By Peter Marsh
Are you feeling angry about the US election result? Or maybe you think Donald Trump must be opposed at every turn until he can be removed from office?
You now know how Trump supporters have felt for the last few years.
Thousands of people in New York and other US cities are on the streets protesting against Mr Trump’s election.
Among the chants echoing through the crowd are shouts of “not my president!” and “racist, sexist, anti-gay, Donald Trump go away!”, according to ABC News correspondents on the scene. Meanwhile the Associated Press reported the hashtag “NotMyPresident” had already been used on Twitter nearly half a million times.
Hillary Clinton has said Mr Trump “deserves an open mind”, but for now at least the anger among her supporters is real — and raw.
The same emotion has driven support for Mr Trump throughout the Republican primaries, and has now propelled him to the White House, US political insiders are saying.
Why was this such a shock?
Associate Professor in American Politics from the United States Studies Centre Brendon O’Connor said the shock felt by Clinton supporters in America (and many of those outside the United States) happens because many just don’t interact with the people who identify with Mr Trump.
“There’s just increasingly less contact with people who see the world differently from you. And those people who see the world differently from you live off in very different lives,” he said.
“People are sorting and living in different places if they have different political views.”
“It will be a sickening day”
ABC political editor Chris Uhlmann travelled to Logan Country in West Virginia before the election and spoke with the voters who fuelled the Trump campaign.
One of them was Trevor Bryant.
“I think the people are frustrated because they don’t feel heard,” he said.
Another, Tony Robison, was asked how he would feel if Hillary Clinton won.
“It will be a sickening day and I do mean that from the bottom of my heart,” he said.
Feel familiar?
ABC Washington Bureau Chief Zoe Daniel spoke to ex-Democrat voters in Ohio (a state Trump won safely by 9 points), and one of them was Steelworker Dan Moore.
“There’s a really rising sense of anger, frustration and disenfranchisement that nobody in Washington DC is listening,” he said.
ABC investigative reporter Stephen Long wrote that while President Obama’s slogan was hope, Mr Trump channelled anger.
“The anger of those who’ve lost hope as they’ve come to see that John F Kennedy’s famous promise that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ no longer holds. Now the rising tide only seems to lift boat owners,” he said.
Anger at the political establishment isn’t exclusive to right-wing politics either.
It was only in July that angry Bernie Sanders supporters staged protests at the Democratic convention.
This post originally appeared on ABC News.
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