Why Trump's Victory Won't Be the Last StunnerThe United States - and the world - were shocked to wake up to the reality of a Donald Trump presidency on November 9th. Polls, pundits, and yes, political risk analysts had all but guaranteed that Hillary Clinton would be elected President of the United States.
Eurasia Group's Global Macro director
Willis Sparks explains why we need to recalibrate our ideas of what is possible in the face of this - and many other - surprising outcomes.
Video and full transcript below.
Willis Sparks:
So, it's been a few days now and we're all still digesting the news from the election, the election of President-elect Donald J. Trump. Here at Eurasia Group, you might realize, we were not expecting President Trump to win either.
But we learned something in this process, which is that we were wise to help our clients prepare for an outcome that we didn't expect. To do a lot of writing as we've done about what a Donald Trump foreign policy, what a Donald Trump government might look like. And that's really the take-away here.
If you look back over to the last 8-10 years, and you consider all of the things that have been surprising that have happened in the world, from the financial crisis to the global recession, the Eurozone crisis, the Arab Spring, Russia at war with Ukraine, the migrant crisis, Brexit earlier this year, and now the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States.
It's very clear that it is important for all of us: political risk analysts, business leaders, investors, or just citizens, human beings. That we have to expand our conception of what is possible, and to take seriously a larger number of alternate futures, because given how much flux there is in the world today, we're going to see more surprises beyond what we've seen just in the past few days with the election of Donald Trump.
Part of the reality here is that Donald Trump is much more of a wild card than Hillary Clinton would have been because as you've probably heard or read by now, Donald Trump is the first person ever elected President of the United States who has never served in government or the military.
That means that Donald Trump is going to have a fairly steep learning curve compared with the average president, even someone as inexperienced in foreign policy as Barack Obama, in deciding how to form a government and how to create an overarching foreign policy.
