Imagine a cocky Trump sizing up his oval office, and cringe

AMERICANS go to the polls on Tuesday in a presidential election described as perhaps the most consequential in recent history.

Contrary to expectations, it is proving to be a cliff-hanger, and many will be waiting for the results with bated breath.

Americans are undergoing their customary soul-searching about what sort of society they want to be and what role their country should play in the world. It’s a metaphorical fork in the road.

Their candidates — Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party and Donald Trump, the Republican Party nominee — represent diametrically opposed visions of the US..

While Clinton, if she wins, could be expected to essentially continue with President Barack Obama’s domestic and foreign policy agenda, Trump wants to rip it apart and take the country in a completely different direction.

Trump has proved to be not your typical Republican, or even conservative. Unlike many Republicans, for instance, he’s against free trade, he rails against the moneybags of Wall Street, he makes nice with Russia and Vladimir Putin and has been critical of the Iraq invasion, which was of course prosecuted by a Republican president.

What’s been surprising is that the historic nature of this election — the fact that if Clinton wins she will become the first woman US president — is almost absent from the campaign narrative.

One would have expected Americans, not known for their coyness, to be bragging about it. They probably realise they are far behind other nations, even lessdeveloped countries, on that score.

But the reason could also be the fact that Clinton has been a fixture of the Washington establishment for three decades. She’s almost regarded as one of the boys, so to speak.

The race was never expected to be so close. Clinton was a shoo-in for the White House the moment she announced her intention to run. Her poll numbers were in the stratosphere.

She’s by far the most experienced candidate to have sought the office of US president and, as a former first lady, she’s seen the job from up close.

But her tenure as Obama’s secretary of state, which was initially deemed to have been a huge success, has proved to be her Achilles heel. The killing of US diplomats, including ambassador Christopher Stevens, in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012, has become a millstone around her neck.

It was during a congressional investigation into the Benghazi killings that it was discovered that Clinton, as secretary of state, had been using a private e-mail server for her communication.

That apparently is illegal, but the FBI, after investigation, decided not to prosecute. Although the issue continued to dog her campaign, she seemed to be cruising to victory — until a week ago, when FBI chief James Comey said the bureau was looking into new e-mails.

Her poll numbers seem to have stalled as a result and Trump is catching up on her.

It has also been Clinton’s misfortune to face an opponent such as Trump, a demagogue who’s been running a campaign littered with lies and insults.

The fact that she’s a woman running against a misogynist has not helped her cause either.

Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall along the Mexican border to stop illegal immigration and, incredibly, force Mexico to pay for it, has caught fire with a section of the electorate.

But his political campaign started five years ago when he promoted the racist notion that Obama is not an American and his presidency could therefore be illegal. By the time Trump announced his candidacy, he already had a firm base among conservatives.

His slogan, “Make America Great Again”, harks to a past when the US was a segregated and racist society. Trump’s election would be a rebuke to the strides the US has made in race relations thus far.

It would be a great pity if the decency of the Obama presidency were to be succeeded by Trump’s imbecility.

Imagine Obama showing a cocky Trump around the White House after the election. That would be a cringeworthy moment.

The next president will also decide the ideological direction the US Supreme Court will take for years to come.

The court, which already has a vacancy that the Republican-led senate has refused to fill, has had a conservative majority for decades. With Clinton in the White House, it would tilt to liberal or the left.

Trump has given an undertaking to appoint justices who’ll gut all laws regarded as sacred cows by liberals, such as those on abortion, civil rights and affirmative action.

Although Clinton was part of Obama’s foreign policy team, she does not necessarily march in lock step with him. She has often sided with the hawks at the Pentagon.

For instance, she forced his hand on Libya, she wants a no-fly zone over Syria and she would be tough on Putin.

She follows the Obama script, but she wants it a tad more muscular.

As for Trump, he simply wants to pull down the shutters.