There will be much hand wringing over how the normally reliable political polls got it the outcome wrong, but it's probably because of an established habit amongst some voters of not wanting to admit that they will be supporting a party or candidate that doesn't pass the "sniff test".
The same phenomenon occurs in Australia where support for Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party is usually understated in political polls.
Significantly Hanson published an effusive statement congratulating Trump on his victory.
All of these political movements seem to arise from a thoroughly alienated group in society who have been left behind by globalisation and the effects of the internet.
Trump's victory has been attributed to solid support from the normally Democrat-voting white working class.
This was particularly decisive in what are known as the "rust-belt" states, where heavy industry job opportunities have shrunk in vehicle building, steel production as automation subtracts opportunities and companies move factories to places like Mexico to take advantage of cheap labour.
This is not just happening in the USA. Both Holden and Ford will cease building cars in Australia in the next few years.
Since the Thatcherism/Rogernomics era of the 1980s things have got tougher for manual workers around the world.
Globalisation has meant that jobs have migrated to low-wage countries, mainly in Asia, and the all-pervasive internet has transformed many long-established occupations.
One good example of how electronic communications have transformed industries is Uber.
This is a cut-price taxi service where drivers sign up to rent their own cars and driving services. Customers book on a smart phone application which sends out their location via the global positioning system and bills their credit card.
This eliminates jobs in the call centres operated by traditional taxi companies and enables Uber drivers to operate with heavily reduced overheads.
A well-off friend who I met at Wellington airport recently told me that he's ceased taking his car to Auckland Airport and now uses Uber to get to and from his home in Auckland's Eastern Suburbs.
The Uber cost is usually around $38. This is less than half of the cost of a traditional taxi and easily beats the price of airport parking.
In the USA there are already experiments with driverless trucks seen by many observers as an inevitability which will eliminate another large source of employment.
The victims of these trends have proven receptive to messages like those coming from Donald Trump, but the answers he offers - economic protectionism, walling off Mexican immigration and penal tariffs on Chinese produced goods - are unlikely to revive the fortunes of these unhappy people.
Our own Labour Party has recently put a great deal of intellectual grunt behind a project called "The Future of Work" which aims to develop policies and strategies to deal with the projection that 46 per cent of jobs will be lost to automation in the next 10 to 15 years.
It's well worth reading this document (just type "Future of Work New Zealand" into Google) which, in my view, is a credit to the finance spokesman Grant Robertson MP who drove the whole project.
The Future of Work Commission has come up with a wide range of recommendations and Labour has already endorsed three years' free post high-school education and training, better careers advice in schools and start-up grants for new businesses.
This kind of positive, affordable and practical approach to the work challenges of the future may not have the political sex-appeal of building a wall 3201km long, but it offers solutions that are likely to endure a lot longer than Trump's certain one term presidency.
Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is CEO of the NZ Howard League and a former Labour Party president.
All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.
