Donald Trump is US president-elect in ‘America’s Brexit’

CNN reports that Mrs Clinton has called her rival to congratulate him on his election victory.

The AP has called the election for Donald Trump.

He will be the next president of the United States of America.

Cheers erupted Mr Trump arrived at the Hilton Midtown hotel where he is staging his “Victory Party”.

John Podesta, Mrs Clinton’s camapaign manager has said: “She is not done yet.”

He has told the Clinton election night party that the campaign is not ready to concede yet because too many states are “too close to call”.

He told the crowd to go home – the campaign will not be saying anything more tonight.

“I know you’ve been here a long time,” he said.

“We’re still counting votes, and every vote should count.

“Several states are still close to call, so we’re not going to have anything more to say tonight.

“Everyone should head home. You should get some sleep. We’ll have more to say tomorrow.

“We are so proud of you, and we are so proud of her. She has done amazing things and she’s not done yet.”

Boos and chants of “lock her up” rang around Mr Trump’s election night event after it was announced Mrs Clinton would not be conceding defeat.

An extraordinary development.

Hillary Clinton had the support of far more celebrities than Donald Trump did during the race for the White House, Helena Hortonwrites.

Many famous faces, including Miley Cyrus and Whoopi Goldberg said or hinted they would even move to Canada if Mr Trump won the election.

As Mrs Clinton’s chances of winning look slimmer and slimmer, many celebrities have tweeted their frustration and worry about Mr Trump.

Harry de Quetteville writes:

The tweet from the “republican” pollster Frank Luntz as the polls closed said it all:

Like everyone else in the prediction game, Mr Luntz was served up a feast of his own words to consume over the next few hours. First came the odd unnerving slice of reality. Then came a few massive helpings of humble pie.

One by one, all their predictions, all their forecasts, their obsessively mined data, their experience at calling previous elections fell apart. It all counted for nothing. Trump was demolishing the pollsters, just as he demolished his rivals to be Republican nominee, just as he – at the time of writing – looked set to demolish Hillary Clinton’s chances of assuming the presidency.

Read the full story.

AP has called Pennsylvania for Mr Trump.

He is apparently coming out to address his victory party, but awaiting confirmation he is projected to pass 270 electoral college votes.

Will Mrs Clinton concede?!

Harriet Alexander has been speaking to a New Jersey-born Cuban businesswoman about why she is celebrating Mr Trump’s success:

Barbara Garcia, 37, who owns property and mortgage brokers, says her main reason for supporting Mr Trump is that he understands business. “What Obama did to us in terms of healthcare and the minimum wage was ridiculous,” she said. “He forced us to get rid of employees. “You can’t order me to pay for my workers’ healthcare without knowing how much I make. I agree with everyone having healthcare – but just not penalizing those who employ them.” Her parents came to the US from Cuba, and this also influenced her vote, she said. “My parents came here for freedom. And that’s what is most important to me. “People say I should support a woman for president – well, sure, but just not that woman. “And I know Trump has said some bad things – at times, I was like: ‘Put a sock in it.’ But I can deal with that. As long as he fixes this country.”

Paul Ryan, the House speaker, has called Mr Trump to congratulate him.

According to NBC, Mr Ryan had “very good conversations” with both Mr Trump and Mike Pence, his running mate.

Mr Ryan withdrew his support for Mr Trump last month after the emergence of a lewd video in which the billionaire discussed sexually assaulting women.

Republicans have retained control of the Senate on what is shaping up to be a great night for them with victory in Pennsylvania.

From banning all Muslims from America to building a wall along the Mexican border (who’s gonna pay for that wall?) – Donald Trump’s campaign for the US presidency has provided shocking, amusing and controversial moments aplenty.

Read our full list of the wildest moments of his “insurgent” campaign.

Dianita Sugiyo, 34, a university lecturer in Indonesia – the world’s most populous Muslim country – said she was particularly concerned by Mr Trump’s calls to temporarily ban from Muslims from countries with a history of terror ties.

“As a Muslim I feel very uncomfortable if Trump wins. He has always been anti-Muslim and I am afraid he will discriminate against Muslims,” said Sugiyo, a member of a leading Indonesian moderate Muslim organisation.

“The United States is a multicultural country and there are a lot of Muslims there, so this is very terrifying,” she said at a US embassy event in Jakarta.

As well as Canada, New Zealand is is apparently an option for Americans wanting to emigrate.

New Zealand immigration officials told Reuters on the eve of the vote that New Zealand Now website, which deals with residency and student visas, had received 1,593 registrations from United States citizens since Nov. 1 – more than 50 percent of a typical month’s registrations in just seven days.

Visits to New Zealand Now from the United States were up almost 80 percent to 41,000 from 7 Oct to 7 November, compared to the same period last year.

Rod Drury, the chief executive of NZ-based global accounting software firm Xero, said the statistics matched up with interest his company has been seeing from prospective U.S. national employees concerned about a Trump win.

Drury said what started as a joke was becoming a reality.

“I’ve got lots of messages coming through at the moment asking for a job in New Zealand, and we’re saying ‘yes you can’,” Drury told Reuters by telephone on Wednesday.

“It will be interesting to see whether it translates into real action, it’s an active conversation that moved to getting more serious and we’ll see what will happen in the next month.”

NZ immigration officials declined to comment.

Former Alaskan governor and Republican supporter Sarah Palin compares Donald Trump’s strength in the US election to the Brexit result:

If Donald Trump wins this, it might be because for the final fortnight of the campaign he did as he was told, Rob Crilly writes.

He shut up and let all the attention focus on his rival. Hillary Clinton was not a good candidate. She may be a fine politician, but she represented all that Mr Trump wants to overturn.

She is a political insider, dogged by questions about whether she can be trusted, whether over her emails or the Clinton Foundation. But every time she was on the back foot, Mr Trump would give her a way out, deflecting attention away from her with one of his own missteps – often an easily avoidable Twitter tirade or public pronouncement.

Until the final couple of weeks that is, when he was reportedly deprived of his phone and reduced to dictating his tweets through aides who could vet their tone and content.

As a result, the last week was dominated by fresh questions about Mrs Clinton’s email server – thanks to FBI Director James Comey’s odd intervention – rather than Mr Trump’s behaviour. Was that the difference in the end?

Harriet Alexander reports from a Trump victory party in Miami:

Inside the Las Vegas Cuban Cuisine, in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Miami, the glee of the Trump supporters cannot be contained.

Aged mainly in their 50s, some are tearful. They are all in Trump t-shirts and baseball caps, waving their Hispanics for Trump banners.

A microphone is being passed around for declarations, mainly in Spanish, about how this is a victory for Cubans, Venezuelans, Colombians and all Latinos. It descends into chants of “Trump, Trump, Trump! USA! USA!”

Gerard Araud, the French ambassador to Washington and a social media institution, tweeted his dismay at a collapsing world order.

The markets are already reacting to the uncertainty surrounding a Trump Presidency.

The Dow futures market plunged more than 800 points while the Standard and Poors 500 futures market fell more than 5 per cent before midnight.

Bonds rallied as investors moved their money into them.

“Right now, the markets are heading for the hills, but we’ll see,” said Robert Tipp, chief investment strategist, global bonds and foreign exchange at Prudential Fixed Income. “That’s a function of fear as much as fact.”

Gareth A Davies, the Telegraph’s boxing correspondent, writes:

I was lucky enough to be amongst the revellers in New York on the night in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected into the White House.

Britain’s brilliant boxer Joe Calzaghe was fighting an American legend Roy Jones Jnr at Madison Square Garden that weekend. The scenes in Greenwich Village and liberal, monied Manhattan were a joy to behold.

Like America had lifted its hood. The parties went on and on. It felt like an epiphany for this great mass of peoples.

I’m on my way from Las Vegas to New York this evening, on a three-week sojourn covering back to back to back prizefights. Las Vegas-New York-Las Vegas. I’ve been a frequent visitor to the United States in the last 25 years, covering fights, over one hundred times, a week at a time, in all places. When I can, I drive.

Each visit has been its own mini story. It’s a wondrous country, but it’s also deeply flawed, and reinvented, like its two presidential candidates. A brilliant 2-hour documentary last night here on the PBS channel profiled both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and the beautifully edited piece outlined the journeys of their lives, the trials of Mrs Rodham Clinton’s husband vacationing from their marriage, his lies, her carrying it, hellbent on keeping them together to drive her own ambitions, and the position they had worked themselves into at the White House.

And on the other side, Trump’s flawed, ego-driven business desires, leaving a trail of destruction with the conclusion that he was really just a great promoter. I leave Las Vegas shortly and arrive at JFK, New York, early tomorrow morning. I’ve been covering the comeback of another politician last weekend – a boxing one in Manny Pacquiao, a prizefighter who rose from the barangays or shanties from extreme privation and through his popularity in a 20-year career, he has risen to become a senator in The Philippines.

He is pushing through bills on the death penalty for heinous crimes, in a country where the recently-elected President, Rodrigo Duterte, has ordered a search and destroy mission on anyone dealing methamphetamine, addiction to which is rife, particularly in Manila.

There are already claims of many extrajudicial executions. But I was told by many Filipinos this weekend who attended the fight that the fear created has made their country much safer.

It has been compelling watching this divisive electioneering in the USA. So compelling that I’ve consumed every magazine, television show and conversation that could be had. Like Brexit, it has had Americans more engaged than ever. But it has been exhausting because of the lack of love or respect for both candidates.

But what I have found different is that many, many more people – often white, often a little older, or poorer – have been happy to say Trump. On previous trips it was hard to find them. The voters were out there all the time. And they are being heard tonight.

Rudi Giuliani said: “I knew it was turning when I saw the figures coming in from Florida.

“This election was about one state. Win Florida and you win the election.

“Maybe the Clinton chapter is over now. They’ve brought enough disgrace to America, the presidency, and the state department. They corrupted the Justice Department.”

Mr Giuliani refused to comment on whether he would try to prosecute Mrs Clinton over her emails if he becomes Attorney General.

There are effectively 42 electoral votes still up for grabs. Donald Trump needs to win just two of them to become president. Here’s how things are looking at the moment:

• Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes): It’s too close to call in Pennsylvania with 80 per cent of the vote in and Hillary Clinton leading by one per cent. With all the rural votes still to come in, this could easily by a Trump victory
• Michigan (16 electoral votes): In Michigan it is Trump who leads by one per cent, with two-thirds of the vote in.
• New Hampshire (4 electoral votes): If Mr Trump can get across the line in tiny New Hampshire, he will become president. He leads by two per cent with 71 per cent in.
• Maine/Nebraska districts (one vote each): The only states to split their vote by congressional district, Maine and Nebraska have one swing district apiece. If Mrs Clinton sweeps elsewhere and takes neither of them, she loses. One and its a draw, heading to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Both and she wins. It’s a narrow path indeed for the former secretary of state.

David Axelrod, who was Barack Obama’s chief election strategist, described the election as “a primal scream on behalf of the US electorate against the status quo”.

He told CNN that it was too soon to say that Donald Trump had won or that he was a political genius.

“We don’t know how this is going to turn out… but my operative phrase as a consultant is that you are never as smart as you look when you win and you are never as dumb as you look as you lose,” he said, but added that the Trump campaign had found a message that hit home.

“When you look back now at the things Donald Trump has been doing with his time in terms of where he was campaigning and the hammering away relentlessly at the message of Hillary Clinton and 30 years [in public life], and it has found an audience. That’s what made this race close.

“If you look at rural areas, in county after county he is outperforming Mitt Romney dramatically and she is underperforming President Obama dramatically.”

Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, is delighted by the the increasingly positive results for Mr Trump in the US election.

Mr Farage, who believes that Mr Trump would be a key ally to Britain in the wake of the EU referendum, expressed his delight at the direction of the result:

At Hillary Clinton’s event, supporters are predicting Armageddon and the end of rational enlightenment, writes Ruth Sherlock.

“The enlightenment happened in the 18th century: reason, education, facts!” said Matthew Goreman, a million dollar donor to the Clinton campaign, shaking his head in disbelief.  “It’s embarrassing that we don’t care about this anymore.”

“You guys had Brexit but we have Donald Trump, that’s so much worse,” he said. “I am literally worried about nuclear Armageddon.”

“To watch your country fall apart before your eyes. To have your last bastion of male patriarchy win out. He’s saying it’s OK to hurt people, to use racist slurs.”

“Political correctness isnit being kind to you to your fellow man. This is Orwellian.”

Canada’s official immigration website has crashed after Donald Trump’s unexpected success in the US election.

Application forms on the Canadian government website appeared to fail to load and website users reported extraordinarily long loading times to access basic areas of the site.

It came as there was a huge increase in the number of search hits for “move to Canada,” according to results from Google.

There was also a spike in searches for “the end of the world”:

Not only is Donald Trump on the verge of taking the White House, Republicans are almost certain to retain the senate and have already reclaimed the House of Representatives.

In control of both houses of Congress, Mr Trump would then have an opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court Justice immediately after taking office to replace the late Antonin Scalia. That would tilt the balance of the court back to the conservatives, with the potential for more nominations to come during his time in office.

Should he finish the job, there is almost nothing standing in Mr Trump’s way.

After Mitt Romney’s electoral defeat in 2012, Republicans came up with one clear prescription: in a fast changing America the party could not win without reaching out to minorities, especially Hispanics, Ruth Sherlock writes.

But on Tuesday Donald Trump challenged that assumption, making unprecedented inroads in a campaign that was bolstered primarily by the white working class.  The theory that there were leagues of white conservatives disaffected from politics to energise had mostly been dismissed by the party’s top thinkers.

But it was those same thinkers who believed Mr Trump would suffer a humiliating defeat.  The other astounding surprise for Republican analysts is that Mr Trump made his gains running on a platform that was at odds with the party’s traditional beliefs.

A free market and global trade deals are part of the party’s core values. Donald Trump ran on a protectionist agenda. And promised some form of social welfare – even if it wasn’t Obamacare. And with these promises he energised Republican voters across the country.

“What happened this year, it was exposed that a big chunk of the Republican party is not conservative, in any sense of meaningful sense of that word,” said Charles Murray, whose book Coming Apart: The State of White America was seen as prescient explanations of the problems that gave rise to a Trump candidacy.

Ruth Sherlock reports:

The setting is grand but the mood is anything but festive here at the Hillary Clinton election night party. Guests are staring silently at the screen blasting out the state by state results.  A roster of speakers are trying to keep the crowd buoyant, but the responses of the audience are ever less spirited. Staffers are pacing the halls, their faces grey and taught with tension.  “I feel really sick,” one told the Telegraph, asking not to be named.

US lawyer, Benjamin Ginsberg, explains whether there could be a recount of votes in the US election:

It’s a party here at the Trump campaign’s event in Columbus, Ohio,David Lawler reports.

A group of young campaign staffers chatted exuberantly in the hallway after their state was called for Mr Trump.

“We did it boys, we got Ohio,” one man in a Make America Great Again hat exclaimed.

“We’re about to get a whole lot more than that,” another added.

Inside the 100 or so attendees grooved along to Happy by Pharrell (a Clinton endorser, incidentally) and utilised the open bar.

This is a campaign that even the Republican Party apparatus was reticent to embrace- hence the separate events tonight – and yet it won over the voters here by an overwhelming margin.

Bedlam broke out at the Trump victory party in New York as North Carolina was called. Supporters began to truly believe their candidate could win. Chants of “Drain the swamp” broke out and guests in suits punched the air.

The US election is coming down to these four states, all part of Hillary Clinton’s so-called “firewall” of Democratic-leaning states. Mr Trump needs just 12 electoral votes from the four of them to win the presidency

• Michigan (16 electoral votes): Having not voted Republican since 1992 and rejecting native son Mitt Romney in 2012, Michigan is now leaning ever-so-slightly toward Mr Trump. His appeal to working class whites was effective in this industrial state.
• Wisconsin (10 electoral votes): There are similar factors at play in Wisconsin, which hasn’t voted Republican since 1984. Mr Trump currently leads by three per cent.
• New Hampshire (4 electoral votes): The lone New England state to in play in this and any recent presidential election, New Hampshire took to Mr Trump right away in the primary elections. He’s up two per cent there now.
• Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes): For two decades now, Republicans have piled time and money in Pennsylvania, tempted by the state’s 20 electoral votes. They have consistently come up short in the past, but Mr Trump is just two per cent behind now and gaining fast.

John Tiegen, a Marine who survived the Benghazi attack, said: “There’s so many closet Trump voters out there, it’s going to annihilate her.”