Witness to history: The election of Donald J Trump

Andrew Buncombe reflects on his experience of the president’s stunning rise to power: the lessons journalists learnt and how they parted with any notion of augury

The president-elect appears before jubilant supporters with his family in the early hours of 9 November 2016

The decisive moment came at 2.30am on America’s east coast.

The television networks and the Associated Press called Wisconsin with its 10 electoral college votes for Donald Trump, pushing him past the 270 needed to grasp the presidency. In The Independent’s New York office, somebody immediately posted a one-sentence article to break the news.

Twenty-nine minutes later, still scrambling to make sense of events, I published something modestly more considered. It began: “The unthinkable has happened. Reality television has merged with reality. Donald Trump is America’s president-elect.”