DC Edit | A decisive mandate in US after a divisive campaign

America has voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump to be the next President. Defying forecasts of a neck-and-neck race that was thought to be too close to call, the United States not only voted Mr Trump to the Oval Office in the White House but also gave his Republican Party control of the Senate and hope towards keeping the majority in the House of Representatives.

The mandate is clear as crystal as Mr Trump is set to sweep the popular vote too, by a few millions at that. The Republican candidate won not only the Red States that would have been his party’s anyway but also won each of the seven battleground or swing states. This was as decisive as it could get and it gave forth a result that surprised the pundits, the pollsters and the politically conscious.

An angry America has voted for change, which is in keeping with results in the first world in countries worldwide, from the UK to many in Europe, Japan and Australia where a vote for change may have come from deep disillusionment with governments and the post-Covid economy that seems to have made inequality even worse.

There are two different Americas with very divergent views on politics and the economy which stand at opposite ends of the spectrum. This was visible in the most divisive campaign ever for the presidency that had a bitter kind of immediacy to the people on the two sides of the same American coin, but separated by gender, region in whether urban or rural, people with college degrees and those without, and women with or without the right to an have an abortion.

The will of a majority of those who are classified as blue and white collar, those who inhabit the vast rustic belt and those settlers who came earlier like the Latinos seemed to have made their choice, however misogynistic and racist this may sound. The battleground states swung the results totally as they may have voted 7-0 for Mr Trump as compared to Joe Biden who had won six of them in his 2020 to narrowly claim the right to reside in the White House and assume the mantle of the world’s most powerful man.

Once again, a woman candidate failed to break the ultimate glass ceiling in the American presidency with Kamala Harris, of Black Afro-Caribbean and Indian roots, faring a bit worse than Hillary Clinton who had won the popular vote but lost it on the electoral college count to Mr Trump in 2016. A woman, and a Black woman at that, seemed a bridge too far for the US.

Mr Trump is a convicted felon, and a serial one at that who was indicted on14 counts. He sought to subvert the 2020 presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden. He is thought to have fudged his business books and sneered at women throughout the campaign even while seeking their votes. All that hardly seemed to matter to those who chose to dislodge the Democrats whose leader will be a lame duck in the White House for the next couple of months.

What a Trump comeback victory means to the world remains to be seen, though stated and unstated fears might make this seem like doomsday for many. What it will fetch for Americans who may have been seduced by the catchy line of “Make America Great Again” also remains to be seen. An immediate consequence of the first notes of the bugles of victory was seen in the world stock markets that zoomed along with the mighty US dollar, the currency of global trade.