Just before Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Kristin Tadlock-Hunter, 31, moved to London with her British spouse. She did a lot of canvassing for Hillary Clinton before she left. This time, all she could do was vote remotely. So, as the US went to the polls, she felt powerless.

And when the result came in? “Devastated doesn’t cover it,” she says. “Really heartbroken. I think it’s a unique experience, to be an immigrant watching it from afar. It feels like you’re watching your house burn down from across the street, with all your friends and family still inside. People say: ‘Oh, you’re so lucky not to be in the house that’s on fire,’ and you’re like: ‘No, that’s my memories, that’s the people I love, that’s the places I love.’ It’s a really painful experience to watch what you love being dismantled.”

When the Guardian caught up with Americans in Britain on the morning Trump’s victory was declared, the Republicans were unsurprisingly buoyant. Greg Swenson, the chair of Republicans Overseas, is 62 and has lived in London for a decade. “You really got the vibe at 4am or 5am when the numbers started coming,” he says. “It was a really great feeling. Pretty euphoric.”

Jennifer Ewing, the head of strategy for the Centre for Digital Assets and Democracy, who is in her 40s and is also involved in Republicans Overseas, says she is thrilled. “He got my vote because I am one of those people who thinks my life was better off four years ago than it is today. I think the direction the country was going in was just crazy, to be honest. And I found Trump – while he says things that are bombastic and occasionally offensive – authentic. What you see is what you get.

“The American people feel they’ve not been heard and they’ve been criticised when they bring up their complaints, which we know are the economy and inflation – and then of course the central one being the crisis at the southern border with illegal immigration. I think Trump and his group spoke to them. This might sound random, but with my exposure to the Bitcoin world, where there are a lot of libertarians, you could get a feel for what was happening. While a lot of them weren’t necessarily sure about Trump, they loved the idea that Elon [Musk] was talking about bringing in possibly Ron Paul, the great libertarian. When both Trump and then JD Vance went on Joe Rogan, that was huge. A lot of the crypto bros listen to that.”

Beyond Swenson and Ewing, it wasn’t easy to find Republicans to talk to, presumably because they were all out celebrating. Democrats in Britain, meanwhile, aren’t beating around the bush. “We’re talking about American fascism,” says Sarah Churchwell, 54, an academic, writer and broadcaster who has lived in the UK for 25 years. She is surprised by the result – “I really did believe this time we would get over the line” – yet not shocked. Trump’s first term in office “did a great deal to diminish and demolish the guardrails of democracy”, she says. “He did a lot to expose the weaknesses in the system, he destroyed all the norms and processes that relied on good faith and he undermined the civic belief in the project of the US – that even if you saw it going in different ways, you recognised the right of the other person to be there.”

Gillian Pachter, 49, a Democrat who has lived in the UK since 1994, feels “pretty stupid”. She thought it would be close, but that Kamala Harris would prevail. James Shaerf, a 42-year-old barrister who is half English and half American and has been here since 2021, “wasn’t surprised, because the kind of talk you hear on CNN was very reminiscent of what people were saying in 2016. It was deja vu. Trump was speaking to quarters of America who feel they’ve been forgotten and that a Harris presidency would threaten their place in the world. That’s just a really ugly current in the culture that Trump tapped into.”

Whatever the polls said, nobody, from the recent émigré to the long-term immigrant, was in any doubt about how divided the US is. Rei Takver, 38, who arrived in the UK in 2022 and has lived in Sheffield since, spent lockdown living with her mother north of San Francisco, a bastion of liberalism. “I remember driving north 30 minutes and, in that time, listening to the radio shift, hearing my usual alternative rock, mariachi music, shifting in 30 minutes to a completely different world – country music, church music. I remember thinking to myself, how can I live in a country where this – a 30-minute drive from my house – is more foreign to me than being in Britain?”

It’s not because the result was unexpected that the reactions are so raw; it’s that the implications are so enormous. All the Democrats I speak to are worried about their mothers. “I know watching the stuff from abroad is a bit of a sport, but my mom was in the civil rights movement, she’s very politically progressive, and she’s completely emotionally devastated, as well as disoriented,” Pachter says. “How could the country go in this direction of hatred and division and lies?”

Takver agrees: “I wish I could be there for my mother right now. I feel very far away.” But she also fears for her young female cousins. “I went to visit them last year. They’re so bright, they’re so alive – having pillow fights in the stairway – and I’m just speechless with horror for the kind of womanhood they may be forced to experience.

“But, really, I’m so worried for everyone. I’m worried for people I care about who are trans. I used to teach newcomer immigrants, many refugees from Latin America; I’m viscerally terrified for them.”

These aren’t melodramatic or catastrophising concerns. “Seventy million people just gave Trump permission,” Churchwell says. “He has a mandate to deport 20 million immigrants. To round them up, to put them in camps. He can go after his political opponents, he can go after his critics, he can go after journalists. I think this is a full-bore assault on the constitutional order. So much for our checks and balances, because the supreme court handed him immunity in the summer. How much is the army going to resist him? At the point at which you’re looking to the army to save you from your own government, that sounds like civil war. That sounds like the land of dictators and coup d’etats.”

Pachter is still reeling from the reality that has been revealed, rather than in anticipation of the new government’s next moves. “I feel like we’re fully in a post-truth America. People live in a realm of fantasy where if something sounds nice they just believe it; it doesn’t matter any more whether there’s any evidence. I don’t even know what you do in a context like that.

“I think a lot of people view the divisions through a prism of hatred: this side hates the other side and that’s what culture wars are. I don’t hate a block of Americans. It’s more that it seems like fantasy has trumped reality.”

Takver started a new job on election day. She will be studying the effects of the climate crisis, specifically extreme heat, on pregnant women and newborns in Africa for the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “The poignancy of starting that work, then watching a fascist dictator come into government literally on the promise of taking control over women’s bodies and heating up the planet as much and as fast as he can. I’m trying to imagine a world in which I can protect these women. I know it sounds stubborn not to accept defeat. But we can’t accept defeat, we have to stay calm, we have to keep going.”

The global implications are unclear to Takver, but they seem ominous: “Trump has not been shy about cosying up to ‘strongman’ leaders around the world who want to take away our freedoms.”

Churchwell says: “If Trump does what he says he’s going to do, what’s going to happen with climate change, with Nato, with the fight for Ukraine, with the situation in the Middle East?”

As for how this happened, well, it came from everywhere. Shaerf thinks Biden should have pulled out of the race sooner. He also dwells on the Democrats’ messaging weaknesses: “They put all their eggs in the abortion basket and I think the sad reality is that a lot of Americans agree with the Republicans on abortion policy.

“He reached minorities. Democrats have always taken their votes for granted, always taken Jewish votes for granted. And Trump at least gave the impression of creating a very broad church. There’s a huge cognitive dissonance about everything this man does – he speaks out of both sides of his mouth constantly. A lot of voters know or at least are reckless about being lied to – they simply don’t mind.”

The legacy media get a kicking from Churchwell: “The New York Times in particular – their normalisation of Trump has been unbelievably consequential. Then flooding the airwaves with Biden’s age and incompetence, staying silent on Trump’s rambling; the double standard was so extreme. They reported on the Republicans preparing for electoral interference if things didn’t go their way as if that were a legitimate part of the democratic process.”

At root, though, most Democrats see bigger forces at play than could be contained in a single personality (or newspaper, for that matter). “Trump is a useful puppet of a number of different factions who could ride him to power,” Churchwell says. “I’m speaking of theocrats, I’m speaking of billionaires … these different interests have coalesced and see in Trump someone who will further their agendas.”

Tadlock-Hunter ends by saying: “I’ve had a lot of really wonderful British women around me this morning, showing so much love and support and kindness – and women who aren’t British or American, other immigrant friends. Women are feeling it, even just the trauma of watching a qualified woman lose to a convicted felon who commits crimes against women. That’s painful for women everywhere.

“But as much as they can empathise and be so kind, as well as worried for their own rights and global implications, it’s not their families, it’s not their friends. I’m having conversations with friends in the US now, just figuring how to navigate the threats to their marriage equality. Some of my friends aren’t sure if they’re able to get married, or form families, or if it’s safe to get pregnant.”

Takver says: “I do still hold on to this. In Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, one of his first rules is: ‘Do not obey in advance.’ It would be easy to collapse and say: ‘The fight is over,’ but we must continue to resist in whatever ways we can, now and into the future.”

Additional reporting by Kate McCusker