I wonder how the Sanders/Trump contest would have been decided. Certainly Sanders was perceived by folks I knew to have more integrity.

Trump would have won, for the simple reason that he can slip between incongruent realities seamlessly - he is so well practiced a liar that speaking two contradictory untruths in a sentence doesn't cause him pause, and his audience selectively hears the truth they wish to hear. Honestly - watch interviews with his voters - he is all things to all men, often contradictory things. He projects his realities outwards, and his followers reflect them back to him, amplified by their own perceptual filters, and it reinforces.

Take a straight man like Sanders. He's consistent. When you only work with one reality, as he does, you limit your ability to slip and feint between narratives as trump does, and as a result your appeal is limited to people in that or similar realities.

In short, if you're prepared to cheat, any move is legal, and an opponent playing by the rules cannot win - particularly if you are also the adjudicator.

It doesn't really matter. Trump would just have made up lots of stuff about Sanders and people would have eaten it up. I mean, most people think that Trump is more honest than Hillary. Once you've gotten to the point where people are too stupid to distinguish between the two you are fucked. You even see it here in HN with supposedly smart people(maybe). They like to suggest or imply that Hillary's flaws are at the same level as Trump's. This country is doomed.

Or maybe you mean people in Macedonia would have made up a lot of stuff and Trump would just have ran with it! The one thing with narcissists is their lack of creativity (there are a few exceptions, but Trump isn't one of them). So they rely heavily on others to do anything.