In 1997-98, there was a leadership crisis in the currently ruling party in New Zealand. My teacher thought this would be a great way to educate us about voting and democracy, and held a mock-election with a campaign period that lasted several weeks.
It quickly came down to two groups polling the best, one was made up of the "smart girls", who were promoting a platform based on practicality, democracy, and fairness. The other was me and the other "smart boys", who quickly figured out that if you lie through your teeth, promise things that are impossible in any reality, and slander your opponents, a significant portion of the voting base will be on board with your nonsense.
We told them that every Friday would be a free-day, with TVs and games consoles in every class, and a fish and chip lunch for every student, and that we'd make the school pay for all of this. Precisely zero of this was anything we could do, but we got 70% of the vote.
Donald Trump used this kind of trick with his Build The Wall (and make Mexico pay for it) rhetoric, and while a politician using used-car-salesman-tier deceit to win an election may not sound like anything out of the ordinary, the outlandish nature of that particular claim and that so many people bought it hook, line and sinker, says something about a lot of the American people that the rest of the American people didn't want to hear - that about half the people out there, driving, voting, owning guns, and so on, are about as stupid as a class full of ten year old children who just got told about the free Playstation in their future.
This obvious and brazen bullshitting never stopped, it carried on all through his campaign, his term, and is still going on now. In later years, one of the biggest lies may be shown to be that he wasn't influenced or supported (legally or illegally) by Russia.
A common argument made in his favour at this point is "at least he's just a charlatan and a clown, not outright evil like the Clintons", but I'd point out that Trump repeatedly flew on Epsteins "Lolita Express" just like Bill Clinton and many others. Add to that dozens of other improprieties and ridiculous antics over the years (which you can look up yourselves, this is already getting too long) and he's got no moral leg to stand on either - he's just as bad as The Establishment he claims to hate so much, while at the same time having no respect for the institutions of American democracy, frequently suggesting changes reminiscent of Italian Fascism, planning to contest an election as rigged well before the polling day even came, etc.
I will say though that from over here, watching him going around being a maniac was fun, it does seem like he stubbornly refused to entertain some of the more warmongering parts of the American machine, and he inadvertently saved the socialised healthcare in my country by scrapping the TPPA, which was going to involve our conservative government cucking out to the Americans and forcing us to pay full price for medicine and hospital care, and switch to a private health insurance structure.
To sum up, he's a colossal retard and a bad person, although I can't truly hate him as such just due to that last paragraph.
