The mood was sombre as KentOnline columnist Melissa Todd arrived in the US on the day Donald Trump won the election.

Here, she speaks to voters about their fears for the future…

I flew to Texas on November 5th, election day, and woke to learn Trump had been elected. It felt like the world had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

I was attending the Lone Star Spanking Party, a kink event which around 500 people attend to play, attend lectures, make friends and most importantly, beat each other. My friends back home wanted to know if Americans were reeling at the result. But in a Houston bar, quaffing bacon bloody Marys, no one wanted to talk to me about the election.

“My political position is private”, a largish gentleman told me, sweating over his burger and beer. “Only my wife knows what I think and how I voted.”

Another was slightly more forthcoming: “I’m a government employee, so I’m glad. The stock market is rejoicing. And look, the sun is out for the first time in a fortnight!” He gestures to the street, bathed in dazzling sunlight, picking out puddles from recent life-altering storms. Trump believes climate change to be a hoax, and plans to maximise gas and oil production as a priority.

While many don’t believe Trump’s boasts about the economy, his plans to get the Chinese to pay his tariffs, any more than anyone imagined he could encourage Mexicans to pay for a wall, often it’s enough that he makes these remarks: that he says what the electorate are thinking. He’s the first politician to do that. Of course he isn’t really going to lock up Hilary Clinton, or gay people, but it sure feels like he wants to. That’s enough to win their vote.

The economy may be surging currently, but the tariffs Trump plans to inflict will directly impact American businesses and consumers. Manufacturers are stockpiling raw materials before the tariffs are introduced, since it’s American companies that will pay them, not the Chinese, as many have been told. Employees are being told their Christmas bonuses will be withheld in order to pay for these changes.

There’s talk of the Department of Education being dismantled. Of funding for special education no longer being ring-fenced. Of the Department of Health putting an end to vaccines, with Robert F Kennedy claiming “there are no vaccines that are safe and effective”.

Those with chronic conditions, unable to work, are starting to panic about how they will pay for their medication. In Oklahoma, they have started putting ’Trump bibles’ in schools - these contain the constitution, but the group of amendments about equal rights were removed. In the US Church and State are separated, but that too is quietly being eroded.

At my spanking party there’s an air of quiet mourning. I’m begged not to mention politics. They want to forget. Many are black, or trans, or porn stars: all of them are scared.

“Every morning I wake up, I remember, and I flip”, says Deborah, a prominent Democrat campaigner from Las Vegas. “I didn’t watch the election coverage. I deliberately chose not to, so I could sleep. That might be the last peaceful night’s sleep I get.

“Now white men are threatening black people in the street. Telling them they will be going back to the cotton fields. They feel they have the might, the power to do it, now that white men are in charge once more.”

“When Trump was elected in 2016 I was frightened to go outside,” Sophia, a young model from Virginia, tells me. “Black people were being shot. By the police! If the police are going to shoot you, what will other people do to you? To be frightened for your life in your own country, feel threatened by your own people…” Sophia is 25, and planning to buy abortion pills now, just in case. They cost £600, so she’s having to save. At the moment it’s still legal to buy them online and get them in the post: there’s a genuine fear this may change in January. Two women have already died in Texas as a result of abortions becoming illegal. Two women that we know of.

The trans community are terrified, scrabbling to change their names and birth certificates before the Trump presidency begins. No one knows what will happen to them, but it’s unlikely to be good news. A spanko tells me he voted for Trump only so that his five-year-old grandson would not be “indoctrinated into trans ideology”. His fears are doubtless inspired by Trump, who's said that kids are being sent to school and then drugged and operated on without their parents’ consent.

Increasingly it seems acceptable, almost cool, to hold right-wing views, and this feels true in Britain too. After the war, people with extreme views had nowhere to go except parties that everyone else agreed were crackpots. You could vote communist or National Front, but everyone would tell you that you were a bad person in consequence. Major figures in the mainstream parties were careful not to say anything too extreme because if they were branded as radicals they were finished, like Barry Goldwater or Enoch Powell. Even Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were careful to step back if they were accused of racism. But that began breaking down after 2008, reaching crisis proportions in the mid-2010s.

It seems there's been a self-reinforcing centrifugal spiral: the more that voters have concluded that conventional politics has no answers to the financial crisis, the rise of China, automation, climate change, and so on, the more they've voted for wilder parties on the fringes - which makes these parties look more respectable, pulling the older parties toward the fringes to compete for those votes, discrediting centrist policies further, encouraging more people to grasp at extremist ideas, until we end up with Trump vs. Bernie Sanders or Boris Johnson vs. Jeremy Corbyn, while centrists just look out of touch.

It’s not irreversible. Joe Biden and Keir Starmer both won and Hillary Clinton got more votes than Trump. But centrists have got to convince voters that old-fashioned liberal ideas like tolerance, the rule of law, free trade, migration, and multilateral alliances, really do work better than crazy, crackpot schemes.

“I feel sad, mainly”, Deborah says, when I ask if she feels betrayed by her fellow countrymen. “Often it’s a lack of education. They believe what they’re told. They want simple solutions to complex problems.” She pauses. “But some of them - some of them I hate.”