After election

Donald Trump must have surprised even his closest supporters when he pulled of his stunning victory over the favourite Democratic nominee for the White House Hillary Clinton in the November 8 election.

Even the markets were taken by surprise when Trump won the presidency.

The results were close in terms of popular votes, with Clinton receiving 47.7 million votes against 47.5 million for Trump, but what counted more were the so-called electoral votes, given by the states on the basis of their population size.

Now the US, the entire world actually, has to reckon with a new kind of US leader, one who never held a public office.

Trump succeeded in his election campaign against great odds because he was clearly closer to the pulse of his nation.

The mood of the US is changing, moving in the direction of isolation and looking inwards.

More important, perhaps, is the obvious fact that ideologically, the US is turning “right”, that it feared that a Clinton president may try to take it to a higher level of socialism than President Barack Obama. 

More than the name calling during the election campaign, what counts most is the ideological shift in the US. 

Many Western countries witnessed similar changes within their political currents, and the US is clearly no different.

When Trump said he wanted to make his country great again, he must have touched a sensitive cord with the overwhelming majority of people who want a real change from the eight years of Democratic rule.

World leaders have now to accept the new reality in the US.

The Republican Party is now in control of the two chambers of the US Congress, something that will strengthen the hand of the newly elected president and give him added freedom to pursue his policies.

What counts for us in Jordan and the rest of the Arab world are the implications of the election of a new breed of leadership in the US.

Judging by his rhetoric during the election campaign, Trump seems to side with Israel.

On Syria, the newly elected president appears to side with the regime of President Bashar Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin, giving priority to defeating Daesh over all other considerations including humanitarian issues emanating from the Syrian conflict.

The president-elect even said that he wanted to reconsider the nuclear accord between the West and Iran, after protesting that the deal is “bad”.

The international financial market has already reversed its initial negative reading of the US political change and now starts to view the change in Washington as a positive, rather than negative, development.

The developing relaxed reading of the US political scene could be a good sign that the Trump presidency need not scare the international community.

Of course, the days and months ahead will offer a better reading of Trump’s administration.

All things considered, when the dust settles, the international community can expect Trump to cool his rhetoric and reconnect with realities, both at his country and abroad.