COMMENT Donald Trump wins. My wife puts it best: “We live in the Age of The Kardashians. As long as you can create enough hoopla as a one-man circus, you can make it.”

For some reason, she also always refers to Trump’s "locker room" comments as “catch the kitty”, and seems to think that anything to do with cats always wins.

On more serious notes, let’s speculate and reflect on how Trump won, and what we might learn from this debacle.

Repeating Bush’s victory conditions

My view is that Trump won in circumstances similar to those which propelled George W Bush to victory in 2004.

These men share a number of similarities. They were widely denounced around the world as idiots, they ran a campaign amidst a backdrop of global terrorism, and they faced rather placid, uninspiring Democratic nominees.

Bush’s chief strategist was Karl Rove, and he had a devastatingly simple approach for 2004.

He said: Look, there are millions of right-leaning Americans out there who aren’t voting. Forget compassionate conservatism and centrism, swing hard to the right, inspire right-leaning Americans to come out and vote (when they usually don’t), overwhelm the opposition.

This ended up working beautifully. Rampant fear-mongering, and positioning Bush as a decisive, hawkish leader opposed to John Kerry’s flip-flopping weakness led to a resounding electoral success - while the rest of the world watched on, dumbfounded.

Twelve years later, we appear to be experiencing very similar disbelief and shock - and likely for very similar reasons.