I don't see how saying "it's the way the system works" is any answer. The whole point is that it *shouldn't* work that way. In the UK, as we have realistic third parties, things become even more complex and it's perhaps more subtle to define how a system "should" work. At the moment in the US, though, and throughout its history, this has been in practice a two-horse race at every single election (other than perhaps 1992, when Ross Perot gave Bill Clinton and George Bush Sr. a fright). I would have thought you, off all people on AB, Naomi, would appreciate that in a two-horse race, the guy who comes first should win. Instead, this is the fifth time in US history that the winning candidate lost the popular vote, and the second in living memory (the other being Gore v. Bush 2000).
It's only because the vote shares are fairly close that this gets overlooked by many, but in fact the US system allows for someone to become president even with only 24% of the popular vote, to the other candidate's 76%. For that to happen is no system of democracy.
Actually the college is even more broken still: in the event of a tied electoral college, Trump would have won (as the Republican-controlled houses would have obviously preferred him to Clinton) -- but that means that the decision is not in the hands of the people. There was, for a time, a plausible and even more outrageous scenario, too. Clinton and Trump might have both missed the 270 target, the two houses of Congress might be split between Republican and Democrat, and Trump might have lost Utah to the one-state candidate Evan McMullin. In such an event, McMullin would have had a decent chance of becoming president as a compromise candidate, despite 49/50 states and DC rejecting him, or never even having the opportunity to vote for him.
But of course, there's no point complaining about all this, because that's how the broken system works, and why should anyone try to change it?