He did it.

When Donald Trump announced he was running for president in June 2015, it was reported as some kind of joke. Mainstream media pundits predicted he was not seriously running but said it was just to enhance his image and he would soon drop out.

When, after a few weeks, it appeared he was serious, the mainstream media pundits predicted he would get wiped out in the primaries.

When Trump started attracting huge crowds to his rallies, the mainstream media said that people would come to his rallies as a curiosity but no one would vote for him.

The mainstream media said that when Trump had to get on the debate stage with real candidates, he would be shown to be the charlatan they said he was.

When he won the debates, the media said it was only because there were so many candidates and when the field narrowed he would start losing debates.

When the polling showed Trump was winning, the mainstream media still predicted that people would tell a pollster they were voting for Trump but wouldn’t vote for him.

When Trump started winning primaries, the mainstream media said it was a fad and the Republican voters would settle down and pick a more mainstream candidate because they didn’t really support Trump.

When Trump continued to win, the mainstream media said that he could never amass enough delegates to win the Republican nomination outright and it would be a brokered convention.

When Trump won more than enough delegates to put him over the top, the mainstream media said that all of his delegates wouldn’t vote for him and it would still be a brokered convention.

When Trump won the Republican nomination, the mainstream media said that he could never win the presidency.

When polling showed that Trump had a chance of winning the presidency, the mainstream media said there was no path for him to 270 electoral votes.

When Trump started winning state after state on Tuesday night, the mainstream media was stunned and didn’t know what to say.

*****

It has taken over a year but the American people have sent a message that cannot be ignored to the mainstream media: “You are so out of touch with the American people you can’t even do your job.”

But what is incredible is that the mainstream media didn’t get the message. Reading pundit after pundit on the day after the election, they said they believe the reason Trump won is because his supporters are racists and sexists.

They also say that Trump will not do any of the things that he said that he would do.

First of all, a politician making campaign promises they don’t keep is nothing new. President Barack Hussein Obama said his first day in office he would close the prison at Guantanamo, and eight years later it has fewer prisoners, but it’s still there.

He also said if Obamacare passed, people could keep their doctors and their rates would be lower. The American people learned that they couldn’t keep their doctors, and rates are through the roof and going higher.

So saying that Trump can’t keep his campaign promises is silly.

What is disturbing about the mainstream media pundits is that during this long race they have made little attempt to understand why close to 50 percent of their fellow Americans would vote for a man they find so despicable. It evidently never occurred to any of them to get out and have conversations with actual real live Trump voters. For one thing, that would mean leaving Manhattan or venturing outside the Beltway around Washington, and in their minds it’s a scary place out there.

I did talk to a lot of Trump supporters and I am one myself. The things I heard most from Trump supporters were concerns about the economy, national security and the direction of the nation.

The pundits, who live in areas immune to the recession, read about it but didn’t feel it, and when Obama announced it was over, they clapped and breathed a sigh of relief.

If they had gotten out in the real America, where most Americans live, they would have found that most Americans are still hurting. For those Americans, the recession has never ended. Those who don’t work for the government or major financial corporations may have jobs but they likely haven’t had a raise in eight years. Many lost their jobs and had to take lower paying jobs. Others lost their businesses and then had to find a job.

Trump says he can fix the economy and his supporters believe him, or at least they know from experience that the Democrats can’t fix it and are willing to give someone new a try.

National security means supporting the military, something that Obama has refused to do. And Hillary Clinton was running to continue Obama’s policies for a third term.

It also means protecting our borders. Countries have borders for a reason; it is to separate them from other countries. If we allow anyone to cross our borders anytime they want, for any reason, and stay for as long as they like, we don’t have borders. And that is what Hillary Clinton said she wanted.

Believing that the country should control its borders does not make someone a racist or xenophobic. It’s the way the world operated until recently.

I have traveled to a lot of countries. Until the European Union came along, every time I crossed a border I had to show my passport and answer some questions about why I was entering the country and how long I planned to stay. If I planned to stay any length of time, or work, I had to get visas and permits. This was not considered racist or anti-American. It was considered common sense.

Trump voters see open borders as both an economic issue and a security issue.

Economic because not only are people who are in this country illegally taking a lot of jobs, they are also being provided with government benefits that we pay for.

It’s a security issue because we don’t know who is coming across the border. Why wouldn’t terrorists who want to kill Americans cross the border and enter the country with no paperwork? It makes sense. Maybe some have, maybe they haven’t, but without border security we have no way of knowing.

Most Americans don’t know squat about international trade deals. But they know that they were told that NAFTA was going to be a boon to the US economy and protect US jobs, and after it passed the jobs all left. Maybe it wasn’t caused by NAFTA, but you will never convince a former textile worker of that.

One of the truly amazing things about Trump is that, as a New York City billionaire, he was able to connect with mainstream America, while the effete snobs in the mainstream media still, even after the election, have no idea what mainstream Americans want or think, and it appears they are not interested in finding out.

If some of these people had bothered to attend a few Trump rallies, they would have been shocked that the arenas were not filled with old white men with big beer bellies and motorcycle tattoos. They would have found a cross section of Americans, young, old, men, women, blacks, Hispanics and whites.

There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton attracted far more blacks to her rallies, but once again someone paying attention would have noticed that Trump was attracting more blacks than at a typical Republican event.

In fact, according to the pundits, the very fact that someone is a Republican proves that they are racist, because so few blacks are Republicans.

I hope that Trump, who according to early data did receive more black votes than recent Republican presidential candidates, may help bring that wall down.

Then the pundits completely ignore the horrible campaign that Hillary Clinton ran.

Take her press conference at the United Nations about her emails. We now know that she stood up there in front of a bunch of foreign journalists, because American political journalists couldn’t get in, and told one lie after another.

At the time we didn’t know they were all lies, but Hillary Clinton did, and she chose to lie and continued to lie about her emails throughout the campaign.

She was almost completely inaccessible during her campaign, going nearly a year without holding a press conference. When she did hold press conferences they were short.

She didn’t campaign nearly as much as most presidential candidates. She spent weeks holed up somewhere doing something, but she wasn’t out on the campaign trail.

The pundits may think that it was acceptable for the Clintons to become rich off a foundation, but most Americans find behavior like that kind of slimy.

Hillary Clinton ran as a candidate with this long resume of service, but even Hillary Clinton herself could not name one major accomplishment while she was secretary of state.

Then there was Benghazi. The pundits wrote this off, but the American people didn’t. For one thing, she did nothing to help Americans fighting off a 13-hour terrorist attack, and then she lied about it. The idea that the most powerful nation in the world couldn’t find a single military asset anywhere in the Middle East that could get to Benghazi in 13 hours is absurd. People didn’t buy it.

But perhaps the worst part of her campaign is that she never gave people a reason to vote for her other than she was not Trump. Once people found out that Trump was not nearly the demon that the mainstream media said he was, they had no reason to vote for Hillary Clinton, unless they really liked one of her many campaign slogans. My favorite was “I’m with Her.”

There are a whole host of reasons why Trump, not Hillary Clinton, is going to be the next president, but the mainstream media don’t seem to have a clue.

*****

The pollsters were so wrong about this election that it appears there is little reason to pay attention to them anymore. Maybe the whole polling industry will go the route of buggy whip manufacturers.

If the polls don’t give people an idea of how the election is going, what purpose do they serve except to make voters think that the liberal candidate is going to win in the hope that people who like to vote for winners will decide to go with the flow.

Trump repeatedly said that the polls were biased against him and it turned out that once again he was right on the money. The pollsters had no idea how people were going to vote. There are so many ways to manipulate the results that the pollsters can and apparently did exactly what Trump said they were doing – manipulating the data so that it appeared Hillary Clinton was winning.

Or maybe they really are so bad at polling that they didn’t manipulate the data and came up with poor results.

In this case the pollsters can’t blame an unanticipated late surge, like they have in the past, because so many votes were cast early.

I knew that something was wrong with the polls and the pundits because they kept saying that North Carolina was a battleground state. It’s the reason we had candidates or candidate surrogates in the state what seemed like every day.

North Carolina has only gone Democratic in a presidential race twice in the past 50 years – in 1976, when Jimmy Carter was running as a Southerner against President Gerald Ford, who was president because of Richard Nixon and Watergate, and in 2008, when the country elected its first black president. Both of those years were anomalies.

It seemed obvious months ago that Trump would win North Carolina, but right up until enough votes were counted to call the state for Trump, it was, according to the mainstream media, too close to call.

*****

Obamacare has turned out to be a disaster. It is a disaster as far as health care goes. For one thing, you can’t keep your doctor as Obama promised. But more important to the supporters, who actually don’t give a hoot about people’s medical care, it is a financial disaster.

The rates shortly after the election will increase an average of 25 percent, and in at least one state will rise over 100 percent. Insurance companies are dropping out of the program as quickly as possible. Most North Carolinians will be forced to go with the one provider still in the system, which means they have no choice at all.

The insurance companies are dropping out because they were losing too much money to stay in and didn’t see profits coming down the pike anytime soon.

What has happened is exactly what the Republicans said would happen. The people signing up for Obamacare are the people with big medical bills who benefit financially from having health insurance. The folks who are supposed to pay for the system, the healthy people with low or no medical bills, aren’t signing up. They can wait until they get sick to sign up, and before then pay for everything out of pocket.

The numbers have to work for insurance companies to stay in business. They have to collect more in premiums than they pay out. With Obamacare they can’t make the numbers work, so the companies are fleeing like rats off a sinking ship.

Some cynics think that was the plan all along, that Obamacare was designed to fail so that the government could take over the entire system and do away with the insurance companies.

If this sounds like a good idea to you, take a look at the veterans’ administration health care, where veterans were dying while waiting for an appointment. It’s run by the federal government.

*****

If you’re confused about who is fighting who in Syria, and who the US is supporting, join the club. One reason it is so confusing is that, without leadership at the top, different US agencies are supporting different groups. Obama is not providing the leadership to have any kind of unified effort in Syria.

The result is that the CIA is supporting some of the rebel groups fighting in Aleppo, but the Department of Defense is not.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has left no doubt about who Russia, Russian intelligence and the Russian military are supporting. The Russians are unified behind Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The result is that Russia is bombing the enemies of Assad wherever they are, while the US is not. Russia is bombing the rebels in Aleppo but the US is not bombing Assad’s forces, which gives Assad’s forces a decided advantage in Aleppo.

Obama has never been able to make up his mind about what to do in Syria. Russia and Iran are supporting Assad, which means likely some of the $150 billion that Obama gave Iran for signing an agreement, which may or may not restrict its development of nuclear weapons, is going to help Assad who the US supposedly is against.

Obama says that the US is only fighting against ISIS in Syria and only helping troops that are fighting ISIS, but he is not helping Assad’s troops that are fighting ISIS, so Obama is only helping some troops that are fighting ISIS and not helping others.

Turkey, who we support, has fought with the Kurdish troops that we also support.

It appears the most likely scenario at this point is for Russia to carve out a country for Assad to rule, which will include Aleppo – Syria’s largest city, or what’s left of it. The rest of the country will be left to warring groups, including ISIS, who will control small territories until Assad can gain enough strength to wipe them out. With Russia behind him and nobody against him, eventually Assad, or perhaps better said Putin, will win.

*****

One thing this election has proven is just how closely the mainstream media are tied to the Democratic Party. Every sentient person who can read or watch television knew the mainstream media were liberal, supported liberal candidates and did what they could to help liberal candidates win.

But with the WikiLeaks releases of Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta’s emails, it has been revealed that the liberal media does much more than write nice things about the liberals and mean things about the conservatives.

The media also leak questions to the Democrats, let the Democrats help write the questions for Republicans, make deals to write certain complimentary articles including the exact phrases to use in order to get access, give the Democrats the right to read and approve articles before they are published and probably shine their shoes and take their cleaning to the laundry.

Any semblance of unbiased media has been thrown by the wayside.

The truth is that the idea of an unbiased media was absurd from the beginning. Journalists are human and have their own opinions. But it used to be the journalists had to slide their opinion into the articles through the backdoor. The choice of quotes, the choice of photos, the choice of questions – there are a thousand ways to get bias into an article without proclaiming in the first sentence that if Hillary Clinton doesn’t win we are all going to die in a nuclear war.

So now we know that we can’t trust the mainstream media to report the news. That’s not bad as long as the mainstream media aren’t the only voice out there. The problem is that the mainstream media, for the most part, are the media. Who else has the money to send reporters out to follow candidates around or can afford to pay a reporter to do research for weeks for one article?

*****

Having said that, it still is incredible to me that even the biased left-wing mainstream media can blame lower black voter turnout in this presidential election on some kind of voter suppression, which they can’t point out exactly, but they know that it’s there.

Even liberals cannot be that out of touch. Of course black voter turnout was down from 2008 and 2012. But it was down from 2008 to 2012. The reason is because black voters turned out in record numbers, as one would expect, to elect the first black president.

Catholics turned out in large numbers when John Kennedy was elected the first Catholic president. Mormons turned to support Mitt Romney trying to become the first Mormon president. Old coots turned out in record numbers to vote for Ronald Reagan. Dumb Southern rednecks turned out in record numbers when Jimmy Carter ran in 1976.

Carter turned out to be even dumber than the dumb rednecks who had supported him, so he lost to Reagan, also because some of the rednecks who supported Carter four years earlier had become old coots and supported Reagan.

Really, does anyone need to do a detailed study to prove what is common sense?

*****

The mainstream media questioned the refusal of the Republican majority in the US Senate for not considering Obama’s nomination for the open seat on the US Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. But it turned out to be a smart political move not to even consider Garland because now Trump will be making that appointment.

The mainstream media theorized that Hillary Clinton would win in a landslide and the Republicans would lose control of the Senate, so Hillary Clinton could appoint a judge far more liberal than Garland.

But their theory was wrong and sometime next year the Supreme Court will once again have a conservative majority.