Well, given our low voter turnouts...

Roughly 1/3 of our population is so stupid and hateful that they would rather have a President that hurts people they don't like, than uh... anything else.

I feel like a lot of non US people really do not fully comprehend the level of just literal hatred that fuels many Americans, as well as how common it is to be extremely charismatically performative in a massively hypocritical way, in just every aspect of life.

We are a country of adults that read at an average of a 6th grade level, with astonishing levels of religious extremism and cults (compared to other countries with similar levels of economic development), who are aware our society is collapsing, but are largely too stupid to even understand why.

We were sold the lie of American Exceptionalism, were indoctrinated into it as a sort of secular cult, it is now apparent this is/was all a lie, and people are (have been) essentially having a kind of mass psychosis in terms of how they handle this revalation.

Our systems are massively corrupt, they've been incrementally corrupting for decades, but the effect has been snowballing.

A few people and groups would pop up from time to time and point this out, and push for a specific, meaningful reform to actually stymie this at a systemic level, and they would be crushed by both corporate and political PR campaigns, but also just a general sense of 'you are overreacting and hysterical' in the broad population, that came from that smug security of the American Exceptionalism ethos.

Basically, we are largely a nation of incurious, brutish, overconfident, malignant narcissists, who revel in biased reasoning ortiented toward justifying an already held belief, who are often already taught from a young age to evaluate the world with the irrational magical thinking of religious cults, which normalizes cognitive dissonance and conspiracism, which then leads to the present outcome you correctly find to be so absurd.