Van Jones calls Trump’s surprise victory a whitelash against a changing country

'It's hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us'

Tonight, as Donald Trump as takes the White House, millions of Americans are in disbelief, and no one has completely embodied the shock of Mr Trump winning the election quite like CNN commentator Van Jones.

“People have talked about a miracle, and I’m hearing about a nightmare. It’s hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us. You tell your kids, ‘don’t be a bully.’ ‘Don’t be a bigot.’ You tell your kids, ‘do your homework. Be prepared.’ And then you have this outcome, and then you people putting their children to bed tonight, and they’re afraid of breakfast,” he told viewers as he became emotional on Wednesday morning. “They’re thinking, ‘how do I explain this to my children.’”

“I have Muslim friends who are texting me tonight, saying ‘should I leave the country?’ I have a family of immigrants, that are terrified tonight… This was many things, this was a rebellion against the elites. True, it was a complete reinvention of politics and polls. But it was also something else,” he explained. “We’ve talked about everything but race tonight. We’ve talked about income, we’ve talked about class. We’ve talked about region. We haven't talked about race.”

“This was a whitelash,” he continued. “This was a whitelash against a changing country, this was a whitelash against a black president in part. And that’s the part when the pain comes. And Donald Trump has a responsibility tonight to come out and reassure people that he’s going to be the president for all the people he insulted, and offended and brushed aside.

“When you say, you want to take your country back, you’ve got a lot of people who feel they aren’t represented well either… But we don't want to feel that someone has been elected by throwing away some of us to appeal more deeply to others. This is a deeply painful moment tonight, and no, it's not just about race, there’s more going on than that, but race is here too and we’ve got to talk about it…”

Watch the full video of Jones' moving segment above.