As the red tide swept across the nation on Tuesday, I was thinking of the night before when, in the last hours of the race, we saw two wildy different campaigns. Hillary had the force of her party, celebrity performances, a former president, a current (and popular) president, a well-oiled ground game, the support of every newspaper, and what almost every pollster thought was enough momentum to win. Donald, who famously said "I alone can fix it" was in many ways alone. He had virtually no party or establishment support. In the final weeks, he was essentially running as a third party candidate. The Party of Trump. Add these factors to an untraditional campaign, poor debate performances, a lack of experience, and everything we thought we knew about politics, and there was no way he could win. And yet he did. (Now the pundits who got it all exactly wrong will tell you what it means.) In coming days, we'll get a better understanding of the frustration and anti-establishment factors that drove these results, and try to comprehend why those who felt left out of the American dream and jilted by the system expressed that anger by voting for a billionaire from Fifth Avenue. For now, we just know we witnessed the most remarkable American political story of our lifetimes. Many of you probably opened this issue hoping to find some salve for your fresh wounds. I wish I had something more, but this is about all I've got: Trump has surprised us at every turn. I hope he surprises us and is a great president. But I'm the progressive son of Holocaust-surviving, immigrant parents, and the father of a couple of brown kids, and this is without any doubt the hardest sentence I've ever had to type: Donald John Trump will be the 45th president of the United States.

Trump's victory speech: "I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be President for all Americans and this is so important to me."

+ Hillary urged supporters to give Trump a chance to lead, but acknowledged: "This is painful, and it will be for a long time."

+ Obama: We're all rooting for his success.

+ Paul Ryan: "What Donald Trump just pulled off was an enormous political feat."

+ Putin was one of the first world leaders to congratulate Trump: "As I have repeatedly said, that is not our fault that Russia-U.S. relations are in that state. Russia is ready and wants to restore the fully fledged relations with the U.S. I repeat we understand this will be difficult but we are ready to play our part in it."

+ Here's how other world leaders responded.

+ And some photos: Emotional Highs and Lows From a Historic Election Night.

"The places that feel most left behind in a changing America propelled Donald Trump to a stunning victory over Hillary Clinton Tuesday night." Ron Brownstein on how Trump won.

+ Vox: Republicans now control the presidency, the Senate, and the House.

+ This is the fact the shocked me the most and turned my own predictions into a complete joke. "Exit polls showed that Trump fared better with Latinos than Romney did in 2012." Dios Mio.

+ Red and Blue? This was all about White. ( It wasn't just non-college educated whites. Not by a longshot.)

+ One thing the exit polls make clear (even if it's confusing): "Americans elected a candidate they don't believe is qualified!"

+ Money is everything in politics? Maybe not: At under $5 each, Trump's votes came cheap.

+ It looks like Clinton will win the popular vote. It's so ironic. The celebrity lost the popularity contest, but won the electoral one.

+ Blame it on Low T. One of the keys: Turnout sucked.

+ Jim Rutenberg on A Dewey Defeats Truman Lesson for the Digital Age: "The misfire on Tuesday night was about a lot more than a failure in polling. It was a failure to capture the boiling anger of a large portion of the American electorate that feels left behind by a selective recovery, betrayed by trade deals that they see as threats to their jobs and disrespected by establishment Washington, Wall Street and the mainstream media."

+ The better traditional ground game lost. The moral of the story: Twitter is the new ground game.

David Remnick in the New Yorker offers even less salve than I did in his piece: An American Tragedy: "That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump's world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering." (I hope he's wrong, but this is basically how I feel.)

+ Andrew Sullivan: "This is now Trump's America. He controls everything from here on forward. He has won this campaign in such a decisive fashion that he owes no one anything. He has destroyed the GOP and remade it in his image. He has humiliated the elites and the elite media. He has embarrassed every pollster and naysayer. He has avenged Obama. And in the coming weeks, Trump will not likely be content to bask in vindication. He will seek unforgiving revenge on those who dared to oppose him."

+ Quartz: "As America woke up to president-elect Donald Trump, who famously and frequently pledged to build a wall across America's border with Mexico, it's worth remembering that today is the 27th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall."

Chris Arnade in The Guardian: The early Trump voters I met were the losers from these changes. Their once superior status – based only on being white – was being dismantled, while their lack of education was also being punished. They lived in towns and communities devastated by economic upheaval. They were born in them and stayed in them, despite their fall. For many, who had focused on their community over career, it felt like their entire world was collapsing." (Many on the other side now know that feeling.)

+ And worth another look, from Larissa MacFarquhar: West Virginia used to vote solidly Democratic. Now it belongs to Trump. What happened? "When people talk about Trump, they talk about how they don't like the establishment or the élites. When they say that, they mean who they see on television--they envision people in New York City making fun of them and calling them stupid. Every time you leave the state, you get it." (I've spent a lot of time reading about this and have recommended JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy to you in the past. I just thought Trump was too terrible of a candidate to capitalize on this. To quote the President-elect: "Wrong.")

When it comes to climate change and the environment, the president plays an enormous role. From The Atlantic: "If he fulfills his campaign promises, President-Elect Donald J. Trump and his future administration could prove cataclysmic for the planet's climate."

+ WaPo: Trump victory reverses U.S. energy and environmental priorities.

+ Quartz: The greatest threat from a Trump presidency may be his toxic brew of unscientific beliefs

As the election map drifted into the red, so too did the world markets. But within a few hours of trading, things had largely stabilized. I couldn't predict the electorate, so I definitely can't predict the market. But I imagine some investors realized that they're probably gonna get a tax break on whatever they make. One of the zillion ironies here is that people who raged against the elites ended up voting for a guy who will put more money in their pockets.

+ You freaked. Markets calmed. But not before things went way south.

+ Smith and Wesson's stock went down. People are less worried about gun restrictions, so they're more likely to be satisfied with their current cache.

"We will do it, and we will do it very, very quickly. It is a catastrophe." That's was candidate Trump talking about repealing Obamacare. As of today, the patient is in critical care.

+ Buzzfeed: Here Is How Abortion Rights Organizations Are Reacting To Trump's Presidency.

Remember how the death penalty seemed to be on the way out? Well, it's not.

+ Remember that unstoppable wave of support that was going to mean legalized weed across the U.S. Well, it's happening. (Speaking from experience, anyone thinking that this might ease their election woes might want to reach for something a little stronger.)

+ Sugary soda taxes were approved in four counties.

+ The number of women of color in the Senate quadrupled. (To a total of 4.)

+ California's bizarre condom vigilante act lost.

Today's bottom the news is the top story. But at least we still have The Onion: Nation's Optimists Need To STFU Right Now

+ Atlas Obscura: An Illustrated Guide of the World's Weirdest Panics, From A to Z.

+ Scheduling Note: I have parent/teacher conferences at my kids' school tomorrow. NextDraft will be back on Friday.