Srinagar: Republican candidate Donald Trump won the presidency election in the United States today, leaving his home country ‘in shock’ and rest of the world ‘in awe’, media reports said.

Donald John Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States in a stunning culmination of an explosive, populist and polarizing campaign that took relentless aim at the institutions and long-held ideals of American democracy, reported the New York Times.

The surprise outcome, defying late polls that showed Hilliary Clinton with a modest but persistent edge, threatened convulsions throughout the country and the world, where skeptics had watched with alarm as Trump’s unvarnished overtures to disillusioned voters took hold, the paper added.

The triumph for Trump, 70, a real estate developer-turned-reality television star with no government experience, was a powerful rejection of the establishment forces that had assembled against him, from the world of business to government, and the consensus they had forged on everything from trade to immigration, the paper further said.

The Republican nominee defied pre-election polling to claim swing states, winning the key battlegrounds of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. He told cheering supporters that Americans must now unite and “bind the wounds of division”, after a gruelling, acrimonious campaign. Global markets plummeted, with the US dollar diving and gold prices surging, the BBC reported.

Trump has so far won 28 US states, smashing into Clinton’s vaunted electoral firewall in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states that have not supported a Republican presidential candidate since 1988 and 1984 respectively, the BBC added.

Trump and Clinton were vying to succeed Democratic President Barack Obama.

After two four-year terms in the White House, he was barred by the US constitution from running for re-election.