What was I supposed to say to my son and his crying flatmate as we watched Donald Trump become president this morning?

This is the third unanticipated electoral shock all-nighter I have shared with my son in the past 18 months. This time it came with the added sadness of his Edinburgh flatmate, a lovely young woman from New Jersey, hiding herself behind a curtain and sobbing against an icy, pre-dawn window. If it’s a parent’s duty to comfort a stricken child, chalk me up another paternal failure, because whatever can you say about this?

Republican President-elect Donald Trump with his family after the announcement (Getty)

If what follows is a deranged stream of consciousness rant in need of decryption at Bletchley Park if it’s to make an iota of sense… well, how more fittingly to pay tribute to the President-elect of the United States?

The difference between us here is that Donald J Trump requires neither alcohol (he is teetotal) nor trauma to spout incomprehensible gibberish. Whereas I have the twin excuses of 1) being bludgeoned close to paralysis, as we’ve all been, by the shock; and 2) having put away a colossal amount of scotch during the recent hours of torment, excruciation and something which at this moment I can’t easily distinguish from grief.

It’s at this point that I would like to give thanks to the early hours of 24 June for preparing us for what’s just been endured. That’s what I would like to, but sadly I can’t.

It may be true that the similarities between the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election were uncanny in both general and the particulars. Specifically, the angry white undercurrent which the polls could not detect, and the progression from smug optimism to bewildered disbelief were the same. So was the bouncing about of the Betfair odds, right down to the false hope-rousing dead cat bounce that hoisted Remain and Hillary Clinton back to favouritism before reality bit.

Generally, the effect on the mind has been virtually identical, though the victory for a "madman" is an even more pulverising blow to the psychic solar plexus than the vote to leave the EU.

I cannot thank Brexit for inuring us to the epiphany of President-elect Trump because no previous experience could have formed an effective defensive barrier against the third unanticipated electoral shock all-nighter I have shared with my 19-year-old son in the past 18 months. This time it came with the added sadness of his Edinburgh flatmate, a lovely young woman from New Jersey, hiding herself behind a curtain and sobbing against an icy, pre-dawn window.

It’s the young for whom you grieve again, as what should be a future of infinite possibilities was shrunk by an electoral quake. God alone knows what the aftershocks will be. Trump won’t have a clue, obviously, beyond the certainty they will in some indefinable way be “great” and “tremendous”.

The world changed irrevocably today, and you’d have to be a spellbinding orator to make the case that it changed other than massively for the worse.

So if it’s a parent’s duty to comfort a stricken child, chalk me up another paternal failure, because whatever can you say about this?

I did whatever passes for my best, reiterating almost verbatim the glib.

Brexit pep talk about what a privilege it is to live through times of historic flux. And I quoted a friend who cogently argues that it’s Hillary, with her clumsy contempt for Russia and incendiary talk about a no-fly zone over Syria, who posed all the risk of igniting World War Three.

After all, one thing that can be said for President Trump – P.R.E.S.I.D.E.N.T. T.R.U.M.P; nope, probably worth a crack but the capitals make it no easier to compute – is that he won’t be picking fights with Vladimir Putin. He may take a holiday dacha several millimetres to the south of Putin’s colon. But he won’t be shaking any sticks at that Russian bear.

If you had a time machine, I said to my boy in a futile bid to distract him from the out-of-body experience sense of dislocation, you might travel to 2020 and find a safer world after a term of President Trump. He smiled indulgently, as he does at my more fanciful rot. “If I had a time machine,” he said, “I’d go back to the moment before his conception, and distract his father with a bludgeon to the head. Or to the 1770s to tell George III to somehow stop them getting their independence. Or I’d go back to this spring, and beg Bernie Sanders not to chuck away the nomination by saying he was sick of hearing about Hillary’s emails.”

That’s not bad. If Sanders hadn’t let her off the hook, in a manner not notably mimicked by Trump, who knows, we might all be feeling the Bern today.

Me, I’d take the Tardis back to the 2011 White House correspondents’ dinner, when Trump went from orange to electric scarlet as Obama wittily ridiculed him for the birtherism nonsense. If that humiliation didn’t plant the seed of vengefulness that flowered into the stomach-turning stinkweed this morning, I’d be astonished. And astonishment, frankly, is an emotion of which I have had my fill today.

Glancing at the texts that arrived throughout the night, the common thread (as it’s been with some of us for a fortnight) is nausea. “I’m sickened, staggered and shattered,” wrote one friend as the inevitable became unavoidable. “It’s the new Middle Ages.”

And yes, there is the overpowering sense today that The Enlightenment has given way to what someone smart called the Endarkenment. It took another pun to encapsulate the genesis of this disaster. “This isn’t a backlash,” said Van Jones, an African American pundit on CNN. “It’s a whitelash.”

In the middle of this night in 2008 we roused our son, then 11, to watch another hugely dramatic moment of history as the first black president gave the victory speech in which he reiterated that message of hope and change. Well, he got the change bit right. Eight years on, we watched together again as anti-Obama fervour swept the swing states.

Somewhere in that mesmerisingly brutal contrast lies a slither of hope. The election of a black person was as unthinkable two years before it happened as the election of an orange monster as president was yesterday (is now, and ever more shall be so). It can’t be any more unthinkable that in four years, assuming America’s appetite for Trump has been sated (not that dunces like me should be making more assumptions about anything), a humane and intelligent politician will replace him in the White House, and set about trying to undo whatever damage he has done.

If there is one thing this teaches us, another friend messaged as dawn embarrassedly broke over on a day that deserves no illuminating, it is that anything is possible in this world.

And he’s right. Even in the enveloping gloom, we should be able to see, just about, that the world of infinite possibilities is still there. It created Donald Trump. O brave new world... that has such a creature running it, as Miranda so nearly put in The Tempest.

One way or another, barring the codes-related doomsday scenario on which we need not dwell right now, it will survive him.