The journo's among the left are realizing they genuinely lost, but they refuse to believe they lost because their ideals and methods were bad. They insist they're still correct, and are trying to rationalize how Trump beat them within the context of their own distorted understanding of reality.
Fun fact, when this happened in the 70s -- which is important cause we're either about to re-enter that time or are already there -- the left at the time were stuck with the same conundrum.
The media lockout had failed and it became blatantly obvious that the USSR was failing. Marxism was failing. In fact, everywhere it had ever been tried, it had failed, and no amount of "respectable marxist scholars" could hide that anymore. The THOUSANDS of domestic terror attacks in the US during the Days of Rage didn't spark a promised revolution. But the marxists at the time had spent their entire careers and adult lives being good marxists, preparing for a glorious cultural revolution to make them the new nobility, a revolution that was not very obviously not going to happen.
What do you do when you realize your entire life is based on a lie?
Well, if you're a 1970s Marxist, you had two reactions. Three if you consider those that came to their senses, but those were so few to be a rounding error.
The Marxists that decided to embrace it as an article of faith embraced Post-Modernism. This is your "Marxism doesn't work according to logic but I FEEL like it should and isn't that good enough?" take. Marxism as faith. Clap louder and we'll get our utopia, stop clapping and I'll fucking kill you.
The Marxists that decided to extend it as a general theory that might not work with Economics, but should work just fine in other fields started Critical Theory in France in the late 70s. This is your "it's not the rich vs poor it's the majority vs minority which is really oppressor vs oppressed" race/gender/fetish Marxism.
Both spread like intellectual cancers, because, well, they're still Marxism, and that's how Marxism spreads. When they finally met up again after the long march through the institutions, they merged and we got "Intersectional Marxism," Critical Race Theory, Wokeism, etc etc. Basically the truly batshit stuff we've seen since around 2012 when the US rejected giving Obama infinite power in the midterms. Even that slight pushback was enough to drive the left a bit nutty. As I've seen it described on twitter, "they got a little roughed up in the midterms and the thin veneer of sanity they covered themselves with was scraped off, and what lay underneath was dark, utterly insane, and
writhing."
though.