Republican Donald Trump stunned the world on Tuesday by defeating
heavily favored Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House, ending
eight years of Democratic rule and sending the United States on a new,
uncertain path.
A wealthy real-estate developer and former reality TV host, Trump
rode a wave of anger toward Washington insiders to defeat Clinton, whose
gold-plated establishment resume includes stints as a first lady, US
senator and secretary of state.
Worried a Trump victory could cause
economic and global uncertainty, investors were in full flight from
risky assets such as stocks. In overnight trading, S&P 500 index
futures fell 5 percent to hit their so-called limit down levels,
indicating they would not be permitted to trade any lower until regular
US stock market hours on Wednesday.
The Associated Press and Fox News
projected that Trump had collected just enough of the 270 state-by-state
electoral votes needed to win a four-year term that starts on Jan. 20,
taking battleground states where presidential elections are
traditionally decided.
CNN reported Clinton had called Trump to concede the election.
A short time earlier, Clinton campaign
chairman John Podesta told supporters at her election rally in New York
to go home. "Several states are too close to call so we're not going to
have anything more to say tonight," he said.
Victorious in a cliffhanger race that
opinion polls had forecast was Clinton's to win, Trump won avid support
among a core base of white non-college educated workers with his promise
to be the "greatest jobs president that God ever created."
His win raises a host of questions for
the United States at home and abroad. He campaigned on a pledge to take
the country on a more isolationist, protectionist "America First" path.
He has vowed to impose a 35 percent tariff on goods exported to the
United States by US companies that went abroad.
Both candidates, albeit Trump more than
Clinton, had historically low popularity ratings in an election that
many voters characterized as a choice between two unpleasant
alternatives.
Trump, who at 70 will be the oldest
first-term US president, came out on top after a bitter and divisive
campaign that focused largely on the character of the candidates and
whether they could be trusted to serve as the country's 45th president.
The presidency will be his first elected
office, and it remains to be seen how he will work with Congress.
During the campaign Trump was the target of sharp disapproval, not just
from Democrats but from many in his own party.
Television networks projected Republicans would retain control of the
US House of Representatives, where all 435 seats were up for grabs. In
the US Senate, the party also put up an unexpectedly tough fight to
protect its majority in the US Senate.
Trump entered the race 17 months ago and survived a series of
seemingly crippling blows, many of them self-inflicted, including the
emergence in October of a 2005 video in which he boasted about making
unwanted sexual advances on women. He apologized but within days,
several women emerged to say he had groped them, allegations he denied.
He was judged the loser of all three presidential debates with Clinton.
TOUTS HIS BUSINESS ACUMEN
During the campaign, Trump said he would make America great again
through the force of his personality, negotiating skill and business
acumen. He proposed refusing entry to the United States of people from
war-torn Middle Eastern countries, a modified version of an earlier
proposed ban on Muslims.
His volatile nature and unorthodox proposals led to campaign feuds
with a long list of people, including Muslims, the disabled, Republican
US Senator John McCain, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, the family of a
slain Muslim-American soldier, a Miss Universe winner and a federal
judge of Mexican heritage.
Throughout his campaign - and especially in his acceptance speech at
the Republican National Convention in July - Trump described a dark
America that had been knocked to its knees by China, Mexico, Russia and
Islamic State. The American dream was dead, he said, smothered by
malevolent business interests and corrupt politicians, and he alone
could revive it.
He offered vague plans to win economic concessions from China, to
build a wall on the southern US border with Mexico to keep out
undocumented immigrants and to pay for it with tax money sent home by
migrants.
The Mexican peso plunged to its lowest-ever levels. The peso had
become a touchstone for sentiment on the election as Trump threatened to
rip up a free trade agreement with Mexico.
His triumph was a rebuke to President Barack Obama, a Democrat who
spent weeks flying around the country to campaign against him. Obama
will hand over the office to Trump after serving the maximum eight years
allowed by law.
Trump promises to push Congress to repeal Obama's troubled healthcare
plan and to reverse his Clean Power Plan. He plans to create jobs by
relying on US fossil fuels such as oil and gas.
CLINTON'S FAILED SECOND BID
Trump's victory marked a frustrating end to the presidential
aspirations of Clinton, 69, who for the second time failed in her drive
to be elected the first woman US president.
In a posting on Twitter, Clinton acknowledged a battle that was
unexpectedly tight given her edge in opinion polls going into Election
Day.
"This team has so much to be proud of. Whatever happens tonight, thank you for everything," she tweeted.
The wife of former President Bill Clinton and herself a former US
senator, she held a steady lead in many opinion polls for months. Voters
perceived in her a cautious and calculating candidate and an inability
to personally connect with them.
Even though the FBI found no grounds for criminal charges after a
probe into her use of a private email server rather than a government
system while she was secretary of state, the issue allowed critics to
raise doubts about her integrity. Hacked emails also showed a cozy
relationship between her State Department and donors to her family's
Clinton Foundation charity.
Trump seized on the emails to charge that Clinton represented a
corrupt political system in Washington that had to be swept clean.
Trump's national security ideas, opposed by most of the elite voices
across the political spectrum, have simultaneously included promises to
build up the US military while at the same time avoiding foreign
military entanglements.
He wants to rewrite international trade deals to reduce trade
deficits. He has taken positions that raise the possibility of damaging
relations with America's most trusted allies in Europe, Asia and the
Middle East.
He has promised to warm relations with Russia that have chilled under
Obama over Russian President Vladimir Putin's intervention in the
Syrian civil war and his seizure of Ukraine's Crimea region.
"Wouldn't it be nice if we could get along with Russia?" he said at many rallies.
