People under 40 are about to discover what it’s like to live with the free world under constant threat

And this time, it’s going to be the free world itself that presents the threat, which is also going to be a novelty for those of us who lived the first half of our lives in the relentless tension of the Cold War, with half of Europe imprisoned under the jackboot of Communist totalitarianism.

I realised early on – from the exit interviews – that it would be Mr Trump, so I just stopped watching and went to bed, knowing I would wake up to the inevitable ghastliness. People have gone nuts. They want the excitement of risk and madness where they should want it least.

Tragically, Mr Trump was given a clear ride to the White House by having the worst possible opponent – and I don’t mean that as a reflection on Mrs Clinton herself, but in strategic terms. An old woman versus an old man, an old woman whose husband had been president already for two consecutive terms, and who stood for a party which had been in power for two consecutive terms up until today.

Had Trump faced a younger woman, or a much younger man, with no history of ever being in the White House even as First Lady, he wouldn’t have made it. He would have been a complete non-starter. But as it was, this was just a toss-up between a couple of pensioners. Their most conspicuous characteristic – brought out starkly during their debates – was their elderliness.

It wasn’t corruption or the FBI interest in her emails which held Mrs Clinton back. If the American electorate had a problem with that sort of thing, they wouldn’t have voted for Mr Trump, a man of the most questionable morality in every area where morality applies.

No, what held her back was her age, and in a toss-up between two old people, the electorate was bound to decide in favour of the one who hadn’t already spent 10 years in the White House as First Lady and whose party hadn’t just been in power for two terms.

I knew it was going to be like that, because it’s the kind of human-nature-instinctive-reasoning which over-rides the rational part of our minds. And I knew it beyond doubt when exit interviews at the polls had people saying they had voted for the candidate who could bring change.

We saw this kind of irrational behaviour in Malta in March 2013 and we saw it in the UK last June when the English and the Welsh voted for suicide and to take the Scots and the Northern Irish with them. The received wisdom in politics is that people don’t like change. That’s wrong. People crave change and they will go all out to shake things up even if a hard think tells them it’s the wrong choice, rationally.

Read the best of the first articles to be written about this mess, this morning.

The Google advert that appeared between the masthead and the headline was so appropriate that I took the screenshot at that moment.