IT is a very exciting time to be following the US presidential election process from the relative safety of Canberra.

Even better is that, thanks to Twitter, we can follow the shock and outrage in real time.

I’ve been pretty lukewarm about Twitter since its inception, it’s an essential tool for a journalist, but also a cesspit of vacuity and, frankly, desperate self-promotion.

But give that man Donald Trump a platform to plunk his short fingers on to in 140-character bursts and you’ve got dynamite.

People who don’t pay attention to politics are outraged that Trump can have come so far and, indeed, looks likely to be the Republican nominee for the presidency.

But if you look closely at the grey weasels who’ve infested Washington’s corridors of power since the 1980s, Trump starts to make electoral sense.

The weasels have perfected a system whereby they harvest vast amounts of money from corporate donors and, in return, try and justify policies that are great for their donors and awful for the public.

Then a bright-orange vulgarian turns up throwing some outrageous truth bombs in amongst incendiary misdirections.

Corporate donations? He says he doesn’t need them because he’s got loads of his own money.

Invading Iraq? Yep, that was a terrible decision.

The particularly delicious irony is that most of his terrible falsehoods don’t trouble the Republican establishment at all. But dare to say the manifest obvious truth about Iraq and, my god, watch the feathers ruffle on the roost.

In many ways, Trump represents everything the average, white American man wishes he could be.

Trump is pretty good at golf and can get away with lying about being even better still, he trades in wives for younger upgrades on a regular basis and gets away with having affairs, and he can say whatever’s on his mind without anyone telling him to shut up.

Trump also represents a repudiation of the establishment by the supporters of the party of the establishment, which is an interesting development.

Over on the Democrat side we have the beautiful spectacle of the Bernie Sanders insurgency asking very uncomfortable questions about why the richest country on earth can’t direct its resources to the wellbeing of its citizens.

And then in this froth of insurgent candidacies we have poor old Hillary Clinton. Former First Lady, former Senator, former Secretary of State, darling of the corporate donors.

In an electorate hacked off to the back teeth with business as usual, Hillary is running on more of the same, but with a sensible woman in charge for once (spare a thought for the protocol officers trying to figure out what to do with Bill on inauguration day).

And yet if you were going to place a bet, she’s just about the only likely eventual winner out of the whole process.

But could it happen here? To some extent Clive Palmer’s run at Canberra in 2014 was a harbinger of Trump.

Fundamentally though our political parties have a better lock on the system.

It’s also worth noting that anyone can get into our politics. They just have to be willing to sit through a lot of very boring meetings.

And why do that when you can watch Netflix in the bath?