Donald Trump Is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment

[Rub It In Rub It In]

Donald John Trump was elected the 45th president of the United
States on Tuesday in a stunning culmination of an explosive,
populist and polarizing campaign that took relentless aim at the
institutions and long-held ideals of American democracy.

The surprise outcome, defying late polls that showed Hillary
Clinton with a modest but persistent edge, threatened
convulsions throughout the country and the world, where skeptics
had watched with alarm as Mr. Trump’s unvarnished overtures to
disillusioned voters took hold.

The triumph for Mr. Trump, 70, a real estate developer-turned-
reality television star with no government experience, was a
powerful rejection of the establishment forces that had
assembled against him, from the world of business to government,
and the consensus they had forged on everything from trade to
immigration.

The results amounted to a repudiation, not only of Mrs. Clinton,
but of President Obama, whose legacy is suddenly imperiled. And
it was a decisive demonstration of power by a largely overlooked
coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters
who felt that the promise of the United States had slipped their
grasp amid decades of globalization and multiculturalism.

In Mr. Trump, a thrice-married Manhattanite who lives in a
marble-wrapped three-story penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue,
they found an improbable champion.

In Mr. Trump, a thrice-married Manhattanite who lives in a
marble-wrapped three-story penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue,
they found an improbable champion.

“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no
longer,” Mr. Trump told supporters around 3 a.m. on Wednesday at
a rally in New York City, just after Mrs. Clinton called to
concede.

In a departure from a blistering campaign in which he repeatedly
stoked division, Mr. Trump sought to do something he had
conspicuously avoided as a candidate: Appeal for unity.

“Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division,” he
said. “It is time for us to come together as one united people.
It’s time.”

That, he added, “is so important to me.”

He offered unusually warm words for Mrs. Clinton, who he has
suggested should be in jail, saying she was owed “a major debt
of gratitude for her service to our country.”

Bolstered by Mr. Trump’s strong showing, Republicans retained
control of the Senate. Only one Republican-controlled seat, in
Illinois, fell to Democrats early in the evening. And Senator
Richard Burr of North Carolina, a Republican, easily won re-
election in a race that had been among the country’s most
competitive. A handful of other Republican incumbents facing
difficult races were running better than expected.

Mr. Trump’s win — stretching across the battleground states of
Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania — seemed likely
to set off financial jitters and immediate unease among
international allies, many of which were startled when Mr. Trump
in his campaign cast doubt on the necessity of America’s
military commitments abroad and its allegiance to international
economic partnerships.

>From the moment he entered the campaign, with a shocking set of
claims that Mexican immigrants were rapists and criminals, Mr.
Trump was widely underestimated as a candidate, first by his
opponents for the Republican nomination and later by Mrs.
Clinton, his Democratic rival. His rise was largely missed by
polling organizations and data analysts. And an air of
improbability trailed his campaign, to the detriment of those
who dismissed his angry message, his improvisational style and
his appeal to disillusioned voters.

He suggested remedies that raised questions of
constitutionality, like a ban on Muslims entering the United
States.

He threatened opponents, promising lawsuits against news
organizations that covered him critically and women who accused
him of sexual assault. At times, he simply lied.

But Mr. Trump’s unfiltered rallies and unshakable self-regard
attracted a zealous following, fusing unsubtle identity politics
with an economic populism that often defied party doctrine.

His rallies — furious, entertaining, heavy on name-calling and
nationalist overtones — became the nexus of a political
movement, with daily promises of sweeping victory, in the
election and otherwise, and an insistence that the country’s
political machinery was “rigged” against Mr. Trump and those who
admired him.

He seemed to embody the success and grandeur that so many of his
followers felt was missing from their own lives — and from the
country itself. And he scoffed at the poll-driven word-parsing
ways of modern politics, calling them a waste of time and money.
Instead, he relied on his gut.

At his victory party at the New York Hilton Midtown, where a
raucous crowd indulged in a cash bar and wore hats bearing his
ubiquitous campaign slogan “Make America Great Again,” voters
expressed gratification that their voices had, at last, been
heard.

“He was talking to people who weren’t being spoken to,” said
Joseph Gravagna, 37, a marketing company owner from Rockland
County, N.Y. “That’s how I knew he was going to win.”

For Mrs. Clinton, the defeat signaled an astonishing end to a
political dynasty that has colored Democratic politics for a
generation. Eight years after losing to President Obama in the
Democratic primary — and 16 years after leaving the White House
for the United States Senate, as President Bill Clinton exited
office — she had seemed positioned to carry on two legacies: her
husband’s and the president’s.

Her shocking loss was a devastating turn for the sprawling world
of Clinton aides and strategists who believed they had built an
electoral machine that would swamp Mr. Trump’s ragtag band of
loyal operatives and family members, many of whom had no
experience running a national campaign.

On Tuesday night, stricken Clinton aides who believed that Mr.
Trump had no mathematical path to victory, anxiously paced the
Jacob K. Javits Convention Center as states in which they were
confident of victory, like Florida and North Carolina, either
fell to Mr. Trump or seemed in danger of tipping his way.

Mrs. Clinton watched the grim results roll in from a suite at
the nearby Peninsula Hotel, surrounded by her family, friends
and advisers who had the day before celebrated her candidacy
with a champagne toast on her campaign plane.

But over and over, Mrs. Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate were
exposed. She failed to excite voters hungry for change. She
struggled to build trust with Americans who were baffled by her
decision to use a private email server as secretary of state.
And she strained to make a persuasive case for herself as a
champion of the economically downtrodden after delivering
perfunctory paid speeches that earned her millions of dollars.

The returns Tuesday also amounted to a historic rebuke of the
Democratic Party from the white blue-collar voters who had
formed the party base from the presidency of Franklin D.
Roosevelt to Mr. Clinton’s. Yet Mrs. Clinton and her advisers
had taken for granted that states like Michigan and Wisconsin
would stick with a Democratic nominee, and that she could repeat
Mr. Obama’s strategy of mobilizing the party’s ascendant liberal
coalition rather than pursuing a more moderate course like her
husband did 24 years ago.

But not until these voters were offered a Republican who ran as
an unapologetic populist, railing against foreign trade deals
and illegal immigration, did they move so drastically away from
their ancestral political home.

To the surprise of many on the left, white voters who had helped
elect the nation’s first black president, appeared more
reluctant to line up behind a white woman.

>From Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, industrial towns once full of
union voters who for decades offered their votes to Democratic
presidential candidates, even in the party’s lean years, shifted
to Mr. Trump’s Republican Party. One county in the Mahoning
Valley of Ohio, Trumbull, went to Mr. Trump by a six-point
margin. Four years ago, Mr. Obama won there by 22 points.

Mrs. Clinton’s loss was especially crushing to millions who had
cheered her march toward history as, they hoped, the nation’s
first female president. For supporters, the election often felt
like a referendum on gender progress: an opportunity to elevate
a woman to the nation’s top job and to repudiate a man whose
remarkably boorish behavior toward women had assumed center
stage during much of the campaign.

Mr. Trump boasted, in a 2005 video released last month, about
using his public profile to commit sexual assault. He suggested
that female political rivals lacked a presidential “look.” He
ranked women on a scale of one to 10, even holding forth on the
desirability of his own daughter — the kind of throwback male
behavior that many in the country assumed would disqualify a
candidate for high office.

On Tuesday, the public’s verdict was rendered.

Uncertainty abounds as Mr. Trump prepares to take office. His
campaign featured a shape-shifting list of policy proposals,
often seeming to change hour to hour. His staff was in constant
turmoil, with Mr. Trump’s children serving critical campaign
roles and a rotating cast of advisers alternately seeking access
to Mr. Trump’s ear, losing it and, often, regaining it,
depending on the day.

Even Mr. Trump’s full embrace of the Republican Party came
exceedingly late in life, leaving members of both parties unsure
about what he truly believes. He has donated heavily to both
parties and has long described his politics as the transactional
reality of a businessman.

Mr. Trump’s dozens of business entanglements — many of them in
foreign countries — will follow him into the Oval Office,
raising questions about potential conflicts of interest. His
refusal to release his tax returns, and his acknowledgment that
he did not pay federal income taxes for years, has left the
American people with considerable gaps in their understanding of
the financial dealings.

But this they do know: Mr. Trump will thoroughly reimagine the
tone, standards and expectations of the presidency, molding it
in his own self-aggrandizing image.

He is set to take the oath of office on Jan. 20.

Correction: November 10, 2016
An article on Wednesday about the election of Donald Trump as
president of the United States carried an erroneous byline in
some editions. The article was by Matt Flegenheimer and Michael
Barbaro — not by Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/us/politics/hillary-clinton-
donald-trump-president.html?_r=0