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A nation gone wrong in a world gone crazy: A first reckoning with how the hell this happened

A global wave of rage hits America, and I won’t pretend I saw it coming. Now we must face the unthinkable

By Heather Digby Parton, Salon.com

November 8, 2016 - File - DONALD TRUMP defeats H. Clinton to become 45th President of the United States. Pictured: October 27, 2016 - Geneva, Ohio, U.S. - Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump appears at a campaign event in Geneva, Ohio. (Credit Image: © Carlo Allegri/Reuters via ZUMA Press)

November 8, 2016 – File – DONALD TRUMP defeats H. Clinton to become 45th President of the United States. Pictured: October 27, 2016 – Geneva, Ohio, U.S. – Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump appears at a campaign event in Geneva, Ohio. (Credit Image: © Carlo Allegri/Reuters via ZUMA Press)

When I’m wrong I’m wrong. Yesterday I woke up thinking that the United States would elect a new president and remain a mostly respected world superpower and a reasonably stable global economic leader. I looked at the polls and believed that the chances of Donald Trump winning were so remote that it was not worth thinking about, so I wrote a piece assuming that Hillary Clinton would win, something I am usually careful not to do. So, of course, the unthinkable happened.

On the news that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States, stock market futures nosedived, the dollar plunged and the whole world is in shock. We wake up today to a fundamentally different world than the one in which we woke up yesterday. The nation our allies looked to as the guarantor of global security will now be led by a pathologically dishonest, unqualified, inexperienced, temperamental, ignorant flim-flam man. Things will never be the same. And we have no idea at the moment exactly what form this change is going to take, which makes this all very, very frightening. Read more