DONALD Trump burst apart at about 4pm, in piñata form, a chocolate coin-filled effigy pouting and swinging from the ceiling as Tessa Brown swished and cracked with a black rod.
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Ms Brown, 25, had worked in the kitchen at Newcastle’s FogHorn Brewhouse throughout the day as the US election poured from projectors onto wall-mounted screens and became Trump’s.
She’d worked, and cried. The piñata had been a bit of fun but now, as the New Yorker who lives in Newcastle with her girlfriend swung a rod marked “Reason”, the act of swinging became something else. Crack.
“I’m glad I’m here, but I’m going home for Christmas and I won’t feel safe,” she said.
“It scares me that the kind of people who’ve supported him all along have won. They know they’ve won.”
As piñata Trump’s chocolate coins slid across the floor, two sombre tables of beer drinkers remained.
Their faces mirrored those of shocked Hillary Clinton voters who had watched the election’s key states – Florida, Michigan, Ohio – domino to the Republican nominee. Trump’s tally of electoral votes ticked over 200.
Ms Brown said she’d known he could win – defying weeks of polls and forecasts of a Clinton victory – from how people were talking back home.
So had Colton Wambolt from Minnesota, in Newcastle on a working holiday.
“I received a text earlier today from my mom saying she’s supporting Trump,” Mr Wambolt, 22, said.
“Honestly, I’m surprised and terrified Trump has received this much support. It really frightens me.”
If the prospect of President Trump set off celebrations in the Hunter’s American expat community it wasn’t readily apparent.
As crowds of red baseball-capped supporters in the US cheered their President-elect, a woman outside a pub on Hunter Street wore a red Donald Trump jersey.
But the prevailing mood among Newcastle’s Americans was shock that so many of their countrymen had made what was, to many, this unthinkable choice.
“I did not see it coming,” Tim Wills, 60, formerly of Alaska and now of Maryville, said.
“I wanted a [Clinton] landslide knowing it could be close, but I did not contemplate a loss. Who knows what the international impact will be?”
Earlier, Alex Morris of Newcastle had voted for Clinton in her former home state of Kentucky through an absentee ballot.
She said her family were southern Democrats, with a few exceptions.
“I do know in my family there are people who are going to vote for Trump, and my brother didn’t vote,” Ms Morris, 29, said.
“I find it easier not to discuss it at all. Unless you think there’s a genuine chance to change someone’s mind, there’s not much point.”
