It started out as a joke: a blowhard billionaire with zero public sector or political experience declared his intention to be the next president of the United States.
Most people scoffed at the idea.
Now people are just scoffing at the result.
Donald Trump is the president-elect for the United States.
This was, arguably, the election with the least desirable front-running candidates in recent history. In the final weeks before the election, it was no longer a question of who was more popular, but who was more disliked. (Yes, there is a difference.)
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a slim margin, but thanks to some unexpected victories in the electoral college, we’re going have four years of President Trump.
Trump resonated with angry, disenfranchised voters, particularly white people without a college degree, who loathed the political elite, or feel they have been left behind in a changing world.
He also did a better job of getting his supporters to the polls, particularly in battleground states like Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Many thought Trump’s supporters wouldn’t vote; they were wrong.
And those supporters blindly backed him, no matter how incriminating, discriminatory or misogynistic his comments were.
This should have been the biggest electoral rout for the Democrats in decades, but instead they lost the White House.
While Clinton is more experienced, and far better suited to run a country and handle foreign diplomatic relations, her years in the public eye and her abundance of controversies over the years made her polarizing.
Trump now faces the challenge of not only bringing together a deeply divided country, he also has to mend fences within the Republican Party. Any other Republican president would be thrilled to have the Republicans control the senate and the house of representatives, but it won’t necessarily be an asset for Trump, at least not initially, since he didn’t have the backing of many in the party’s establishment.
If Trump thinks he’s going to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, or ban Muslims from entering the country, or tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), or redefine NATO, or do any of the other insane things he promised during the campaign, he’s going to be in for a surprise.
As for how this victory will impact Canada, we can look forward to Trump approving the final phase of the Keystone XL pipeline. It might be the only upshot to a Trump victory.
He’s not going to tear up NAFTA, not with so many free trade champions currently in the Republican Party.
But Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will find Canadian-American relations much more difficult now that Republicans control the Capitol, and Trudeau is not, figuratively, the street-fighter type who’s suited to this situation.
The next four years will be interesting indeed.
