In the early hours of Wednesday morning, legacy news networks were already sliding toward 2016 levels of melting down about the increasingly definite prospect of a presidential victory by Donald J. Trump. For them, Harris’ stinging defeat is personal — because it’s just as much a defeat for them as it is for her.

The corporate media industrial complex has spent Donald Trump’s entire political career trying to destroy him. Hand-in-hand with triple-letter government agencies and Democrats, they ran a hoax painting Trump as a Russian stooge based on ridiculous rumors commissioned by his opponent’s campaign in 2016. They continued to spread the lie for the duration of his presidency, awarding each other Pulitzers for it. And they’ve only ramped up their efforts since then.

The problem they’re reckoning with tonight is this: those efforts didn’t work. They’re no longer able to control Americans by controlling their information intake, because their credibility is farther deep-sixed than the Clinton family’s enemies list.

A TV executive anonymously fretted last week that “If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form.”

Even before the election results were in, that was true of the corporate press. Jeff Bezos knew it when he reportedly ordered The Washington Post to withhold an endorsement of Harris. But now, they can’t avoid it.

Since the last presidential election, the media have screeched incessantly about Trump “inciting an insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They made documentaries comparing Trump to the Ku Klux Klan. They portrayed Trump as the ringleader of a terrorist attack and not as a president who gave a speech and urged his supporters to protest peacefully.

Tuesday night’s results are a resounding indication that Americans didn’t buy it.

With help from a debunked story planted in The Atlantic, the media made Trump out to be a “fascist” and routinely compared him to Hitler. When Trump held a gangbusters rally at Madison Square Garden, they screeched that he and his supporters were obviously Nazis because they gathered at the same venue that Nazi sympathizers once rented — along with Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Billy Joel, Beyoncé, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter.

They called him a threat to democracy and said he would be a dictator. That didn’t work either.

Americans saw the Russia collusion hoax fall apart. They saw Trump govern for four years and peacefully transfer power to Joe Biden without fulfilling their authoritarian predictions. When Covid mania broke out in 2020, they saw the media and their Big Tech allies religiously shut down true information and spread lies — about the virus’ origins, Democrats’ lockdowns, mask mandates, and forced vaccines, to name a few.

They watched the same thing unfold when the media insisted the Biden family influence-peddling scandal was Russian disinformation right before the 2020 election. And as the media kept screaming about Trump being a “threat,” Americans saw him handing out french fries, swapping jokes and family anecdotes with their favorite podcasters, and talking about how much he loves America. (Speaking of podcasts, Trump’s interview with host Joe Rogan garnered a whopping two-thirds the views of the presidential debate hosted by ABC.)

The less Americans bought their lies, the more the media piled on the rhetoric. But that isn’t working anymore. Instead, the more maniacally the media amp up their attacks, the less they appear to be sticking.

If the past eight years — and the first few hours of cope-streaming from TV Wednesday morning — are any indication, the legacy press isn’t planning on repentance. They don’t feel obligated to represent Americans; they feel entitled to control them. The loss of that control is making them apoplectic.

Kamala Harris is only the second-biggest loser of the night. Her media shills are nursing wounds that will take far longer to recover from. After all, they were always the ones fighting the hardest to bring Trump down — and after eight years of it, they’re skulking away weaker and more humiliated than ever.