This is the world’s worst headline: Donald Trump Is The New President of the United States

Republican candidate Donald J Trump has won and been named the 45^th President of the United States of America. This is possibly the most dire sentence I have had to write in 2016, and with this win, things may only get worse for the entire world in the months to come.

“How did we get here?” is possibly the question on most people’s minds right now and may well be the name of the chapter in America’s future history books when explaining the outcome of the 2016 elections. How did the world’s most powerful democracy manage to choose a racist, xenophobic, alarmist candidate with next to no political accountability to steamroll through the Republican party and sit on top of it? But even beyond this, the question arises— how did the world’s biggest economy, largest military and the planet’s only hegemonic superpower manage to essentially choose what at best seems to be a character from Looney Tunes to be their Commander in Chief? On what herbal tonic did the country reach a point where they said, “Yes, this Trump, he will be a leader fit for us?”

But, such is democracy. It is, to put it simply, the people’s will to see a character like Donald Trump to the White House. This is a man who is racist, xenophobic, a raging misogynist, Islamophobic, and aloof on global economics; one who has sold himself as a blue-blooded American who will protect the country from a whole bunch of imaginary (this is excluding terrorism as a topic altogether) threats that he has built and marketed himself. He has shunned globalised trade agreements, floated absurd ideas such as charging NATO members for providing protection, gone after Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and called it a fraud, suggested building a wall along the US–Mexico border and been certain he will make Mexico pay for it, and the list by this time of the year has become endless. However, despite all this, he has found good support as all kinds of people in the US, who may have had similar latent thoughts, felt emboldened and started to crawl out of the nooks and cracks of the country until a swell made his views mainstream enough.

Trump’s victory has no clear mandate; he has won on a Molotov cocktail of alarmism, scare tactics, false information and populist rhetoric. It is not surprising that Trump had these characteristics to sell or that he lied through his teeth to reach where he is, but what is surprising and perhaps more at fault here than Trump himself is that the people in significantly large numbers went for the goods that he was selling. The people of the United States have managed to convert the White House, a place of democracy where the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Dwight D Eisenhower, John F Kennedy and so on roamed the corridors, and made the US what it is today— essentially, a sophisticated looking theme park where the mayor of the rollercoaster ride has been given the world’s deadliest weapons and all the power to play with.

Trump’s win is also an institutional failure of the American electoral system, which seemingly does not have enough checks and balances in place to make sure the people finally running for the presidency have at least basic qualifications, experience, and wisdom to give respect to the office which it deserves. Now, with Trump at the helm, it will come down to the American bureaucracy, and perhaps even corporations, to make sure his advisory circle is more arrogant than Trump himself, so that he does not take decisions which may hurt not just the US, but Western-led ideas and thought processes that are important for democratic values to thrive in the global arena. A man running the White House as a demigod with a serious attitude problem will take America’s relations with the world, already strained in many theatres of diplomacy, many steps back. During the campaigning period itself, many of America’s allies had raised their concerns with the Obama administration over the possibilities of a Trump win. During this time many pundits had also suggested that by polling date, Trump would have aligned himself to be more centrist and a moderate, letting go of the absurd rhetoric we had got so used to from him. This did not happen.

However, amongst all this, one needs to reflect on what led to this sort of drastic shift in American politics. And perhaps the deepest reflections have to be done by those who vehemently opposed Trump’s campaign and all that he stood for. It is indeed a perplexing question, for example, how Trump won despite serious sexual misconduct allegations and overtly refusing to part with his tax details in order to maintain a transparent election. What led to enough people voting for him despite all the things people pointed out was wrong with the man, his thinking and his actions?

For now, it is anybody’s guess how a Trump administration will turn out, but it won’t be a bad idea to sit with your fingers and toes crossed and a stiff drink by your side. Perhaps the great American journalist and writer HL Mencken was right in saying that “democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.”