Democrats are not doing anything to adjust to the changed political landscape, as evidenced by their retention of Nancy Pelosi as House minority leader, and it seems that elite news media are also sticking to the same playbook. They are wasting opportunity to understand the voters who are dissatisfied with them.

The first step of this process has been casting illegitimacy on the election itself, through continually bringing up irrelevancies like the popular vote and fake news. The popular vote argument has no substance — the rules did not change for Hillary Clinton — but it does erase the importance of rural and working-class people who turned the Midwest red. The unsupported “white backlash” theory accomplishes the same thing.

Making a story out of fake news serves a straightforward purpose for the press: to establish villains who spread lies that only the professionals can clear up. Internet conspiracy theorists fit the bill.

Even more nefarious villains are the alt-right and neo-Nazi fringe groups that receive outsized attention from a media desperate to tie them to Donald Trump, thereby tainting Republicans with racism. It does not matter that Richard Spencer and his friends have received the same miniscule crowds that they are used to, and that they have been roundly denounced; neo-Nazi support for Trump provided the pretext for wall-to-wall coverage of a group that craves attention and has essentially zero support.

People are right not to trust a media that spills so much ink over white supremacists who have no influence over our politics. Similarly, they are right to be irritated by widespread reports about Trump’s transition “chaos” and fevered denunciations of honorable people like Jeff Sessions.