The latest manifestations of the profound sickness of the American media (and no Canadian should imagine that ours is much better) have been from historian Jon Meacham and CNN’s veteran reporter Christiane Amanpour. Meacham is a rather banal liberal historian who plowed Newsweek magazine under the sod with a news-free business plan that no sane editor would have endorsed, and has managed to sell himself to the Bushes as their family historian. He demonstrated his Trump-hate bona fides two weeks ago by calling the president a “lizard of white privilege,” and, though an employee of MSNBC, wrote Joe Biden’s “victory speech.” This was too much even for MSNBC, which fired him as a commentator (doubtless only for a few weeks). Amanpour presented footage of Hitler’s infamous Kristallnacht of 1938 on its 82nd anniversary last week, in which scores of Jews were murdered, thousands injured and 200 synagogues destroyed. She cited it as a warning, and compared it to Trump’s unspecified conduct. Former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt described it on its 40th anniversary as, “The beginning of our national descent into hell” — the murder of 12 million people in death camps and the unleashing and barbarous prosecution of the most terrible war in history. Amanpour offered no elaboration on what this horrible massacre had to do with Donald Trump.

The national American media almost never reported that 80 per cent of coronavirus sufferers are afflicted also by other life-threatening ailments, or that even as more and more people are infected, 99 per cent of them recover and are thereafter immune for at least some period, or that a great many who have contracted the coronavirus in the United States and other advanced Western countries have yet to be reported, which means that these countries are a good deal closer to a state of what is inelegantly called “herd immunity” than has been reported. Even in such an electoral Armageddon as this, with millions of ballots to be recounted, American newscasters of all persuasions are constantly, as if to reassure themselves, announcing that America’s electoral and justice systems are, wait for it and brace yourselves, ”the envy of the world.” The U.S. is a half-jungle; it is magnificent in its way, and operates on a scale the world has not seen since the height of the Roman Empire, but it repels much of the world. That doesn’t matter; the United States is a democracy and the Americans can run their country any way they want and it’s no one else’s business; but the imputation to the rest of us of being prostrated with envy of American life is a fantasy.

If Joe Biden takes the oath, his will be a regime of irreconcilable contradictions, in a gridlock imposed by the crafty Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Trump can do what he wants — the Republicans are his party now. He has inspired scores of millions of Americans fed up with the corruption, hypocrisy and injustice of the ever-self-celebrating American political system. But there was always a doubt over whether his supporters would be as numerous as those whom he offended by his often irksome public personality. He allowed this election to become less of a choice between him and a very uninspiring opponent, and instead a referendum on the straight question: “Do you like Donald Trump?” That question could arise again, but the self-diminished media won’t be able to perform a protracted bloodless assassination again.