You were the one who brought up bad behavior.
In a country that gave elected positions to Gopher, Arnie, Jesse Ventura and Al Franken?
No, I’m not shocked.
The Trump Organization is a closely-held family business, and one with a rocky history. Not a major corporation, nor any good training for politics and the level of cooperation that requires.
However low down the totem pole J. Trudeau may have been, he was at least in Parliament and thus has some experience with its culture and workings. By contrast, D. Trump Sr. never deigned to run for* any *elective office that wasn’t US President. Not even Mayor of NYC nor Governor of New York. He is devoid of humility and devoid of perspective.
Trump has run for chief criminal, in the party of the Bushes. The elder George Bush preemptively pardoned Cap Weinberger, lest a trial embarrass him, and the younger George Bush sent his Sec’y of State to bald-facedly lie to Congress. They are of the Nixonian belief that the President is above the law itself; and Trump took their party’s banner, that he might occupy that enviable seat.
So, the ones who embarrassed themselves in the office. Yeah, that’s our point!
I admire things about Grant and LBJ; they really tried to make this country better. But they went down in flames of scandal, as did Nixon.
They were good guys brought down by jackassery. Being jackass-like was their flaw, not their selling point. Does Trump have even the redeeming virtues of Grant, LBJ, or even Nixon? I don’t see it.
That’s understandable, but to me it seems to insult Corsica’s most notorious son to compare him to the rust under my pinto.
[Aside]
What was wrong with Buchanan? Not that he was particularly great, but I didn’t know he was considered particularly bad in any way. Granted, he couldn’t stop the southern states from seceding, but I doubt if anyone could have done so under the circumstances.
[/Aside]
I think the short answer is that his attempts to deal with the lead-up to the Civil War resulted in him alienating absolutely everybody. He neither took a principled stand on one side or the other, nor worked to identify a common ground upon which to establish peaceful resolution. As a result, everything went rapidly to hell.
He may not have been able to stop secession but he definitely made things worse.
Well, I am just speculating, but I think two factors will heavily influence the election prospects of candidates of Trumps mold.
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The country in question must be a real democracy, where the voters determine the outcome of elections. Populist appeal is less valuable if the population doesn’t get a say.
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And… the bigger the inequality in a nation, the more appealing someone who promises to sweep it all away will be to the have-nots. Who are normally the majority in high-inequality places.
Brian Mulroney served as Canada’s Prime Minister from 1984 to 1993, winning two majority governments, despite having never held elected office before. He did have extensive experience working as an advisor to politicians, though.
That’s the closest example I can come up with here, anyway. Mulroney’s record was mediocre; to his credit he had some major policy successes, but his government was dogged by scandals and poor fiscal policy, and ended badly.
Grant wasn’t a jackass at all. He wasn’t a good President and was a weirdly terrible judge of other people’s character in any context other than a military one, but I don’t think I have ever read anything indicating he was anything like a jackass. If anything, his reputation was of being a quiet, thoughtful person who was a good family man. His personality was that of a math teacher, which is in fact what he’d always wanted to be.
LBJ and Nixon were certainly major league jackasses. Andrew Jackson was, too. Coolidge was kind of a passive-aggressive jackass.
As a Briton, I’m not sure you’ve got the right way around. 
You’re forgetting his year as Leader of the Opposition and MP for Central Nova. 
I agree, he’s the closest example, but he was the consummate backroom boy, starting as a campaign worker for Bob Stanfield in the 1950s, when he was SFX, with a previous run at the leadership in 1976. He was always doing politics until he got the Tories to dump Clark, which was no mean feat - getting the Tories at that time to agree on anything was an accomplishment!
I always thought of him as a politician from the earliest I heard of him; he just was a politician who managed to get to the top early. Not like Trump, who didn’t put in real any effort at politics before.
But even then, Mulroney did it by his backroom political skills, which was the point I was making in my much-earlier post: our party system forces wannabes to work the party to advance.
It’s not just that Trump is hopelessly ignorant of the job he just got; he’s also really old, which makes his lack of experience and ignorance more striking. He is the oldest person ever elected President for the first time.
Brian Mulroney, by comparison, was 45 years old when he became PM - just a little older than Justin Trudeau (who was 43) and a few years younger than Stephen Harper (who was 47.)
Bonaparte was ten times the man Donald Trump is, and I’ll fight you if you say otherwise. Don’t make me come all the way across the pond to whip your smug English backside.
Oh, and whoever makes a short joke gets a piece of this.
And there’s been a development on this front.
Yesterday, O’Leary dropped out of the leadership race, because of the Quebec issue. He said that he’s confident he could win the leadership, but admitted that his unilingualism meant that he likely couldn’t win Quebec in a general election, and thus wouldn’t win the general election.
Kevin O’Leary drops out of Conservative leadership race, endorses Maxime Bernier
And I just want to do a little brag: called it, three months ago!