WHY TRUMP’S WIN MATTERS FOR GLOBAL HEALTH

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The first of two elections with profound consequences for global health has been held—the U.S. presidential and congressional race. The second—the election of a new director general of the World Health Organization (WHO)—will soon be decided.

But first—the implications of Donald Trump’s win for the future of global health.

On every conceivable issue, Americans had two very different options to choose from. Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump not only disagreed about everything, but also, in many ways, had differing interpretations of the reality from which they drew policy decisions. Facts were in dispute.

And a word of caution is needed, not only for Americans on the day after this election but also for the entire world—we do not know what President Donald Trump will do once he is in the Oval Office. During the campaign, Trump repeatedly told his followers that his momentum was a "movement," not a classic presidential run. How that movement will translate into governance is unclear. We can make guesses, based on Trump’s rhetoric and a limited amount of published policy material, but there will certainly be surprises. The Brexit surprise and its aftermath offer clues to what the first one hundred days of a Donald Trump presidency might bring—uncertainty prevails in both the United Kingdom and Europe regarding every aspect of the process of disentangling Britain from the union, and the anxiety it provoked has prompted market volatility and a broad range of planning difficulties for public and private sectors across Europe.