Five global stories to watch as the US waits for midterm election results
The United States has spent the last four years being torn apart as a country by two seemingly irreconcilable political trends: Donald Trump’s campaign and Brexit. But this week, as the presidential election and the result of the vote to leave the European Union were settled, one thing that was sure was that none of us could escape the twin spectacles of the campaign, and the moment when Europe voted to throw in its lot with Trump, a man, a president, so far from the public’s view, who has already become the most polarising figure in US politics, one more divisive than the president who led the country for the first 35 full years of its existence.
But as the Trump era goes on, there will no doubt, no matter what happens over the next 24 hours, be a long period of introspection, and reflection about whether a Donald Trump-led America after Brexit is to be anything other than a world that we’ve never lived in before, that we might not know how to live out again.
How do you even characterise the election of a man who has been defined by such polarising rhetoric, who has so many contradictory views about so many things, who has always been and always will be, in a phrase, a conundrum?
How do you characterise the victory of a man who has been so controversial from the very beginning of his political career, and who has spent the entirety of a campaign that was more about personal triumph than anything else? How do you characterise the moment the polls opened and the public went to vote with their gut, with their convictions and their hopes, with a sense of where they are and where they’ve come from and where they’re going?
There are those who have made the case that Brexit could be a gift for Trump given the potential instability and risk to global stability. He has been in the US a week now, and he has already started his administration with a travel ban, a travel ban that was blocked by the courts. He has already started a travel ban for people from seven Muslim-majority
