It has been 24 hours since Donald Trump won the US presidential election, but the shock in America, and the rest of the world, is still setting in.
Trump was behind the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in virtually opinion poll in the lead-in to Election Day. Most pundits thought the American electorate would repudiate Trump’s political pitch that emphasised xenophobia, isolationism, sexism, and Islamophobia.
In the end, everyone was proven wrong. The 70-year-old billionaire got 289 electoral votes against Clinton’s 218, after winning 29 states.
In his victory address, Trump pledged that he would be “president for all Americans”. He also praised his defeated rival for her years of public service: “Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all of Americans.”
Here are some of the cartoons reflecting the disbelief at one of the greatest upsets in US political history.
In the US, the media has been introspecting on how it failed to foresee Trump’s phenomenal rise to the White House.
"The media missed the story," The Washington Post said, adding, "In the end, a huge number of American voters wanted something different. And although these voters shouted and screamed it, most journalists just weren’t listening. They didn’t get it."
The New York Times, in an analysis, accepted that the usual tools used to measure elections failed and how: “The polling on both sides was wrong.”
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