After an appalling rebuke of the political establishment on Tuesday night, the nation is girding itself for a Donald Trump presidency.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, is eyeing the opportunities they will have in January, with the GOP set to take control of the both houses of congress and the White House.
“I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans,” Hillary Clinton said Wednesday morning, publicly conceding the election to Trump. She had already privately phoned her rival in the early morning hours, after he was projected to breach the 270 threshold in electoral college delegates.
“Donald Trump is going to be our president,” Clinton added. “We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.”
Trump’s final electoral vote count is likely to be north of 300, once results are finalized in Michigan, where the real estate baron is up by fewer than 20,000 votes.
“Working together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding our nation and renewing the American dream,” Trump said in his scripted victory speech Wednesday morning. He offered few specifics about what his governing agenda might actually look like, now that he’s untethered (for now) from the pressures of electoral politics.
Trump did promise a massive public works program, claiming: “We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals.”
He added, “We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.”
The political realities following Democrats’ shocking loss Tuesday night, however, does portend a rightwing agenda on the horizon.
Democrats failed to take control of the Senate, meaning the GOP will hold power in both the legislative and executive branches for the first time since the early years of the Bush administration.
Addressing reporters on Wednesday, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) said that Trump “pulled off an amazing political feat.”
The two men held a strained relationship during the campaign, but Speaker Ryan was downright giddy about what the GOP might be able to accomplish with a fellow Republican in the White House. That includes, first and foremost, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
“This Congress,” Ryan said, “has already demonstrated and proven we’re able to pass that legislation and put it on the president’s desk.”
“The problem is President Obama vetoed it,” he added. “Now we have President Trump coming who is asking us to do this.”
Ryan then promised a raft of policies to roll back clean energy promotion and environmental protection initiatives.
“Think about the laid off coal workers now who see relief coming. Think about the farmers here in Wisconsin who are being harassed by the EPA. Think about the ranchers of the west who are getting harassed by the Interior Department,” Ryan told reporters.
“The opportunity is now here. The opportunity is to to go big, to go bold, and get things done for the people of this country,” he said.
Trump will also have the chance to appoint at least one Supreme Court justice next year. Assuming Republican Senate leadership doesn’t kill off what’s left of the judicial filibuster, Democrats will have an opportunity to play the same obstruction card Republicans have used against President Obama (and promised they would use against a potential President Hillary Clinton) to keep the high court ideologically split.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest released a statement the day after the election stating that Trump had been invited to meet with President Obama at the White House on Thursday.
“Ensuring a smooth transition of power is one of the top priorities the President identified at the beginning of the year and a meeting with the President-elect is the next step,” the statement read.
As news of Trump’s victory reverberated around the world, global markets declined sharply. The Dow Jones Industrial average shed 800 points in late night trading, before eventually stabilizing after the opening bell on Wednesday morning.
