NEW YORK - Political novice and former reality TV star Donald Trump yesterday defeated Hillary Clinton in a stunning culmination of an explosive, populist and polarising campaign to become the 45th and oldest-ever president of the United States.
The shocking outcome, defying late polls that showed Clinton with a modest but persistent edge, threatened convulsions throughout the country and the world, where sceptics had watched with alarm as Trump’s unvarnished overtures to disillusioned voters took hold.
In his campaign the Republican mogul took relentless aim at the political establishment, but in his victory speech he pledged to unite a nation deeply divided after the bitterest election in recent memory, vowing to be a “president for all Americans.”
“Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of division,” Trump told a crowd of jubilant supporters in New York, pledging to work with Democrats in office. “We will get along with all other nations willing to get along with us,” he said in his brief speech.
Trump scored 290 electoral votes against Clinton’s 228, easily crossing the 270-vote victory bench mark. The Democrat nominee lost despite bagging more popular votes, 47.7 percent against Trump’s 47.5 percent.
Ms Clinton in her concession speech hoped the winner will be a “successful president”. “I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans,” she added.
The election of Trump may be the greatest political surprise of the modern era, after the Republican nominee trailed national and state-by-state polls for over 100 consecutive days.
The 70-year-old billionaire businessman stormed, one by one, through battleground states — Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and then Wisconsin— to tear down his Democratic challenger’s seemingly formidable “blue wall”.
Although he has no government experience and has been as well known for running beauty pageants and starring on his reality television series “The Apprentice” as he is for building his property empire, Trump is the oldest man ever elected president.
His success is only part of a larger, crushing victory for the Republican Party, which retains the House and maintains control of the Senate.
The long-standing global political order, which hinges on Washington’s leadership, was cast into doubt by the election of a man who has questioned core US alliances.
Around the world, as Trump’s victory settled in as cold reality, the political earthquake was greeted with warnings that America had handed power to “an unstable bigot, sexual predator and compulsive liar,” in the words of Britain’s The Guardian.
But the leaders of America’s closest hemispheric partners, Canada and Mexico, quickly made clear their willingness to work with the new president, offering a message of continuity and stability with their giant neighbour.
And US investors appeared to be shaking off the shock that initially sent global markets plunging.
So great was the shock of defeat that the normally robust Clinton did not come out to address her supporters who had gathered at the Javits Center in New York in what was expected to be a victory party. She instead sent her campaign chairman to speak to her poll-watching party.
Her public concession speech came after the Democratic nominee made a private phone call to Trump, shortly after 2am local time (12 noon PST), to congratulate him.
Hillary Clinton then appeared be composed enough, as she urged her supporters to accept the result and said all Americans owe Trump an “open mind” and a “chance to lead”.
“Donald Trump is going to be our president… I hope he will be a successful president for all Americans,” Clinton said to a room of emotional aides and supporters, who gave her an extended round of applause.
Trump, who in the last presidential debate called her a “nasty woman”, was also decent and considerate in his victory speech as he praised Clinton for her hard work and years of public service.
As day broke under rainy skies in Washington, the White House said President Barack Obama called Trump to congratulate him. The president, who will host his successor for transition talks on Thursday, was to address the country and the nation at 1715 GMT.
Trump’s victory was a shocking rebuke to the outgoing president, who had warned that Trump is temperamentally unfit for the office and an existential threat to the very foundations of the world’s oldest democratic republic.
Dangerous intentions
During a bitter two-year campaign that tugged at America’s democratic fabric, Trump pledged to deport illegal immigrants, build a wall on the nation’s southern border with Mexico, ban all Muslims from entering the country and tear up free trade deals.
The New York real estate tycoon, who will become America’s 45th commander-in-chief on January 20, also proposed to launch a trade war with China, a softening with Russia and a ruthless war against Islamists across the Middle East.
There was no disguising the concern of Washington’s partners that Trump’s victory might destroy the Western alliance they still regard as a touchstone for stability and the rule of law.
Response of nervous allies
EU leaders Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker, seeking reassurances about transatlantic ties, invited Trump to an EU-US summit at his “earliest convenience.”
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the world body was counting on Trump’s administration to help combat climate change and advance human rights worldwide.
Harun Khan, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, an umbrella body that has more than 500 affiliated organisations including mosques and schools, congratulated Trump but said “there is a justifiable concern about his election.”
“It is hugely worrying that a man who has openly called for discrimination against Muslims and other minorities has become the leader of a superpower nation,” he said in a statement.
Nato head Jens Stoltenberg warned Trump, who spoke during the campaign of making US allies bear a bigger share of the Western security burden, that “US leadership is more important than ever.”
the 70-year-old tycoon openly praised Putin during the race, questioned US support for Nato allies in Europe and suggested that South Korea and Japan should develop their own nuclear weapons.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reacted to Trump’s election by insisting that his country and the United States are “unshakeable allies.”
Warm welcome
Russia’s autocratic leader Vladimir Putin said he wanted to rebuild “full-fledged relations” with the United States, as he warmly congratulated the president-elect.
Some of the most enthusiastic support for Trump came from far-right and nationalist politicians in Europe such as French opposition figure Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Northern League and British euroskeptic Nigel Farage.
Markets rattled
The election results prompted a global market sell-off, with stocks plunging across Asia and Europe, while the Mexican peso plunged 7.64 percent to a record low against the dollar.
If that drop holds Wednesday morning, it will represent a greater market crash than the world has seen since the Great Recession began in the fall of 2008.
However, the British market briefly after Trump’s conciliatory victory speech and the Dow Jones Industrial Index opened higher.
How it all happened
Trump’s campaign message was embraced by a large section of America’s white majority, grown increasingly disgruntled by the scope of social and economic change under Obama, their first black president.
Many Americans from minority backgrounds expressed dismay at Trump’s victory, which some observers blamed on a backlash against multicultural America.
During his improbable political rise, Trump constantly proved the pundits and standard political wisdom wrong.
Opposed by the senior hierarchy of his own Republican Party, he trounced more than a dozen better-funded and more experienced rivals in the party primary.
During the race, he was forced to ride out credible allegations of sexual assault from a dozen women and was embarrassed but apparently not ashamed to have been caught on tape boasting about grabbing women’s genitals.
Unique in modern US political history, he refused to release his tax returns — leaving a question mark over how much, if any, tax he has paid while running a global empire.
But the biggest upset came on Tuesday, as he registered a series of hard-fought wins in battleground states from Florida to Ohio. He amassed at least 290 electoral votes to 218 for Clinton, according to network projections.
Supreme Court seat
Clinton had been widely assumed to be on course to make history as the first woman president in America’s 240-year existence.
But Americans repudiated her call for racial and cultural unity, opting instead for a leader who insisted the country was broken and that “I alone can fix it.”
Trump has an uneasy relationship with the broader Republican Party.
But it will have full control of Congress and he will be able to appoint a ninth Supreme Court justice to a vacant seat on the bench, ensuring conservatism’s continued predominance among the black-robed justices.
Slap to Obama
The election result was also a brutal humiliation for the White House incumbent, who for eight years has repeated the credo that there is no black or white America, only the United States of America.
On the eve of the election, Obama told thousands of people in Philadelphia that he was betting on the decency of the American people not to back Trump’s dark and divisive vision.
Instead, America’s first black president will be succeeded by a candidate who received the endorsement — albeit unsought — of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan.