So for the second time in a year we awoke to a shock, to a world changed. Except this time we did so having gone to bed with perhaps an inkling that something seismic was about to happen, that facts and decency and compassion were no longer the winners they used to be.

But this makes Brexit look like a vicar’s tea party in comparison.

Look it’s far, far too late now to say that the next president of the United States is a bullying, short-tempered, blustering, tax-dodging misogynist who likens women to pigs, slobs and dogs and who has spouted racist guff to boot.

After 2016 this is all locker room banter.

It apparently no longer matters.

What is true, if we search among the cesspit of slurs and simpleton slogans that was the US election campaign for such unfashionable concepts, is that once again a largely white, largely male, non college-educated job-threatened swathe of a population has been under-estimated by politicians. Except by the non politician.

Sure the other side chose a desperately poor, wooden, non-empathetic insider to battle the beast but nevertheless the backlash has been incredible to watch.

You can almost understand the frisson of destructive pleasure many will feel today when they imagine the queasy looks on the figures who make up what has become known as “the establishment”, a term that now almost has as many negative connotations as child abuser.

Except perhaps “liberal” a word generations of people since the horrors of the Second World War have worn like a badge of honour now sneered at for its effete requirement to educate oneself, understand the debate, appreciate difference and diversity.

They are the “enemy within” in the bleak new world of 2016.

That the “anti-establishment” champion owns posh hotels across America and inherited his wealth from his father is an irony so small in this smorgasbord of contradictions that it is barely now worth mentioning.

But just like Brexit, where does this volcanic eruption of incoherent anger go from here?

The next president will let down those who, in the main, have sensationally put him into power. He cannot do anything else.

And not just because he has next to no policies to speak of but because there are no easy solutions to the complex problems the people of the Rust Belt find themselves in.

Nor Basildon or Sunderland for that matter.

Of course to point that truth out is to lose the vote in our supposedly advanced age. Why risk it?

The last time demagogues peddled snake oil solutions at a time of global turmoil was in the 1930s and even this president will know what happened next.

Or if not he’ll now have someone who’ll be able to tell him.

It is often said we live in a post-fact society. This election has empirically proved it.

Our social media age has fundamentally altered the patterns of our thinking. We seek reassurance that our views are correct from those we like and guess what: we get it.

Our prejudices are confirmed never challenged for we can just “unfriend” those who would do so.

We don’t need to bother with a 3,000 word researched examination of the new president’s business acumen when constant, repetitive, unproven Tweets that his rival is “crooked” are all you need.

Keep the message short and keep it constant, any prime time TV reality show host knows that.

The danger is our horizons are shrinking into the private space on our mobile and laptop screens which was not the outcome the pioneers of the world wide web imagined. There’s a clue in the name.

So we are faced with four years of the least qualified president of all time handing down his beauty pageant verdicts and settling scores like an irritable medieval king.

It might not be wise to be Hispanic, Muslim, a woman with opinions, a Syrian refugee, a media outlet with the temerity to challenge, nor even a member of the Bush family.

The next time the alarm clock goes off it might be tempting to push the snooze button a couple of times.