President Trump
The election that shocked the world
Donald Trump stunned the world this week by defeating Hillary Clinton in the US election. His victory – which defied a wealth of polling data and was fuelled by a wave of support from white, working-class voters – will make the real estate developer turned reality TV star America’s 45th president. Global markets swung sharply in response to the news. Trump won swing states including Florida and Ohio, as well as supposed Clinton strongholds such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states that haven’t supported a Republican presidential candidate since 1988 and 1984 respectively. Nearly nine in ten black voters, and two-thirds of Latinos, voted for Clinton, but Trump, despite his inflammatory campaign rhetoric about race, still did better among these groups than Mitt Romney four years ago. The Republicans also kept control of both houses of Congress.
Trump, who at 70 will be the oldest first-term US president, praised Clinton in his victory speech and urged Americans to “come together as one united people”. Clinton also called for unity, saying Trump must be given a chance to lead. Vladimir Putin congratulated Trump and said he hoped Us-russia relations could now be saved from their “critical condition”.
What the editorials said
President Donald Trump. Those are three words we hoped never to hear, said The New York Times. The victory of this manifestly unqualified candidate is a “humbling blow to the news media, the pollsters and the Clinton-dominated Democratic leadership”. More than that, said the FT, it’s a challenge to the entire “Western democratic model”. Trump has “succeeded where Huey Long and George Wallace, American populists of the 20th century, fell well short”. The fact that Republican candidates also did well in congressional elections shows that this was “a rebuff not just to Clinton but also to President Barack Obama, who put his reputation and legacy on the line in the last days of the campaign”.
America’s political class must heed the lessons of this “earthquake”, said The Wall Street Journal. Voters didn’t choose Trump on the strength of his programme, to the extent that it even exists. They just decided that he was “an agent of change”, and was therefore worth a punt, despite all his flaws. His victory is “a walking rebuke to the general liberal indifference to economic stagnation”. The question now is whether Trump will use his mandate responsibly. While he sounded the “right note of magnanimity” with his initial comments about Clinton, he should go further and drop his campaign threats to have her prosecuted and jailed.