You thought the UK was bad? Welcome to America’s Brexit

Stock markets surged just before Britain’s Brexit vote in June, so confident were the markets that voters would opt to remain in the European Union. Just days after a majority of Britons voted to leave, however, prices slumped by up to 5%.

Only a few days ago US stock prices rose, signalling confidence that Hillary would move into the White House in January. Pundits, pollsters and commentators were poised to herald the election of American’s first woman president.

But as election results rolled in on the evening of Tuesday 8 November, a chill of disbelief settled in over the ‘progressive’ commentariat. Voters were sending Donald Trump further and faster towards the presidency than many ever thought possible.

By 12.30am EST, the tone of discussion on all the principal TV news channels had changed. An awful realisation began to dawn on the pundits that the exotic, the outrageous and the unthinkable was about to happen: Trump was going to win.

Go past the media commentary, however, and this has been a very muted presidential campaign. Clinton was always going to be safe here in California; but as I have travelled from Connecticut to Georgia in recent weeks, the sense of dismay has been palpable.

“I’m voting for the party and not the candidate,” people told me in North Carolina. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” others told me in Virginia. And the story was the same up and down the east coast.

From the very beginning, Donald Trump’s candidacy was ridiculed by the media, business and cultural establishment. Where was his experience? What was his record? And how could he be so abusive?

But Trump ignored the pundits, reached over the heads of the political establishment, and connected directly with the American people. By 1am on Wednesday 9 November, he needed just 16 electoral college votes to reach the magic 270 needed to win.

And by then it really looked like he was going to win – even though neither he nor Clinton commanded more than 50% of the popular vote. But Trump was highly likely to command 100% of the presidency. And America is going to have to come to terms with it.

So is Candidate Trump likely to be different from President Trump? “Who the hell knows,” opined Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. And America is going to have to come to terms with that, too. The United States is setting out on uncharted waters.

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election is one of the most astonishing stories in the history of the republic. It’s certainly tumultuous – a billionaire showman who owns casinos, builds hotels, and hosts reality TV shows as Commander-in-Chief?

But this great country has survived political turmoil before, and it will survive the election of this surprising, eccentric and extraordinary candidate. America is a divided country and the tenor of political debate has been stringent and bitter.

Trump looks likely to have won the presidency on the basis of the deep, frustrated dissatisfaction of millions of Americans who are weary of the political establishment and share Trump’s conviction that, in one way or another, the system is “rigged” against them.

If he wins, President Trump will need to be a leader for the entire country and to honour the trust which over 50 million Americans have placed in him. He will also need to be the president of the 50 million or so people who voted for Clinton. Can he do it?

Voters appear to be confounding pollsters and pundits in all the great western democracies. Donald Trump knew this all along and insisted that he was “doing great” when so many insisted he was deluded, urging us to bank on a Clinton victory.

But Trump also knows that now he needs to be the leader and the uniter of a country facing challenges both at home and abroad. His transition team is already working hard to ensure a smooth and professional path to power. A new dawn is breaking in the United States.

Peter Kurti is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and is currently in the United States where he has been observing the Presidential Election.