Local office is scary easy to run for, and after following my municipal election more closely than I ever have before, I can tell you a lot of fucking weirdos run and win local office. Pay attention to your local politics, people.

How should I know? I live in a country where the president drowned a baby and fucked kids

One of my school’s dads just randomly ran for local office and won. Sounds possible to me!

No, because we don’t have a president here.

Oh… did you mean a president of a specific country, but forgot to specify which one?

Short answer: President, unequivocally no. Local office, yeah, and not as hard as you might think.

President has pretty open formal requirements, but the informal ones are the killer. To be on the ballot, you need to get a threshold of signatures that varies by state, so you need to fund a campaign well enough to attract enough people to go out and stand on street corners or go door to door collecting signatures in all 50 states. That’s tens of millions of dollars you’d need to raise just to be on the ballot. Then you’ve got the actual campaign and unless you’re running with a major party, you would need to raise it all by yourself. The last presidential race cost billions of dollars, so without a political party’s support, which you won’t get because you’re an outsider, you’d better be friends with some billionaires and prepare to sell off huge chunks of your authority to get elected.

Local elections, especially things like city council are reletively easy. You need some signs, flyers, a website, and good campaign strategy. All of that costs money but you’ll need to gather the support of local business owners or residents and solicit campaign contributes, maybe $20k for a small city. If you’re in a bigger city the money you need to raise goes up and so does the presence of crony politics like in the presidential races, but unless you’re criminal record was rape, selling drugs, or murder, the background won’t matter.

Assuming the US, the only restrictions for the US presidency on paper is that you are 35 years old, you are a US citizen from birth, and have not previously held the office for two terms.

For local offices it’s *generally the same idea, with slight variations on age and sometimes residency.

In actuality it depends on how much money you put in versus how likable you are in general, for all elected offices in the US. Attractive people tend to fair better in elections than unattractive people; people with money tend to fair better than those without; people with strong long-standing (generational) local connections tends to fair better than those without. It also doesn’t hurt if you meet with business leaders that would be affected by your position in order to ‘make assurances’ they won’t be restricted or taxed.

To snark your question; the current sitting US president is a convicted felon, whom if it were any other class of person, would be in jail for life without parole. It hasn’t seemed to stop him.