Power Wars by Charlie Savage covers this rhetorical zig zag.

Whether most of the people doing so were smart enough to understand it is a good question, but the fact is we put a Perón-like figure into office, and only age will likely make him leave.

Gee, I'm shocked, shocked, that a guy who stole large numbers of classified documents on his way out the door and stuffed them in unused bathrooms in his house(s) would fail to safeguard confidential taxpayer information.

You're right, it wasn't an election topic. Nobody who had any power cared to make it one, nobody who cared had the power... and nobody else was paying attention.

Obama didn't run on drone strikes, but everything Trump is doing has been a part of the Trumpist or Republican fringe platform for years. The Republicans have wanted to defund and destroy government ever since Grover Norquist said he wanted government to be small enough to drown in a bathtub. Purging academia of DEI and "woke," aggressive anti-immigration policies, tariffs, rule through executive order, none of it is new, all of it is established, boilerplate Trump-era Republican doctrine.

Trump ran on "draining the swamp." This is what "draining the swamp" means.

The only real exception to the norm seems to be Trump's sudden hard-on for invading Greenland and Canada.But even then you can look back at his infamous comments on not wanting immigration from "shithole countries" like Haiti versus places like Norway, or his comments on Mexico sending rapists over the border, and see how he might want to forcibly annex a few million white people to balance out the scales of white replacement or whatever racist paranoid shit goes on in his head.

I don't know. But let's please stop pretending no one who voted for Trump knew who he was or what he was about, or that what's happening now is not in effect what many Trump supporters wanted.