Donald Trump was right. This was America's answer to Brexit or, as he promised at a rally days before Tuesday's election, "Brexit plus, plus, plus."
The election of the first non-politician to the US presidency in 64 years, beating poll favourite Democrat Hillary Clinton, has caused a political earthquake similar to Britain's vote to leave the European Union.
Swap out the pronouns in the campaign leading up to Britain’s referendum in June for American names, places and issues, and you will come close to the campaign Trump ran, perhaps with a little less bile.
The grievances were similar.
Trump appealed to the same kind of disaffected population and addressed a rural-urban divide. He played up the differences between heterogeneity and homogeneity, the higher-educated and the working-class, and the professional sectors and industrial workers.
Trump sold himself as an outsider to the political system and a self-made man who his supporters believed would replicate his success in business in elected office.
Trump’s claims of a “rigged” economic and political system appealed to Americans who felt they had been left behind by the economic recovery since the Great Recession, by their politicians and by rapid social and demographic changes that had taken place at far quicker rate than they wished.
The Republican's support was among the strongest along the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio where supporters with a unique Scots-Irish independent streak in the hills of Appalachia felt no allegiance to party.
They instead backed a candidate who promised to bring American manufacturing jobs back from overseas and to restore their industrial sector, their coal mines and their steel mills, to their former pre-globalization glory.
Trump's election as the 45th US president came on a class-based national wave of support that swept across the industrial midwest, from Pennsylvania to Ohio and Michigan all the way to Wisconsin.
His Rust Belt strategy smashed Clinton's blue firewall that her campaign had hoped would limit his sweep to the big swing states of Florida, Ohio and North Carolina.
Pennsylvania and Michigan had not supported a Republican since 1988, Wisconsin since 1984 - a decade when Ronald Reagan, like Trump, won over Democrats with the same exhortation: "Make America Great Again."
The Reagan Democrats became Trump Democrats, adding to the traditional base of Republican support in the industrial midwest.
Inside the coasts - from the Appalachian mountains to the Rockies - Trump lost just Illinois, New Mexico and Colorado. He won West Virginia, a state devastated by the decline in coal mining, by a whopping 43 points.
Accurate internal polling drove the Trump campaign late on, pushing him to campaign in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota when the Clinton campaign had thought that these states were firmly in the Democratic column.
"Ours was not a campaign but rather a great and incredible movement," Trump told his supporters at his victory-night speech in the Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan.
The Manhattan property mogul played most effectively on the economic fears of working-class whites, picking out low-paid Mexican immigrants and foreigner manufacturers in Chinese and Mexican as simple, easily identifiable targets for non-college educated whites who were angry over the loss of their jobs, factories and livelihoods.
Exit polls showed that he won working-class white voters, people without a four-year college degree, by a whopping 39 points, outperforming Mitt Romney's 26-point advantage over Barack Obama four years ago.
He even won non-college educated white women by 28 points, an astonishing figure for a candidate running against the first female major-party candidate to run for the US presidency.
In the later stages of the campaign, Trump appeared to win back college-educated whites too who, for a time, drifted away from him in large numbers after a leaked recording of him bragging about groping women surfaced.
While he lost women with graduate degrees, he won college-educated whites overall by four points. This was lower than Romney’s 14-point margin but Trump - presenting himself as the “blue-collar billionaire” - offset this loss with his surging support among working-class whites.
Top Trump supporter, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, was almost giddy with Trump's stunning electoral success when he said on MSNBC that Trump's win was "like Andrew Jackson's victory," referring to the seventh US president who famously stuck to the political establishment with a similarly populist campaign.
“This is the people beating the establishment,” said Giuliani.
“And that’s how he posited right from the beginning, the people are rising up against a government they find to be dysfunctional. And yes, it is a defeat for the Democrats, but this is a defeat for some Republicans too.”
Remarkably, for a candidate whose election relied heavily on white voters, exit polls showed that overall the number of white voters as a proportion of the electorate dropped by two points to 70 per cent since 2012.
Despite insulting Mexican immigrants and a Mexican-American judge, Trump even performed better than Romney amongst Hispanics. Some 65 per cent of Latinos supported Clinton, while 29 per cent backed Trump. Barack Obama won Hispanics by 71 per cent to Romney’s 27 per cent.
Clinton’s failed to mobilise African-Americans in the same numbers as Obama. He won them by 93 per cent to Romney’s 7 per cent. She won black voters by 88 per cent to 8 per cent for Trump.
It was a fatal weakening in the Clinton-Obama coalition in the face of a rising movement behind Trump.
That movement somewhat vindicated his pre-election hyperbolic boast that his victory would be “Brexit times 10.”