If you stayed up into the early morning hours to watch the Blue Wall gradually bleed red and Donald J. Trump give a rambling victory speech surrounded by an entourage, you might have thought that you had seen this show before.
You had. But not quite in this way.
The long election night unfolded on TV much the way Mr. Trump’s first two did — similar stakes, similar battleground states. But it played very differently. His win in 2016, after a campaign in which he was often covered as an outrageous novelty who would never really win, landed in news studios like an asteroid. In 2020, networks were prepared to fact-check his defiant, false claim of victory after a night that ended up surprisingly close for him.
His re-election, on the other hand, was unusual but not unanticipated. It was within the range of possible outcomes suggested by polling, and networks went on the air with the presumption that both he and Vice President Kamala Harris had a solid chance to end up president-elect.
So the re-election of a president who had attempted to overturn the results of the last contest — and the return to top billing of America’s most divisive media star — was covered, at least in its first hours, largely as a matter of math.
There were seven battleground states, and within them, layers and layers of numbers and variables to unpack. On channel after channel, guys in shirtsleeves with smart-screens — Steve Kornacki, Bill Hemmer, John King — zoomed into America’s electoral anatomy. A CNN map showed in shades of brown which areas of the country had suffered most from recent inflation, a vista of amber waves of pain.
The percentages were plentiful but the broader perspective elusive. In the early hours, it could be tough for a channel hopper to get a sense of who was doing well and poorly. On Fox News, Jesse Watters gloated over the “cannonball” splash of Mr. Trump’s win in Florida, while ABC saw early hope for Harris in Pennsylvania.
Numbers were crunched and metaphors mixed. “All their eggs are going to be in that Blue Wall,” the former Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus said of the Harris campaign on ABC.
The bigger picture unfolded gradually as midnight approached. On Comedy Central, Jon Stewart led his Harris-friendly audience toward the unwelcome news with gallows humor, reading off Democrat-positive results while admitting, “We are obviously digging through the results to find some that you like.”
On the news channels, the anchors started talking more directly about a result that their organizations hadn’t yet called. “We pretty much know how this is going to end,” Rachel Maddow said on MSNBC.
Maybe fittingly, it was Fox — which had made Mr. Trump a network political commentator in the Obama years and made a fateful early call of Arizona against him in 2020 — that was first among the big networks to announce his restoration. Mr. Trump, according to reports, was waiting for the announcement by his frenemy network to take the stage.
His speech, in late-Trump-rally manner, pinged among topics like a ball falling through a pachinko machine. He claimed a mandate and marveled about watching one of his supporter Elon Musk’s rockets land. He pledged to “help our country heal” and gave the mic to Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, who in turn gave his thanks to the Trump-endorsing podcaster Joe Rogan.
By the time the president-re-elect finished, it was well past 2 a.m. Eastern time, leaving the anchors and panels little time to talk about the implications. This was likely a consequential election. Mr. Trump won promising to turn the military on his enemies and to govern like a dictator, at least for a day.
But it didn’t feel deeply consequential, at least as covered on TV. If 2016 was an earthquake in the network studios, this one felt more like a layer of soil settling into place. It was just the way it was. It was just the way we were. It was just numbers.
This may have just been the consequence of a long night, though it could also be a harbinger. It has been said that the Mr. Trump of the 2024 stump had lost some energy. But who hasn’t?
Living in the Trump mediasphere, we have learned, can be draining. He leaches into the cultural groundwater; he becomes fodder for comedy and subtext for drama. He raises the national metabolism and blood pressure. Every election is a collective national heart attack. It is acrimonious, nerve-rattling and makes fellow citizens hate one another, and then it all ends in a long night full of math on TV.
When does numbness take over? Do we, as a culture, have another 2017-21 in us? Will CNN and other networks take the same watchdog stance toward Mr. Trump — now explicitly promising strongman-style rule — with an exhausted audience and a president promising to punish unfriendly outlets? Can late-night scrounge up another four years of jokes? Will there be a “Trump bump”? (Perhaps the universe of bro-oriented podcasts, which Mr. Trump campaigned on and which have a different incentive structure.)
Those questions might come up in the many days of TV-news panels ahead. But on election night, as the former president basked in a victory he won promising vengeance and control, TV news took little time to discuss what it meant that all of this had been ratified. This was another way in which Mr. Trump won.
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