In the words that are spoken every year at Passover, last night was different from all other nights. By the usual measures, Donald Trump is the least qualified candidate to ever win a presidential election: he has no experience in government, no record of military service, and no demonstrable policy know-how. But then, this election had a lot of firsts, unprecedented at almost every level. Let us count the ways:
The Trump Platform is Still Largely a Mystery.
As New York Times political reporter Alexander Burns points out, "Never has such an untested and unlikely candidate captured the presidency, and no one in modern times has entered the office with his plans for governing so uncertain." It's easy to forget that Trump really didn't lay out any substantive policy plans during his more-than-year-long presidential run.
He Remade the Electoral Map
That lack of specificity didn't seem to faze his supporters, though—mostly white, working-class—who defied the polls that had Clinton winning handily. What pundits like to call the "Blue Wall," the Democratic stronghold in midwestern states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, also came tumbling down.
He took the media by surprise.
Perhaps the oddest thing about Trump's run was how little effect the media's documentation of his scrofulous past had on his image. As Jack Shafer of Politico wrote the weekend before the election, Trump neutered the press with his talk of bias and a bellicose Twitter account with millions of followers (taken away from him a few days before the election, though perhaps back in his hands now), rendering their reported attacks against him virtually useless. "As a result of Trump's attack-the-messenger strategy," Shafer wrote, "for perhaps the first time in U.S. history no mainstream outlet has any influence over the voters backing one of the presidential nominees." Will that change as Trump moves into a more "presidential" role? We'll see.
He didn't mention God in his Victory speech.
We do know, though, that Trump is the first president-elect in three decades to end his victory speech without blessing America, according to this Quartz analysis by Marta Cooper—yet another way in which Trump seems unfamiliar with the norms of American political tradition.
He is the oldest person elected president.
Hillary Clinton, as we know, was the first woman to win a major party nomination—and won more votes overall than Donald Trump, making her the fifth presidential candidate to win the popular vote but still lose the election.
Matthew Kassel has written for The New York Times Magazine and The Wall Street Journal.
