You can find a kernel of truth in anything and extrapolate it to your favored conclusion. After all, Bernie Madoff was the chairman of Nasdaq at one point. Hi

You can find a kernel of truth in anything and extrapolate it to your favored conclusion. After all, Bernie Madoff was the chairman of Nasdaq at one point. His marks were so convinced he was on the up and up, because their returns were so good. He was 4x as successful as Donald Trump. His investors had no problem seeing up as down, and black as white, because they were making good money. Their consent was trivially simple to manufacture. Madoff was eventually found to be a charlatan, but it's only obvious in hindsight. What if there's another charlatan who is a master negotiator, and simply needs to read enough single issue voters. Then he could just promise them all of their single issues will be solved. It might help to take credit or claim to have a simple solution for general trends that have existed for decades, like sensationalism in the media, or violence in places we've bombed for 50 years. Also, if you have no reputation to ruin, and are a billionaire, you have no incentive to act civilized, so just the simple act of the media predicting your political demise allows you to point out their inaccuracy as proof that theyre out to get you. You'd probably find it trivially easy to manufacture a whole bunch of consent. But that would never happen, right?