As were many hundreds of thousands of other men, and yet Trump is in the Oval office and they are not.

An ageing Biden and Dubya have also occupied that office and they don't exactly strike me as "master persuader" types either.

Nobody is accusing Trump of lacking ambition or charisma, and there's also no doubt the party machine that backed him is pretty sophisticated in the arts of political campaigning. But there's a difference between being a "master persuader" able to convince almost anyone of almost anything and being a shameless braggart in front of an electorate that's unusually impressed by a celebrity's overconfidence and wealth, and also being a lot less shameless about appealing to their chauvinistic attitudes than predecessors.

So Joe Biden and George W Bush are also master persuaders?

I feel we've cheapened the title "master persuader" if every elected politician in semi-democratic nations, even the nepo babies, gets that accolade.

I'm really looking for masterful persuasion, preferably of people who haven't already poisoned themselves with a diet of misinformation.