At 2.40am, it fell to Bret Baier to announce the news to the sea of red-capped loyalists assembled in their thousands at a New York Hilton hotel.

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“Donald Trump will be the 45th president of the United States,” said the Fox News anchor, detonating an explosion of cheers from the crowd, “winning the most unreal, surreal election we have ever seen.”

Unreal. Surreal. The words didn’t come close. It was the culmination of an insurgency launched in June 2015 from an escalator in Trump Tower just a few blocks away, that had now swept away all preconceived notions about presidential elections, about what it takes to garner the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House, about the self-identity of America.

Eight minutes later, Trump took to the stage at the Hilton, dressed in his trademark blue suit and red tie, striding out to the carefully choreographed soundtrack of the movie Air Force One. He led a train of family and coterie, his young son Barron and wife Melania in front, daughter Ivanka and the rest of the brood behind, diehard surrogates Rudy Giuliani and Ben Carson forming the rear.

For 18 months, pundits have pontificated about whether Trump would ever be able to be “presidential”, whether he would behave himself long enough to have a stab at winning the world’s most powerful job. And when the moment came, and he presented himself as US president-elect, he did it in classic style: he didn’t appear presidential. Rather, he rewrote the rulebook on what it is to be so.

Yes, he stuck (largely) to the script, and yes, he read from his Teleprompter. But not many historic victory speeches made over the ages have begun with: “Sorry to keep you waiting. Complicated business …”

Not many presidents-elect have gone on to say of their vanquished rival that “we owe major debt of gratitude for her service to our country”, having threatened to jail her on live TV just a month previously. Not many soon-to-be-occupants of the Oval Office have promised to “double our growth and have the strongest economy anywhere in the world” while at the same time being the first major party nominee since Richard Nixon to refuse to disclose their tax returns.

This was exactly the opposite of what was supposed to have happened. From the vantage point of most pollsters and pundits, media outlets and political leaders of both main parties, this was going to be Hillary Clinton’s night. She certainly thought so. What now looks like overweening confidence was built into the architecture of New York’s Javits Center, where she was meant to celebrate victory under an elaborate ceiling composed of thousands of panes of glass – an allusion to her 2008 “glass ceiling” concession speech.

In the end, she didn’t even turn up. Was it a final lack of strength from a woman who has proven herself capable of withstanding the harshest knocks (“this political stuff is nasty, and it’s tough”, as Trump put it)? Was it a loss of heart? Either way, Clinton sent in her place John Podesta, the chair of her campaign who unwittingly played no small part in her demise as the subject of WikiLeaks’ hacked emails.

In her absence, he delivered a pitiful appeal to the by now bedraggled Democratic crowd to hang on in there through to the morning.

“We can wait a little longer, can’t we?” Podesta said.

Yes, but only for a little. Within half an hour, the presidency had been called and Clinton’s hopes of highest office were dead forever.

It was sublimely cruel for her that her hopes of finally breaking through that glass ceiling were dashed by a man for whom the first question put to him in a TV debate was why he had called women “fat pigs” and “dogs”, and who just a month before the election was heard on a hot mic bragging about how he made uninvited sexual advances.

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But then this election night will go down as a sublimely cruel occasion not just for Clinton, but also for the 60 million Americans who voted for her. Sometimes the election gods decide not just to inflict defeat on a party but to do so in the most agonizing fashion, like torturers playing with their victims.

And so it comes to pass that 8 November 2016 goes into the annals as one of the most anguished experiences that one half of the American people have ever been unfortunate enough to have endured.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hillary Clinton supporters reacting to Tuesday night’s news. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

It all began deceptively predictably, as presidential elections always do. Trump and Clinton watched TV from their Manhattan eyries – the Trump Tower penthouse, the Peninsula hotel – while, like the national treasure he is, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer announced every incoming projection with his usual breathless excitement, even though the results were as portentous as a slab of American cheese.

First up at 7pm were Vermont and Kentucky, two states that would have put a spring in the steps of their winners, Clinton and Trump respectively, were it not that the outcomes were entirely to be expected. Vermont has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1988 and Kentucky Republican since 1996.

Through 8pm and 9pm the results began to pour in, but they continued to play out according to historic form: Clinton locked down the Democratic strongholds of the eastern seaboard, from Delaware and Maryland up through New Jersey to Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Trump locked down the Republican heartlands of the south and midwest, blazing an early cordon of red states right up the center of the country, from Texas all the way to North Dakota.

So far, so ordinary. In the Trump Bar, 58 floors below the penthouse, about 60 Trump supporters had gathered. The televisions were tuned to Fox News, and the mostly white crowd cheered as more and more states were called. At the Javits Center, thousands of Clinton supporters did the same.

And then the election gods got to work, encouraging their Democratic prey to believe that all was going according to plan by dangling tidbits of positive data.

Who voted for Donald Trump?

Exit polls were showing a surge of support for Clinton among college-educated white women, suggesting that Trump’s sexist remarks were costing him. Latino voters were showing a historic surge also, particularly in crucial Florida, arousing speculation across cable channels as diverse as Fox News and left-leaning MSNBC that the sleeping giant of the Hispanic vote had truly been awakened this time.

About 8pm, Blitzer hurried across to CNN’s smart board. Clinton was in the lead in the other vital state, Ohio, and if that held it would be “game over”. How many viewers noticed that only 12% of the Ohio votes had at that point come in?

Having raised Democratic spirits, the election gods did not immediately smash them. That would be too easy. Instead, they inflicted hours of exquisite uncertainty, just to draw out the agony.

Florida began to flutter manically right in front of our eyes. “Florida has flipped from Clinton to Trump,” Blitzer exclaimed. “Clinton has taken back the lead,” he declared only minutes later. And on and on, each flip sinking another dagger into Democratic hopes.

As the night went on, America developed new obsessions. Could Broward County in Florida pull in enough votes to secure the state for Clinton? Would Durham County in North Carolina outweigh the rising tide of Trump supporters in the countryside?

But as one by one Trump secured his biggest targets – Ohio at 10.20pm, North Carolina at 10.45pm, Florida shortly after – talk of the unlikelihood of a Republican path to the White House switched to the unlikelihood that Clinton would make it. The race came down to the newly forged battlegrounds that, to give him credit where credit is due, the Republican billionaire always said it would: the corridor of rust belt states that runs from Pennsylvania eastward to Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

With Wisconsin added to the too-close-to-call list, a state that Clinton visited not a single time during the general election, so certain was she of its loyalty, Democratic hopes began to plunge as dramatically as Dow Jones futures. The swath of the country that had given birth in the 1980s to the Reagan Democrat now appeared to be spawning his first cousin, the Trump Democrat.

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David Axelrod, the political wizard who helped steer Barack Obama to two victories, spoke for millions when he said that what they were witnessing was America uttering a “primal scream”.

When Pennsylvania was called for Trump, it was all over bar the shouting. At the bar in Trump Tower, when the Republican reached 254 electoral college votes, at around 11.30pm, there had been a roar.

“Trump, Trump, Trump,” the crowd shouted. People jumped up and down. Conversation turned very quickly to the impact President Trump would have. There seemed to be consensus that it would be immediate.

Just after 2am, a ripple went through the crowd. Someone had spotted movement at the side of Trump Tower. People were getting into cars.

“I can see him!” someone shouted. People raised their phones to take pictures. A moment later, the motorcade headed away, up Fifth Avenue. Trump was in one of those cars, and he was going to deliver his acceptance speech.

Elsewhere, it remained only for the shock and awe of what had happened on a momentous night to begin to sink in. Twitter, that reliable arbiter of America’s riven heart, told the story.

“America we hardly knew ye. Certainly I misjudged the country,” came the cry of despair from liberal economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. His dismay was matched with equal and opposite force by the joy of Richard Spencer, the white nationalist whose movement has been emboldened over the past year and a half by the Trump insurgency.

“We’ve won. #AltRight,” he tweeted, with pointed simplicity.

Let the wild rumpus of the Trump presidency begin.

The woman behind the Trump campaign

Despite the controversies with women that dogged his campaign, Donald Trump is the first presidential candidate to be propelled to the White House under the guidance of a female campaign manager.

Kellyanne Conway became Trump’s third campaign manager when he put her in charge on 17 August. At the time his campaign was foundering in the wake of his comments about the parents of a Muslim-American soldier who was killed in action.

Observers detected a rapid smartening up of the operation, for which Conway, an experienced Republican pollster and political operative who has specialised in advising Republicans on appealing to women, was given much of the credit. She even gained a nickname: “the Trump whisperer”, as supposedly the only person who could impose some discipline on the unpredictable candidate.

Others questioned her direct influence on the campaign, however, with some Republicans suggesting her principal role was to appear on TV. “That’s sort of her job,” a source with knowledge of the strategy told Buzzfeed. “They think she’s good on TV, and they like having her there as the face of the campaign.”

Conway, 49, is a former lawyer from New Jersey who formed the Washington DC-based Polling Company in 1995. She is married with four children, and has known Trump for more than a decade, having lived in one of his buildings and served on the condo board of the Trump World Tower in Manhattan.

Questioned after his victory whether Trump still believed the political system was rigged, she told the Today show: “He certainly would say the system is rigged, and it proved last night that he’s got millions of people who agree with him.”

Esther Addley