Victor Davis Hanson assesses this week’s presidential election result for National Review Online.

There were a lot of losers in this election, well beyond Hillary Clinton and the smug, incompetent pollsters and know-it-all, groupthink pundits who embarrassed themselves.

From hacked e-mail troves we received a glimpse of the bankrupt values of Washington journalists, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, and wealthy donors. Despite their brand-name Ivy League degrees and 1 percenter ré?sumé?s, dozens of the highly paid grandees who run our country and shape our news appear petty and spiteful — and clueless about the America that exists beyond their Beltway habitat.

Leveraging rich people for favors and money seems an obsession. They brag about wealth and status in the fashion of preteens.

Journalists often violated their own ethics codes during the campaign. Political analyst Donna Brazile even leaked debate topics to the Clinton team. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank reportedly asked the Democratic National Committee to provide him with anti-Trump research.

Reading about the characters who inhabit the Clinton campaign e-mail trove, one wonders about the purpose of their Yale degrees, their tenures at Goldman Sachs, even their very stints in the Clinton campaign. Was the end game to lose their souls?

One big loser is the Obama Justice Department — or rather the very concept of justice as administered by the present administration. It has gone the tainted way of the IRS, VA, and NSA. The Justice Department clearly pressured the FBI to limit its investigation of pay-for-play corruption at the Clinton Foundation and the State Department.