Donald Trump was always going to win, the establishment just keep getting it wrong.

When Barack Obama was elected president, there was a sense that history was on his side. That the 2008 election result was the culmination of everything American society had worked for since the 60s. That the unstoppable winds of change were blowing and it simply had to happen.

Even if you thought Republican candidate John McCain had won the argument, any reasonable person had to appreciate the poignancy of the occasion.

Donald Trump was nothing like that, Donald Trump was a revolution. All the political establishment thought America was a train headed to a fixed destination, but one man jumped off, ripped up the tracks with his bare hands and set a new course. That achievement, alone, deserves respect.

The sneerocrats from much of the establishment are no doubt awaiting the apocalypse. But on this new historical path, it may be they who are judged harshly.

All the celebrities, all the commentators, all the experts, all the unfunny comedians and half the Republican party thought that by insulting and laughing at Trump, they could bring him down, rather than giving him free airtime.

But what they never realised is that if this was one of their own Hollywood films, Trump would be the hero and they would be the villains in a story of the common people toppling a hated aristocracy.

At the end of the Cold War these people, left and right, had every opportunity to map out a positive new era of peace, prosperity and freedom.

Instead, they made the world more dangerous with needless foreign wars, they shipped the jobs of the American working class overseas and they took away people’s freedom with political correctness. And what’s worst of all, they didn’t even care enough about the lives they’d ruined to explain why.

The media, which was once informative and honourable, began to write about how outraged they were with anything and everything the political establishment disliked. No justification, just outrage.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was rigging the system, but parties on the right and the left were filled with people who almost exclusively followed the establishment view. Whichever way the people voted, the political class took it to mean they wanted more of the same.

When the prospect of real change came along, with Trump as with Brexit, they decided it was an expression of hate. Even if this was true, they made the key mistake of responding with enough hatred to last a lifetime.

Take this editor’s note printed at the bottom of EVERY Huffington Post article.

“Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.”

Then there was the disastrous moment when Hillary Clinton labelled half of Donald Trump’s supporters a ‘basket of deplorables’.

When this is the temperament the political establishment have, why would anyone worry about Donald Trump’s temperament?

Their argument was that when a candidate is as outrageous as Trump, the normal rules of politics go out the window. But in reality, defeating a candidate like that requires cool heads determined to persuade people to their point of view, rather than forcing them.

Despite Trump’s victory, I guarantee the Democrats and the media will believe they still have one silver lining. That is that when people realise how many ridiculous promises Trump has been unable to fulfil, they’ll see him for the demagogue he is and return somebody ‘saner’ to the White House in four years. But it’s not quite that simple.

If the media continue to treat people the way they have throughout this campaign, Trump will be re-elected with a landslide no matter how badly he performs as president.

If they rethink everything they have done over the past two years, go back to doing what they used to do and scrutinising the government on policy, while respecting people’s right to make up their own mind, then in future they might get the result they want.