Put morons and vulgarians on stage, give them the wild freedom to showcase their pig-ignorance and ill-breeding and you'll be guaranteed a giant audience across middle America.

And so it has come to pass.

The appalling oafishness that has long been the format of the likes of The Jerry Springer Show has vaulted from reality TV to actual American reality.

Donald Trump is the President-elect of the United States of America.

It takes the breath away merely to say it.

There is, however, no turn-off switch to this show. No privacy of your own lounge room to indulge in the guilty pleasure of watching it before taking an afternoon nap.

Trump, the pout-mouthed, big-haired, self-congratulatory flim-flam man more comfortable with a lie than the truth, so coarse he gives the concept a bad name, is President, and the whole world will have to live with it.

Here is the era and the work of the secret voters.

Fearing their world was broken, they smouldered, lusting to break it up even more, but when the pollsters called, were too ashamed to say out loud their choice for the job was a trash-talker like Trump, just as their cousins across the Atlantic had played fox before the Brexit referendum.

And just like a lot of those who voted for Brexit, great masses of those dimwits who chose Trump will turn around in a few months and complain that "we didn't know it would be like this". But it is already too late to undo what has been done.

Trump, the isolationist without a clue, will teach his adherents soon enough that a nation that will not approve trade deals will find itself starved of access to foreign markets. The rust belts that put their faith in him stand condemned to become even rustier and poorer.

A leader without an idea about foreign relations beyond the squalid vision of building a great big wall will soon enough be exposed as leading his country up a dry gully.

And a man so thick he believes he can play global politics with the likes of Vladimir Putin and skip free is plain dangerous.

There are not so many moments that can be identified instantly as turning points for world history.  The declaration of world wars, the dismantling of a wall between east and west hemispheres, the failure of world markets...these are easily distinguished.

But the day the most powerful nation in the world put its faith in a calculated fool, as easily, apparently, as settling into a TV show that celebrates the basest instincts of both participants and audience?

That is a sad and pathetic day, which is not a promising start for what is, undoubtedly, one of those rare moments in history that can be identified instantly as a turning point. The question now is a turning….to what?

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