The tone was triumphant early Wednesday morning on “Fox and Friends,” in the hours after the Fox News network called the presidential race for Donald J. Trump.
Ainsley Earhardt, one of the show’s hosts, declared: “This is the end of the legacy media,” claiming that other news outlets had tried to tell Americans how to vote and had failed.
“Middle America loves God, they love country, they don’t want a handout,” she said. “They want to work hard and have their dollar go as far as it did four years ago.” Ms. Earhardt later said of Mr. Trump: “God saved his life for a reason.”
Bill Melugin, a Fox News correspondent, reporting from a celebration held by Mr. Trump, said that his “phone was blowing up last night” with messages from immigration officers and border patrol agents who were “locked and loaded and ready to go.” The hosts repeatedly pushed the idea that President Biden’s staying in the race into the summer was a major cause for the loss.
The show also checked in with joyful Trump voters at a pancake house in Maggie Valley, N.C., and a restaurant in Tyrone, Penn., where voters praised Mr. Trump’s authenticity. One said that she believed a Trump presidency would have sent resources more quickly to the state after Hurricane Helene. Another said he planned to celebrate by watching the daytime talk show “The View” on ABC, and presumably gloating over the downbeat reactions of the hosts.
A much more somber set on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” began a postmortem of Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed run. The NBC News Decision Desk had made their race call at 5:31 a.m.
“It’s time for the Democrats to take a good, long hard look at how this happened,” the host Joe Scarborough said. “And if they just say ‘Trump bad, Democrats virtuous,’ they’re going to keep losing.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton said there had been disbelief and shock at Ms. Harris’s watch party at Howard University’s campus in Washington, D.C., as a Trump victory became apparent. Attendees had been told to go home shortly before 1 a.m., and Ms. Harris has yet to make a public address.
“There was a lot of race bias in this, there was a lot of gender bias in this, and I think that we thought that a lot of voters were more progressive in those areas than they were,” Mr. Sharpton said.
He added: “The problem that I see is not Trump. The problem I see is people that can be appealed to in this way, and we’ve got to bring this country together.”
Former Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, said: “I think we have to acknowledge that Donald Trump knows our country better than we do.”
On CNN, the anchor Kasie Hunt conceded that Mr. Trump had given “a relatively unifying” acceptance speech but noted that “the incentives in Washington, they often run the opposite way.” The commentator Scott Jennings said: “The American people sent a clear message about what they want and who they want to do it, and my idea would be that everybody needs to get onboard with it. To rebel against it after what we saw on election night would be political malpractice.”
On ABC News, anchors and contributors tried to analyze the win and what it might mean for Mr. Trump’s opponents and government regulations.
The anchor George Stephanopoulos asked Mark Updegrove, a presidential historian at the network, about how Mr. Trump was able to overcome a long list of once-disqualifying strikes, including impeachments and a felony conviction.
“It goes back to the economy,” Mr. Updegrove said. “At the end of the day, despite the character flaws, the marked character flaws of Donald Trump, Americans were thinking about kitchen-table issues.”