On the Sunday before the 2024 presidential election, ABC This Week host George Stephanopoulos managed to squeeze off one last overwrought, hysterical opening editorial about the stakes of the election. The Regime Media have beaten the drum relentlessly since the very beginning of this cycle, and continue to do so straight through the end.
Watch the editorial as aired on ABC This Week on Sunday, November 3rd, 2024:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Good morning, and welcome to This Week. It is almost over. What comes next is anyone's guess. What we do know is this. No election since the Civil War has posed such a test of our constitutional system. Whether to accept election results and the peaceful transfer of power has never been on the ballot like this. The stakes in this election are as high as it gets. The differences between the candidates are as stark as it gets. And as we emerge from the final weekend, the polls suggest that this election is as close as it gets.
If Stephanopoulos’s rant sounds familiar, it’s because he said these same things back in April.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, in flashback: Good morning, and welcome to This Week. Until now, no American president had ever faced a criminal trial. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election, or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president ever faced hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments for business fraud, defamation and sexual abuse. Until now, no American presidential race had been more defined on what's happening in courtrooms than what is happening on the campaign trail. Until now. The scale of the abnormality is so staggering that it can actually become numbing.
It's all too easy to fall into reflective habits- to treat this as a normal campaign where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But that is not what's happening this election year. Those bedrock tenets of our democracy are being tested in a way we haven't seen since the Civil War. It's a test for the candidates, for those of us in the media, and for all of us as citizens.
Civil war and peaceful transfer of power. Reasonable people might accuse of Stephanopoulos of self-plagiarism.
Today’s Stephanopoulos editorial follows a pattern of hand-wringing at ABC, wherein he and Jon Karl trade rants. Just last week, Karl opened with a similar stakes-driven rant:
JON KARL: Good morning. Welcome to This Week. For most of us, Election Day is already here. Virtually all of us live in places where you don't have to wait until November 5th to cast your ballot. More than 40 million Americans have already voted. This morning, we're going to talk about where the race stands, who's up in the polls, who's down, the tactics the candidates are using to convince undecided voters and to get their supporters to turn out. But this isn't a sporting event. This is about much more than tactics or polls. If there's one thing both sides agree on, it's that America is making a choice that will say a great deal about what kind of a nation we are. And what kind of a nation we may become.
Four years ago, Donald Trump became the first president in American history to refuse to accept the results of a presidential election, and to do everything in his power to try to overturn the will of the people. It was an effort that continued even after he left The White House. This time, Trump once again seems to be making it clear he won't accept the results if he loses, but he might not have to. Donald Trump has a very good chance of winning this election. He might even be at this moment, the front-runner. This even after his former Chief of Staff issued a stark warning this week that Trump wants to rule as a dictator, that he meets the textbook definition of a fascist. Once again, this is not a normal campaign.
These hysterical rants serve only to pit Americans against each other, and to stoke fear of electoral outcomes not favored by the media. Ironically, this is the very thing that these screeching editorials decry. Regardless of the outcome of the election, it is not likely that this moral lecturing will end any time soon.
