The media never treated Clinton as an atypical candidate, although she was in so many ways. No matter how often she lied or much we learned about her racketeering or her malleable positions on foreign policy and everything else, her defenders could claim that there was no moral equivalency between her and Trump.

There was. Democrats nominated one of the least trusted people to ever run for the presidency. According to the final Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll, Americans trusted Hillary six points less than they did Trump, whose absurdities and outright fabrications probably came off as straight talk to millions of Americans sick of hearing manicured talking points. An Associated Press-GfK poll also found that 92 percent of Americans thought Clinton’s email setup either broke the law or was in “poor judgment.” Only 6 percent believed she did nothing wrong. This poll was taken months before the freakout over the James Comey letter. Rather than dealing with this reality, Democrats and their allies attempted to normalize her corruption.

Trump might also have been the beneficiary of decades of vacuous liberal attacks on Republican candidates who, as you know, are always racist, homophobic, transphobic xenophobes because they have different ideas about society or policy. Voters might be becoming increasingly immune to these histrionics. Yet, as soon as it became apparent that Trump would win, liberal commentators began blaming bigotry again. The Left has become so saturated in identity politics, it can’t imagine that anything else might drive a voter.

As my colleague Sean Davis has noted, though, seven states that voted for Obama twice voted for Trump in 2016. Did all these Americans suddenly become racist in a few years time?