The vulgar and narcissistic Donald Trump – isolationist, misogynist and xenophobic – was elected president of the United States last Tuesday night, and the sky did not fall.
Next day, the sun came up, and the sky still did not fall. Americans went to work and their children to school. The stock market defied predictions; instead of collapsing, it rose to record highs.
The political earthquake of Donald Trump's stunning victory on Nov. 8, was greeted with surprised relief by most Republican elected officials.
It was a quirky victory based upon less than 85,000 votes in Michigan and Pennsylvania, while he was losing the overall popular vote by more than 200,000.
Everyone is nervous today.
No one, least of all the players most intimately involved, knows what may happen tomorrow in what is one of the closest and certainly the most divisive election in modern American history – an election that pits distrust of Hillary Clinton against fear of Donald Trump.
A campaign that began on high ground with the prospect of electing the first woman president to succeed the first black president ends in the sewer as voters go to the polls tomorrow amid allegations of lying, criminal behaviour and electoral fraud.
On Friday, just 11 days before election day in the United States, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation went rogue and threw a spanner into the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Recent polls have suggested that Donald Trump was pulling uncomfortably close to Hillary Clinton, prior to the first televised debate between them. His most significant appeal has been to represent a change in the status quo of governmental gridlock, and being opposed by a candidate little more popular than himself, despite his multitude of personal flaws. That momentum toward the Republicans seems to have been arrested by Trump's performance in that opening encounter, and his behaviour in the days that followed.
