CNN's Jake Tapper celebrates Joe Biden's reported victory: 'Long national nightmare is over'

CNN anchor Jake Tapper channeled his inner Gerald Ford upon the media's declaration that former Vice President Joe Biden is the president-elect — declaring America's "long national nightmare is over."

"What a moment in history. We have all been waiting on the edges of our seats since Tuesday. It is the end, the end of a tumultuous presidency— a time of some accomplishments, no question, a time when many Americans throughout the country and in shuttered steel-towns and in rural America, they felt for the first time they felt heard, which is important," Tapper began.

"But it has also been a time of extreme divisions, many of the divisions caused and exacerbated by President Trump himself," Tapper explained.

"It's been a time of several significant and utterly avoidable failures, and most tragically, of course, the unwillingness to respect facts and science and do everything that could be done to save lives during a pandemic," Tapper continued. "It has been a time where truth and fact were treated with disdain. It was a time of cruelty, where official inhumanity, such as child separation, became the official, shameful policy of the United States."

"But now, the Trump presidency is coming to an end. To an end. With so many squandered opportunities and ruined potential, but also an era of just plain meanness," Tapper went on to say.

"It must be said to paraphrase President Ford: For tens of millions of our fellow Americans, their long national nightmare is over," Tapper said.

What was the reference to Ford?

Upon taking the presidential oath of office in August 1974, Ford — who was not elected president, but assumed the high office after Richard Nixon resigned — sought to encourage Americans that the Watergate Scandal that had besmirched Nixon's White House was finally over.

"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over," Ford said.

"Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher Power, by whatever name we honor Him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy," Ford continued. "As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate."