Britain’s national newspapers registered their profound shock at Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton with pages and pages of coverage.
The Daily Telegraph’s front page called it “the election that shook the world”, while the Daily Mirror showed the Statue of Liberty clasping her face and a headline asking “What have they done?”
In lengthy editorials, leader writers sought to make sense of what the Times referred to as “the most dramatic insurgency in American political history”.
“Politics will never be the same,” said the Times. It “was a political earthquake that the American political class could not bring itself to imagine”.
The Guardian also called it a “global political earthquake”, contending that “President Trump is the shock heard round the world”.
The Financial Times believes it “marks a thunderous repudiation of the status quo”, while the Daily Telegraph sees the vote as the shattering of “the liberal consensus” by “antipolitics”.
Every paper has views on why it happened, of course, and there is a considerable, and somewhat surprising, measure of agreement across the political spectrum.
The Times points out that Trump’s base, white working-class men, was bolstered by white women with college degrees, plus nearly one-third of Asian and Hispanic voters. For all of them, Trump “was the change candidate”.
And that change is scary, with the threat to impose stiff tariffs on Chinese and Mexican imports. Even so, the Times thinks Britain may do well, because Trump “has far __more affinity with and affection for these islands than Mr Obama”.
Trump’s victory was, said the Daily Telegraph, “America’s Brexit moment”. His campaign “was based on being the outsider who would give the political establishment a bloody nose”.
Trump “is not a rightwinger” in economic terms and, on social policy, “he has mostly adopted liberal positions”. Nor is he a leftwinger, because he believes in low taxes and has been strident in his comments about immigration.
But his protectionism is problematic. It would help no one, said the Telegraph, “least of all those Americans who want Mr Trump to improve their lives”. It continued:
From Britain’s point of view, upholding the special relationship is __more important than ever in the wake of the Brexit vote ...
None the less, if President-elect Trump is to be true to the spirit of Brexit that he has invoked, then he must lead an America that reaches out to the rest of the world and does not retreat into an isolationist shell.
The Daily Mail reads Trump’s win as a revolt against “a complacent liberal elite” that includes, but is not confined to, media pundits, the BBC, “bienpensant politicians” and “the massed ranks of luvvies”.
It was “an unmistakable warning to the west’s ‘we know best’ political class”, who have nothing but “contempt for the ordinary people whose interests they profess to hold dear”. The paper continued:
They simply fail to understand voters’ rejection of all the ‘isms’ beloved of the left (multiculturalism, militant feminism, internationalism and social liberalism) or Trump’s appeal to the most enduring ‘ism’ of them all – old-fashioned patriotism.
And that left had displayed “the same stunned reaction to Brexit”. Why? Because “voters were fed up with having their concerns about mass immigration ignored”, and were “sick to death ... of a political class bailing out super-rich bankers while family budgets were relentlessly squeezed”.
For the Mail, the result is “a warning to all liberal elites, including the French, Germans and those who seek to frustrate Brexit, of the penalty for ignoring the electorate”.
The Sun urges people to calm down, arguing that Trump’s “crazier ideas should be reined in by experienced Republican party advisers”.
Anyway, it thinks he has “some solid economic policies” and could “forge a new era of dialogue with Vladimir Putin, whom he admires”. Ah yes, and he “is also a fan of Brexit.”
Like the Mail, it sees an equivalency between the vote for Trump and the vote to leave the EU, contending that “smug lefties ... should condemn less and seek to understand more”.
Do they not grasp that, for years, voters with falling wages were ignored by politicians in Washington or Westminster?
The Daily Express, which views every current event through its obsessive loathing for the EU, is relieved that Trump backs Brexit.
The Express registers its delight that Nigel Farage has cosied up to Trump and believes it is “a great relief to have a friend in the White House who respects the special relationship and is ready to put Britain at the front of the queue”.
The Daily Mirror, as its brilliant front page indicates, is downcast at Trump’s victory: “A tragedy not just for America but the rest of the world”. It says:
The keys to the globe’s most powerful democracy have been handed to a man who is a serial liar, sexual predator and overt racist.
Anyone who cares about the wellbeing of the United States, where inequality is rife and racial tensions run high, should be alarmed.
Those who care about global security, the international economy, climate change and human rights should despair.
The Mirror finds Trump’s domestic agenda, such as his plans to dismantle Obamacare, expel Muslims and build a wall on the Mexican border, “distasteful”. It also believes he “poses a risk to world security, the global economy and Nato”.
But the Mirror believes it necessary “to understand why he won ... He spoke to those left behind by globalisation, stuck in low-paid and insecure jobs and fearful for their families’ future”.
The Independent believes Trump’s election “is part of a revolution sweeping through the developed world”, but argues that “although the Brexit-Trump phenomenon is powerful and new, it does not mean that centrist liberal politics is dead.
“However, if centrist liberalism is to survive it must learn some deep lessons and renew itself. The wrong response to defeat is to blame the American voters for their stupidity or prejudice, just as the wrong response to the Brexit vote was to deride leavers ...
“A successful and confident liberalism has to understand why the voters behaved the way they did.”
The Guardian is concerned that Trump’s presidency could herald America’s “most stunning reversal of political and economic orthodoxy since the New Deal in the 1930s”, but with the opposite intention and effect.
“It signals a seismic rupture in the American-dominated global liberal economic and political order that had seemed to command the 21st century after communism collapsed and China’s economy soared.”
The paper sees echoes in his victory “of the increasingly alarming general rightward shift in the politics of other postindustrial western democracies, to which progressives have again produced inadequate responses”.
In company with rightwing papers, it recognises the parallel with Britain’s Brexit vote and, “as with Brexit ... a period of careful evidence gathering and reflection is in order.”
In pointing out that Americans had chosen “a political neophyte with a simple slogan, ‘Make America great again’”, the Financial Times argued that it had revealed “profound fautlines in American society exposed by the global financial crisis”.
Trump’s campaign had “appealed to nativism, isolationism and protectionism”. His “sweeping rhetoric and compulsive tweeting” had “resonated among millions of Americans who have felt marginalised by globalisation”.
But the paper maintains that “the free movement of capital, goods, and labour is one of the great achievements of the postwar era. Globalisation has lifted millions out of poverty, especially in Asia”.
If Trump carries out his threat to start tariff wars with global partners, “the world will be poorer as a whole” and the consequent “effects on inequality are unlikely to be the ones that Mr Trump’s working-class supporters expect”.
So there is a great deal of agreement about why Trump won, but precious little advice on how to cure the problems that gave rise to his victory.