willing to go head-to-head with Biden “anytime, anyplace and anywhere”, starting “now”. But Biden has been uncommitted to any debate so far, saying last month: “it depends on [Trump’s] behavior.” More

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      Can NBC News recover from its damaging decision to hire Ronna McDaniel? | Margaret Sullivan

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      As boneheaded corporate decisions go, the one by NBC News to bring on Ronna McDaniel as a paid contributor is right up there.Whatever twisted purpose hiring the former Republican National Committee (RNC) chairperson was meant to accomplish has been lost. That may have been gaining access to Republican bigwigs, sending a cynical message of ideological diversity or boosting ratings.Instead, the network has badly damaged its reputation and credibility. The hire makes a statement that, for this major US news organization, there are no consequences – rather, a juicy reward – for public figures who continually lie to the press and citizens. Her contract is reportedly worth $300,000.Hiring McDaniel – a powerful election denialist who joined then president Donald Trump in pressuring voting officials not to certify the 2020 election – was like putting a standing chyron on the NBC Nightly News: “Lying is rewarded here.”Of course, some commentators defended it, like Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who praised McDaniel’s “insider’s perspective”. He was shot down on Twitter/X by the scholar Norman Ornstein: “This is not about somebody with alternative views. It’s about a serial liar who intimidated election workers, tried to alter the election results in 2020 and has behaved in an utterly despicable fashion.”Social media memes also rose to the moment: Ronna McDaniel as politics commentator? Why not bring in OJ Simpson to host a show on preventing domestic violence, or hire Vladimir Putin as a Ukraine war commentator? How about a regular show for Ginni Thomas, the insurrection cheerleader married to a corrupt US supreme court justice?After four days of embarrassing news stories about the hire and its backlash, and some feeble efforts at damage control, it’s clear that the network should reverse course and ditch McDaniel or – depending on the terms of her contract – keep her entirely off the air. And that goes not just for the left-leaning MSNBC cable channel, but for the mainstream NBC News shows as well.And that’s not enough.The brass at NBC News needs to take stronger action in a statement – and a brief televised appearance by a top network executive or news leader – that affirms the commitment to covering politics truthfully and rigorously. It could appear once at the top of the nightly news and once on, let’s say, Morning Joe and Meet the Press.Then, go further. Prove that commitment in the network’s presidential campaign coverage. How? By using extreme care in giving a platform and a megaphone to proven liars, including the former president, and by providing sustained coverage about the stakes of the election, not just the horserace.Kristen Welker made a good start on Sunday’s Meet the Press, which she hosts. In a news interview recorded weeks before McDaniels’ hire, Welker respectfully but tenaciously grilled the former RNC chair.Insisting that she hasn’t really changed, McDaniel told Welker that she now acknowledges that Joe Biden won the election fair and square. Welker – perhaps channelling one of her predecessors, Tim Russert – wisely went to the tape, specifically McDaniel’s words to Chris Wallace in 2023: “I don’t think he won it fair.”McDaniel infamously joined Trump in a phone call pressuring two Michigan canvassers not to certify the election results; and her RNC led the charge to censure Republican members of Congress Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the House of Representatives January 6 investigation. All while disparaging the media.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs Chuck Todd of NBC put it: “Many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”Todd, on Sunday’s Meet the Press, said he thought NBC owed Welker an apology for putting her in an impossible position. And Mark Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor, called in his newsletter, Stop the Presses, for the network to apologize to the public.These apologies would be welcome, but the main thing is to acknowledge the error in judgment and make sure that no habitual liars or enemies of democracy – whether paid or unpaid – get to blather their way to November’s election.Truth-telling in the media always matters. It matters intensely right now, as American democracy teeters on the brink.NBC should affirm that core mission. In so doing, the network could earn itself a lot of goodwill and recover from this blunder. All while doing the right thing.After all, it’s one thing to screw up. It’s another to dig your heels in.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      ‘Pretty bad’: NBC condemned by top US historian over role for Ronna McDaniel

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      The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “tried to disassemble our democracy” by supporting Donald Trump’s electoral fraud lies and should not be given such a media role, a leading historian said amid uproar over the appointment.“What NBC has done is they’ve invited into what should be a normal framework someone who doesn’t believe that framework should exist at all,” Timothy Snyder, a Yale professor and author of On Tyranny, told MSNBC, part of the network now employing McDaniel.On Friday, NBC announced it had hired the former RNC chair and the network’s senior vice-president for politics, Carrie Budoff Brown, said that McDaniel would contribute her analysis “across all NBC News platforms”.“What NBC has done of its own volition is bring into a very important conversation about democracy, one which is going to take place for the next seven months or so, someone who … tried to disassemble our democracy. Who personally took part in an attempt to undo the American system,” Synder said.“And so … what NBC is doing is saying, ‘Well, [it] could be that in ‘24 our entire system will break down. Could be we’ll have an authoritarian leader. Oh, but look, we’ve made this adjustment in advance because we’ve brought into the middle of NBC somebody who has already taken part in an attempt to take our system down.’“So, yeah, I think this is pretty bad.”On Sunday, days after joining the network, McDaniel said on the Meet the Press that Biden won “fair and square” and said she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse”.But McDaniel also claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [elections in battleground states] in 2020” and said she had supported Trump’s election fraud lies as a way of “taking one for the whole team” .That stoked an on-air protest from Chuck Todd, a former Meet the Press host. On Monday, MSNBC hosts including Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Nicole Wallace, to whom Snyder spoke, also condemned the McDaniel hire. The day also saw a protest from a union group representing NBC News staff.McDaniel and NBC did not comment.Snyder, who has written for the Guardian, said: “If you are going to be on American media, you should be somebody who believes there is something called truth, there are things called facts and you can pursue them. You shouldn’t be someone who has over and over and over again pushed the idea of fake news, educated Americans away from the facts, away from belief in the facts.”Describing such work by McDaniel, the anti-Trump conservative ex-congresswoman Liz Cheney said that as RNC chair, McDaniel “facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome. She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”McDaniel became RNC chair in January 2017. In that role, she defended Trump through his scandal-ridden presidency; his refusal to accept his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, culminating in his incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress; and through his surge to another presidential nomination despite facing 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties and regularly admitting to authoritarian ambitions.Despite such support, Trump last month pushed McDaniel out of the RNC, to be replaced by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.Snyder said: “If we’re going to be putting people on the news who have participated in an attempt to overthrow the system, then we have to ask at the very beginning, ‘Why did you do that? Why is that legitimate?’ And we have to ask ourselves, ‘Why is it that we are taking this step to bring people into the middle of our discussion?’“So my two red lines are, you should be somebody who’s at least trying for the facts, and you shouldn’t be somebody who has taken part in an attempt to undo the system, which is what we’re talking about here. We shouldn’t mince words about it.” More

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      Ex-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel: Biden won 2020 election ‘fair and square’

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      A little more than two weeks after resigning as the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel admitted Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election over her party’s candidate “fair and square”.But the newly hired NBC News contributor maintained it was acceptable to also say there were “problems” in the manner that the US president defeated Donald Trump – even after the former president’s supporters translated such sentiments into the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021 that has been linked to nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides.McDaniel delivered her contradictory remarks Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press in what was her debut on the network as a paid pundit. Show moderator Kristen Welker spent much of the session pushing McDaniel to address why she had waited until now to concede that Biden justly defeated Trump in 2020 – and to express disapproval over Trump’s promise to free those who were convicted or still facing charges in connection with the Capitol attack if he returned to the White House.“When you’re the RNC chair, you – you kind of take one for the whole team,” McDaniel said.And while she said: “I don’t think violence should be in our political discourse,” she also contended that it was acceptable for Republicans to continue to question certain aspects of the 2020 election.Though nonpartisan voting integrity experts consider that race to be the most secure election ever, McDaniel said it remained “a concern” for her that Pennsylvania could go from recording 260,000 mail-in ballots for Trump’s Oval Office victory in 2016 to 2.6m in 2020.McDaniel omitted mentioning that mail ballots heavily favored Biden after Trump discouraged his supporters from using mail ballots and instead urged them to vote in person.Democrats who generally obeyed measures to limit the spread of Covid-19 during that relatively early phase of the pandemic, on the other hand, availed themselves of mail ballots. Trump and his Republican allies then used the disparity in mail ballots to fuel lies about how electoral fraudsters had vaulted Biden to the presidency.Welker at one point asked whether McDaniel regretted getting on a phone call with Trump in which they apparently sought to pressure two local-level election officials in Wayne county, Michigan, to refuse to certify the state vote that Biden won. On the call, which the Detroit News reviewed late last year, McDaniel promised the officials “we will get you attorneys” as long as they declined to certify the vote.McDaniel stood by her actions on the call, saying the discussion wasn’t for the officials to decline to certify the outcome of the election in the state – but rather to demand an audit of the vote. She said what concerned her was that the officials reported being called “vile names” as well as “being threatened” when they went public with their wishes for an audit.Ultimately, McDaniel said, while she believes Biden won and is “the legitimate president”, she insisted “there were issues in 2020”.“I believe that both can be true,” McDaniel said.McDaniel’s performance did not impress former Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd, who was on a panel of commentators for Sunday’s episode. He questioned the wisdom of NBC’s decision to hire McDaniel, saying to Welker: “I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation … She has credibility issues that she still has to deal with.”Todd said many NBC journalists are uncomfortable with the hiring because some of their professional dealings with the RNC during McDaniel’s tenure “have been met with gaslighting, [and] have been met with character assassination”.The Wall Street Journal reported on the “internal backlash” happening within the NBC family of networks because of McDaniel’s hiring.Citing “people familiar” with the controversy, the Journal reported that the president of NBC’s sister network MSNBC, Rashida Jones, said McDaniel would not be welcome to appear on air there.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMSNBC would not comment on that report on Sunday. But two of its star hosts, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, said on Monday on their Morning Joe show that they hoped NBC “reconsiders its decision” to bring McDaniel aboard.Meanwhile, an MSNBC executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person would not publicly discuss internal matters, told the Associated Press it would be up to individual network shows to decide whether or not the bring McDaniel on – not that there is a channel-wide ban.NBC had no comment on Todd’s statement. In announcing McDaniel’s hiring on Friday, the network’s senior vice-president for politics, Carrie Budoff Brown, said that McDaniel would contribute her analysis “across all NBC News platforms”.A niece of US senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who is the only Republican to twice vote to convict Trump at his impeachment trials, McDaniel became the first woman to serve as RNC chairperson in 2017.But she resigned on 8 March, saying in part that she was stepping down to afford Trump the opportunity to select a chair of his choosing as he attempts to take back the presidency in November.The RNC subsequently installed as its chair Michael Whatley, a North Carolina Republican who has echoed Trumpists’ claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump was voted in as co-chair.Trump has claimed he does not intend to use the RNC to pay off the legal bills that he has run up while facing more than 80 criminal charges for election interference, retaining classified materials after leaving the Oval Office and hush-money payments. He has also been grappling with multimillion-dollar civil penalties handed to him over lawsuits centering on some of his business practices that were deemed to be fraudulent as well as a rape allegation that a judge has found to substantially true.But as the Associated Press has reported, the Trump loyalists in command of McDaniel’s former organization are in firm control of the Republican party’s political and fundraising levers without facing much – if any – internal oversight.Asked why NBC viewers should trust her voice after her RNC tenure, McDaniel said a substantial number of Americans shared her viewpoints. “I think,” she told Welker, “you should be able to hear from different voices.” More

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      Liz Cheney says ex-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel ‘enabled’ Trump’s ‘criminality’

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      The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “enabled criminality and depravity” with her support for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the former congresswoman Liz Cheney said as controversy swirled over McDaniel’s new career in media.“Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome,” Cheney, a Republican who was vice-chair of the House January 6 committee, wrote on social media.“She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”McDaniel – a member of the powerful Republican Romney family who reportedly dropped the name at Trump’s behest – became RNC chair in 2017.In February 2022, the RNC said Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the other anti-Trump Republican on the committee that investigated the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, were engaged in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”.Cheney lost her seat in Congress later that year. Kinzinger chose to retire.McDaniel was eased out of the RNC last month, to be replaced in part by Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law.McDaniel’s move to NBC was announced last week. On Sunday, she appeared on Meet the Press, the flagship politics show.Characterising her support for Trump’s election fraud lies as “taking one for the whole team”, she said she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse” and that Biden won “fair and square” – but still claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [with battleground state elections] in 2020”.A former Meet the Press host, Chuck Todd, issued an on-air protest.“There’s a reason why there’s a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this,” he told the current host, Kristin Welker, “because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination”.Monday brought more reports of staff discontent – and its open expression by two of the network’s biggest names.On Morning Joe, the MSNBC show that often sets the Washington agenda, co-host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, said: “We’ve been inundated with calls this weekend, as have most people connected with this network, about NBC’s decision to hire” McDaniel.“We learned about the hiring when we read about it in the press on Friday. We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons including, but not limited to, as lawyers might say, Miss McDaniel’s role in Donald Trump’s fake elector scheme and her pressuring election officials to not certify election results while Donald Trump was on the phone.”Scarborough’s wife and co-host, Mika Brzezinski, said: “To be clear, we believe NBC news should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage.“But it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier. And we hope NBC will reconsider its decision. It goes without saying that she will not be a guest on Morning Joe in her capacity as a paid contributor. Here’s why.”There followed a compilation of McDaniel’s comments about the 2020 election, which Brzezinski called “exhausting”.Disquiet was also reported over McDaniel reportedly being paid $300,000.“Across MSNBC they have been cutting contributors,” an unnamed host told Politico. “So everyone’s like, what the fuck? You found 300 for her?” More

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      ‘Full fascist’ Trump condemned after ‘treason’ rant against NBC and MSNBC

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      Donald Trump said Comcast, the owner of NBC and MSNBC, “should be investigated for its ‘Country Threatening Treason’” and promised to do so should he be re-elected president next year.In response, one progressive group said the former US president and current overwhelming frontrunner in the Republican 2024 presidential nomination race had “gone full fascist”.The Biden White House said Trump threatened “an outrageous attack on our democracy and the rule of law”.The US media was “almost all dishonest and corrupt”, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Sunday, “but Comcast, with its one-side and vicious coverage by NBC News, and in particular MSNBC … should be investigated for its ‘Country Threatening Treason’.”Listing familiar complaints about coverage of his presidency – during which he regularly threatened NBC, MSNBC and Comcast – Trump added: “I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I win the presidency of the United States, they and others of the lamestream media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events.”Trump also used familiar terms of abuse for the press: “the enemy of the people” and “the fake news media”.Observers reacted to Trump’s threat to NBC, MSNBC and Comcast with a mixture of familiarity and alarm.In a statement, Andrew Bates, White House deputy press secretary, said: “President Biden swore an oath to uphold our constitution and protect American democracy. Freedom of the press is a fundamental constitutional right.“To abuse presidential power and violate the constitutional rights of reporters would be an outrageous attack on our democracy and the rule of law. Presidents must always defend Americans’ freedoms – never trample on them for selfish, small and dangerous political purposes.”Elsewhere, Paul Farhi, media reporter for the Washington Post, pointed to Trump’s symbiotic relationship with outlets he professes to hate, given that only last week Trump was “the featured interview guest last week on Meet the Press, the signature Sunday morning news program on … NBC”.Others noted that on Monday night, the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, a key witness for the House committee that investigated the January 6 attack on Congress, which Trump incited, was due to be interviewed on MSNBC.“Female political or media antagonists really cause blood to come pouring out of Trump’s eyes,” wrote Howard Fineman, a columnist and commentator.Sounding a louder alarm, Occupy Democrats, a progressive advocacy group, said Trump had gone “full fascist” with an “unhinged Sunday-night rant”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“There you have it, folks,” it said. “While Trump and his Republican enablers love to falsely accuse Democrats of ‘weaponizing’ the government against Trump, Trump himself is now openly threaten[ing] to weaponize the presidency to completely remove entire news channels from the airwaves simply because they expose his rampant criminality.”Juliette Kayyem, a Kennedy School professor and CNN national security analyst, pointed to a previous warning: “To view each of Trump’s calls to violence in isolation – ‘he attacked Milley’ or ‘he attacked NBC’ or ‘he attacked the jury, the prosecutor, the judge’ – is to miss his overall plan to ‘introduce violence as a natural extension of our democratic disagreement’.”Trump’s rantings were also coupled with threats to Gen Mark Milley, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff whose attempts to cope with Trump were detailed in an Atlantic profile last week.They come after a Washington Post poll gave Trump a 10-point lead over Joe Biden, who beat him in 2020, in a notional 2024 general election matchup.The Post said the poll was an “outlier” but Trump dominates the Republican nomination race and generally polls close to Biden despite facing 91 criminal charges – for election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments – and civil threats including a defamation trial arising from an allegation of rape a judge said was “substantially true”.Another new poll, from NBC, showed Trump and Biden tied at 46% but Trump up 39%-36% if a third-party candidate was added. A “person familiar with White House discussions” about the prospect of a candidacy from No Labels, a centrist group, said it was “concerning”, NBC said. Biden, the report added, was “worried”. More

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      TV networks left in limbo as America struggles to decide who won election

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      “This is why elections are fun,” said CNN’s John King, relentlessly jabbing at one of his two giant iPads as the lead in Florida lurched back and forth. Then he said it again. Absolutely no one agreed with him.About an hour and an epoch earlier, the networks and news channels had seemed as interested in their own redemption story as they were in the election itself. They hoped for a do-over of 2016, where every glib presumption would be replaced with a cautionary note, and a radical plan to wait, no matter how long it took, to see what would actually happen.That was temporarily good for democracy, but possibly difficult for television executives, whose solemn duty was to make their product as opaque as reality. “There is no telling when we are going to have a winner,” said Martha MacCallum, introducing Fox’s coverage with something other than a bang. “It could be hours, it could be days, it could possibly take even weeks.” On MSNBC, Brian Williams told viewers: “It’s going to be a night of a lot of math.” It wasn’t a thrilling observation, but it was at least unlikely to be clipped up and played on Twitter’s infinite loop in the days ahead.Of course, there was still the odd hostage to fortune. “Biden is doing much better with white voters, and I think that’s going to be a theme throughout this night,” said David Axelrod, the former Obama adviser, and you wondered if that would ultimately seem too obvious to remember or too idiotic to forget. In those moments, as the words left their mouths, the pundit class seemed like tightrope walkers: foolhardy or brave, one foot in front of another, the weight of history on their backs.Then the numbers came in, and the math went out of the window – or maybe just got more complicated. NBC’s Chuck Todd, swooshing around his own magic map, remarked: “All that tells me is, it’s going to take forever to call Florida.” Twenty minutes later, he said that the state “looked like an uphill climb for Joe Biden”. Half an hour after that, it was firmly in the Trump column.CNN’s entire broadcast, meanwhile, had become brutally compelling, appearing to jettison its ensemble of sedate anchors in favour of King’s one-man dramatic monologue on the Florida county of Miami-Dade. But, other than King’s unusual sense of what constitutes a good time, it wasn’t clear why it was still treating Florida like a toss-up.On the BBC, Andrew Neil and Katty Kay were formidable and austere, with Neil signing off from his perch at the corporation in a mood of magnificent irritation with America for not having made its mind up yet. The static cameras and distinct shortage of pounding theme music set them apart from their excitable US counterparts, which were increasingly difficult to distinguish from each other.CBS had a “what happens if” map; MSNBC had a “what if” map. Every studio adhered to an aesthetic of fluorescent Tetris. Countdown clocks and “key race alerts” with no outcome attached dragged viewers remorselessly from hour to hour. The phrase “blue wall” became ubiquitous, again.At some point , John King’s touchscreen stopped working. “You’re gonna have to come back to me,” he said. Meanwhile, the New York Times’ notorious election needles had swung firmly in Trump’s favour, and the prospect of days more trauma to come.Then one of them swung back again, and Fox News called Arizona for Biden ahead of anybody else. Karl Rove, who when Fox put Ohio in Obama’s column in 2012 had vocally disagreed on air with the station’s decision desk, vocally disagreed on air with the station’s decision desk.The only person who seemed certain of anything was the president himself.Trump tweeted that the Democrats “are trying to STEAL the election” and claimed that “Votes cannot be cast after the Poles are closed!” CNN’s Jake Tapper said that “the fact that the president misspelled ‘polls’ is just ‘chef’s kiss’”, which drew the kind of social media enthusiasm on the left that you might a few hours earlier have imagined would be reserved for a victory in Texas.Instead, the naive prospect of euphoria had been replaced with the desperate urge to stave off despair. In another time, those who found themselves unable to switch off might at least have hoped to absorb their anxiety with a few fellow travellers, and a drinking game or two. This year, the stakes are too vast, the lockdowns too dislocating. Instead, they sat in their bubbles, waiting – and waiting – for the future to burst through.Fun? Trump called it fraud. “We gotta dip in here because there have been several statements that are just frankly not true,” said the NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie, to her and the network’s eternal credit, even as rivals let him lie without interruption. On the BBC, a few hours earlier, the political scientist Larry Sabato had made a more plausible assessment.“We are very, very split,” he said. “This night has just begun.” More