Phew! It is over folks. Breathe. The American people have stunned the world and ridiculed the pollsters. It seems only Donald J. Trump correctly read the heart of the American people and hence he is now the commander-in-chief of the world’s greatest power and not Hillary Clinton as the world hoped for. The email scandal has drowned her and with her deprived the world of a steady and experienced hand in the White House.

It has been indeed a torturous election. The 2016 United States presidential election will stand in history in a class of its own. I am not sure how historians will evaluate it, but there is no doubt that it will go down as the election that broke all standards of morality and good taste.

The world was shocked, disgusted and dumb-founded by the political shallowness of the US presidential election, which indeed put the political idiosyncrasies of some Third World countries to shame. As the political language descended deeper and deeper into the realm of profanity, the outside world was thankful that their children had electronic games that kept them away from the living rooms where parents were watching the American election campaign with a sense of shame.

There is no doubt that the world looks at America with envy for its free speech, democracy and for its world leadership in education and innovation apart from its military power. And no one can doubt either that the election spectacles we have all watched with derision and amusement was part of the free speech that one can expect only in America. However, it is also true that Trump’s free-wheeling approach with language and facts had left many Americans aghast and horrified the outside world. But the American people may have seen in him something other than his rhetoric. Something that spoke to their fears of the other.

Trump, who ran the whole campaign like a soap opera, also proved to be a true machiavellian who could move the masses by carefully selected catch words that appealed to their emotions. While Hillary lectured about grand policies and complex issues in bureaucratic language, Trump reverted to Isaiah Belin’s hedgehog mantra and kept repeating a few simple slogans which gripped people’s hearts and echoed in the mind like a commercial jingle. So despite everything else, one can say Trump owes his victory to the simplicity of his message. Which itself tells a lot about how simple-minded people have become in the age of Twitter. So the people have given their trust and the nuclear code to the man who speaks their language.

It is true that the world anticipated Hillary Clinton to be another epoch-making figure like Barack Obama. We wished that she broke the glass ceiling as the first woman to rise to the presidency in the country’s 240 year history. We imagined what the founding fathers would have thought of these two consecutive historical milestones that was unthinkable in their time. A black man and a woman handing over the reins of power to each other. But that dream has been shattered by the juggernaut of Trump who drew a different new reality for America and the world.

No one read the writing on the wall. It started with Brexit and with the election of Trump, the rest of the world is at a loss. It doesn’t know where to look at for global leadership. But unlike his campaign rhetoric, Trump tried to reach out in his acceptance speech. He is now the president not only of America, but the whole world as well. And he knows that he did a lot of damage with his rhetoric during the campaign trail. So there is a lot of work waiting for him to heal the wounds and address the genuine fears of people around the world.

The world can live with the familiar flaws of the American leadership, but it is ill-prepared to see the best qualities of the American democracy thrown over the cliff. And there are many people on both inside and outside America who were horrified by the apocalyptic view of Trump.

It is interesting times to live and watch how different the world will become under the leadership of Trump, but one has to admit that his message of “making America great again” must have resonated with the American people, particularly at a time when the political rhetoric has become so poisoned and portrayed immigrants as monsters coming to destroy the western civilisation.

Trump is coming to a complex world where his mantra and simple utterances will stand a chance to achieve results. He woke up yesterday in a world where Syria smoulders, Iraq is in war with terrorism, where extremists continue to wage a war against all humanity regardless of race or creed, where mothers and children shiver due to fear of drones in the sky, where climate change is a reality and plays havoc with the environment and people’s livelihoods, where economic inequality deepens the division between human beings, where poverty pushes millions of people to risk their lives to die on the high seas in search of better living, while the wealthy West tries to close the gates of its castles after robbing the Third World dry of its resources. It is, therefore, how Trump deals with such complex world problems that will decide his place in history in the coming four years.

Bashir Goth is an African commentator on political, social and cultural issues.