Donald Trump’s victory is the new American Revolution that no Western nation should ignore

Months of condescending to Trump and his supporters has caught up with the political and media elite

With a primal scream voters in America have rejected the political establishment as embodied by Hillary Clinton and gambled on a man with a sledgehammer promising to destroy it.

He was at times reckless and that appealed to them. He blew up the rules of campaigning by promising to blow up the rules of Washington. That is what the country has asked for. Will there be buyer’s remorse, perhaps as some saw in Britain after it voted to leave the European Union?

There won’t, not among the tens of millions who voted for him. At least not now.

To ask the question even is to continue to commit the same mistake that so many made in the United Kingdom, when they misjudged the mood before Brexit, and so many similarly made here in the United States, when Mr Trump first burst onto the political scene one year ago in June.

This is what his supporters – so many more of them than the egg-covered pollsters ever saw – want and what they will still want when they awake on Wednesday morning. Their anger is real, visceral. “Drain the swamp,” he repeatedly exclaimed as he campaigned. They said, “do”.

It is a stunning sledgehammer blow to the status quo with deep implications for the political order not just in the United States. This eruption will ripple across the Atlantic at supersonic speed. France has elections soon. So does Germany. If Brexit didn’t wake their political establishments from their sleep-walking self-confidence, Trump becoming the US President-elect should.

It will be tempting to conclude that Mr Trump won in part because Ms Clinton was a poor candidate. Indeed, she was. She lacked the warmth of the New York billionaire on the stump – and I do mean warmth – and she had none of his ability to connect beyond her solid base of liberal supporters. Honestly, she didn’t really connect with many of them either.

Democrats chose her as their nominee in spite of the extraordinary baggage she carried with her. The email server was only part of it. It wasn’t appetising to remember the dramas of the Bill Clinton presidency – Lewinsky, Whitewater et al.

Supporters of Donald Trump hug as election results come in during a party at a hotel in downtown Phoenix, Arizona (Getty)

And in a season when the stirrings of rebellion was surely visible to anyone who looked – who travelled out of their editorial suites in New York and their studios in Los Angeles to Dubuque, Iowa, or Grand Rapids, Michigan – why would you choose a candidate who was the quintessence of everything that ignited it in the first place?

I still recall Ms Clinton telling New Hampshire students in February that she understood voters’ anger that so much influence, power and money was concentrated in the hands of so few. And I thought, oh dear, she’s a lost cause. Because she was clearly describing herself.

That she had enriched herself and her family so handsomely while professing to have had a 30-year career of humble public service, sat badly. How had she? It smelled, if not like outright corruption then a clear case of the elite using their position to look after number one.

But she failed above all because she was on the wrong side of the tsunami. And Trump won because he saw it, understood it and knew precisely how to ride it home. Actually, he understood it back at the end of 2012 when he first applied to trademark his slogan, Make America Great Again.

He knew that he could also give voters tangible things to blame. He held up globalisation and decades of free-trade policy as the culprit that had taken away their hopes of a better future and, often, their jobs, their very sense of economic security. His unexpectedly strong showing in states like Wisconsin and Michigan tells that story. And speaking of Ms Clinton’s failings – she did not set foot in the state of Michigan once after winning her party’s nomination. Hubris is another sin she never quite grasped.

He understood that during eight years of President Barack Obama, his current positive approval numbers notwithstanding, many Americans found themselves questioning the notion that their’s was the world’s exceptional nation. In this country, that’s like taking away religion.

Horror, not remorse, more aptly describes the mood of those on the losing side today. Partly because of their utter dislike of Trump the man. They should know: many of those who voted for Trump didn’t like him either. “I am going to hate voting for Trump,” one Minnesota man told me a few weeks ago, “but I am going to love not voting for Ms Clinton”. Yes, he is probably a bad guy, but our desire for change is so complete, we will take him over her anyway and any day.

But beyond their disdain for the “orange” one the metropolitan, liberal elite of the East and West coasts know the damage that sledgehammer may now deal to things they cherish. The miracle of his election is their nightmare. No wonder the Canadian immigration website was crashing on Tuesday night.

The list of their fears of a Trump presidency – also real, visceral and profound – is long too. They fear for the immigrants he is threatening to throw out. No one more than those immigrants themselves. They fear what he will do to the rights of women to make choices about their own bodies and what his choices for the Supreme Court will do to all the social advances of recent years, including gay rights, voting rights, minority rights.

They know that the last several decades of free-trade doctrine that has helped to grow economies more than wreck them will be blown apart. A new trans-Atlantic free trade deal? Forget about it. They shudder at what Trump will do to the world order beyond trade. Nuclear proliferation, the future of the Nato alliance and – they can barely imagine – a love-in with Vladimir Putin. They quake at a return of trickle-down economics where the rich getting richer is meant to float those who are already sinking.

They see that the legacy of President Obama that they mostly like – including his milestone Obamacare law, flawed though it surely is – will be rolled up like dirty lino and thrown on a fire. Don’t even mention the prospect of Giuliani as head of the FBI or Christie as Attorney General. Or the idea of a president who thinks climate change is a liberal con.

And where Trump supporters believe he will indeed make America great again, those who voted Hillary are of course convinced he will do the opposite. They believe Trump’s America will be one of intolerance and division, not a land they want to raise their children in.

Americans can be certain of only a few things this morning. Mr Trump will not deliver all that he has promised his supporters. Coal miners won’t get their jobs back. The wall on the US-Mexico border won’t be built. His campaign was always part serious prescriptions, part utter fraud. Nor, however, will he be the unbridled catastrophe and embarrassment his detractors say he will be.

Finally what we can all be certain of is this: political leaders in what we understand to be our club of western democracies have now to wake up. If they pretend this populist wave is not real, they will perish. If they see it but then attempt to condescend to it or pretend it is peculiar to America only, they will perish. And if it is not in their blood to offer a considered response to it, they will also perish. As Hillary just has.