by Nathan Wuertenberg

From the announcement of his candidacy in 2015 to his victory on election night a year later, many (particularly white liberals) viewed Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency with a sense of steadily growing disbelief. His infamous announcement speech on June 16, 2015 set the tone for the next eighteen months of his campaign, one plagued by revelations of sexual assault, racial discrimination, and the occasional (frequent) retweets of white supremacist propaganda and conspiracy theories. Only a month into that campaign, the Huffington Post dismissed Trump as a “sideshow,” one that deserved to be covered in the Entertainment section rather than Politics. HuffPo finally retracted its statement five months later, when Trump promised a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” declaring that it was “no longer entertained.” Two months after that, the outlet announced Trump’s…