US election: What kind of leader will president-elect Donald Trump be?

By Chris Uhlmann

The unthinkable has happened. The barbarian has stormed the citadel with his unfashionable army of old economy soldiers.

The unlikely leader of this blue collar revolution is a narcissistic, billionaire property mogul who moonlighted as a reality TV star before deciding to have a tilt at the White House.

But the punchline is now the headline: Donald Trump, president-elect of the United States of America.

Mr Trump’s victory was unimaginable to the squadrons of pundits who act as gatekeepers on acceptable discourse and he was routinely written off in the Republican primaries.

When he emerged to challenge Hillary Clinton in the run to the finish line, her defeat was never seriously contemplated.

The polls did not pick up the seething resentment in his disciples, who hate the mainstream media at least as much as they loathe the political class.

Mr Trump cut a lonely figure on the stage in the final days of his campaign, repudiated by Republican grandees like the Bush family.

But where he went, crowds came in their thousands, packing venues and spilling onto the streets outside.

Much of the commentary on his disciples was pejorative. They were the residue of a dying America: rough, racist, working-class white men.

Democrats turned their backs on the working class.

By contrast, Mrs Clinton was buttressed by the slick Democratic establishment surrounded by a dazzling array of right-on celebrities: Beyonce, Jay Z, JLo and the Boss.

In building a coalition from city-dwelling professionals and black and Latino voters, the Democrats seemed to have little use for the blue collar workers on which the party once rested.

They were taken for granted, even treated with contempt.

Mrs Clinton did not visit Wisconsin after winning the Democratic nomination, but it was dyed deep blue on every election map.

When it turned red late on polling night, one network reported that an exit poll there showed half of all union households had voted for Mr Trump.

Those families — because Mr Trump voters also included a healthy chunk of working class women — believe they are losers in the Washington consensus on free trade and immigration.

The truth is more complex, but census figures showed they have been left behind by the changing economy.

The median household income of people with a high school degree or less peaked in 1997 at US $51,000. Today it is $42,000.

The tragedy for them is that, while Mr Trump has been brilliant at articulating their grievances, he does not have any real solutions.

America woke to a rude reality the morning after polling day; it is deeply divided along racial, demographic and geographic lines.

And the two sides seem intellectually incapable of understanding how the other half thinks.

So how, then, is the rest of the world to understand America?

Gracious winner or unhinged bully?

It is too soon to say what kind of president Mr Trump will be.

Is he the gracious winner of election night who called on the country to unite? Or is he the spiteful, often unhinged bully who wants to jail his opponent, apply a religion test to immigrants and build physical and tariff walls?

If past form is the best guide to future behaviour, then the odds have to fall with Mr Trump reverting to type.

That would mean the US President would be that worst of all kinds of leaders: capricious.

The world does not want someone with a glass jaw in charge of a nuclear arsenal.

Speaking to experts about the transition of the president-elect to the Oval Office, the best hope is that he surrounds himself with business-as-usual Republicans.

But America just voted against business-as-usual, so it is hard to see how Mr Trump can keep the faith with his followers and be the kind of president the world might want.

Obama-era policies out, tariff walls in.

This will matter across a vast array of fronts, from trade to action on climate change, where any hope of American leadership just evaporated.

If America turns inwards, the cost of defence in countries like Australia will rise.

If it encourages countries like Japan to acquire nuclear weapons, the Asia Pacific will engage in an arms race.

The signature Obama administration trade deal, the Trans Pacific Partnership, is dead.

This was to be the economic plank of America’s much touted “pivot to Asia” and it will join a large pyre of Obama-era policies.

And if America rebuilds tariff walls the world will follow.

So, there are no maps for the road ahead but it looks likely to be a white-knuckle ride.

This post originally appeared on ABC News.