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Personally I think what terrifies a certain class of people about Trump is just that he seems actually interested in wielding power, and has, I dunno, 'agentic' behavior when he does it. There's clearly some objective he's swinging towards, even if he's taking actions that appear stupid.
He did it quite inartfully in the first term. The second term, there's a certain amount of focus and relentlessness that probably scares such people even more. So much happened in just the first 100 days. We're 8 months in, and every week or so another angle of attack is unleashed, and it sure looks like the legs are getting knocked out from under the activist class. Simultaneously too many targets to actually focus on, AND fewer resources to divide amongst the various causes.
I assume it feels like an existential battle for them, whether it really is or is not.
Compare it to a Romney or even Bush-like figure, who are seemingly more content to twist the dials on the administrative state a few degrees here and there and not interfere with their enemy's tactics (or disrupt their funding) so the actual 'balance of power' doesn't shift much.
For better or worse, Trump is taking steps that will actually make it harder for the dems to regroup and mount another offensive, and the one thing that is missing thus far, the one seal that hasn't been broken, is actually prosecuting and jailing the people who are best positioned to thwart his power.
And in a sense, that is the most terrifying thing of all, since that sword of Damocles will hang around for the next couple years, certain people can never feel completely comfortable that the FBI won't be showing up at their door sometime soon.
That's my take, anyway. There's the people with the symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome who aren't actually threatened by him, and then there's those whose whole raison d'etre is acquiring and wielding political power, and this current situation is threatening to remove that possibility entirely for them.
I would argue that this was a feature. Bush, Obama, McCain, Clinton all had some investment with the status quo. They were playing the game by its written and unwritten rules. If any of them had seen the opportunity to cross the Rubicon and make themselves dictator, they would likely not have taken it, because nobody wanted to go down as that figure in the history books. For all the differences between GWB and Bernie Sanders, neither is willing to throw the democracy experiment under the bus to beat the other.
Not so with Trump. He is acting with a self-interest that would make most kleptocrats blush. He will happily burn 100$ of commons to earn 1$ for himself. He is prizing personal loyalty far beyond qualification.
I am however wondering what will happen to the Trump party once Trump finally croaks. As any player of Crusader Kings can tell you, these systems of personal loyalty are all fine while you are alive, but tend to get very messy on succession.
Taking this analogy more literally, none of them faced the sort of ultimatum that Caesar did. They weren't seen as overly popular and powerful and thus a danger to the status quo in and of themselves if they returned to the public sphere.
They enjoyed the mutually agreeable reassurance that if they gracefully retire they can live out their days in ease.
Trump's Rubicon moment was probably in the vein of "If you keep up this election denialism and run again we'll burn down your entire life." Maybe he sincerely truly believed that the election was stolen from him, or he just really hates losing, or he does legitimately think he's uniquely qualified to get the country back on track, but for whatever reason he called that bluff and then survived the onslaught. Where's that leave him now?
Very curious too. How much of the coalition is genuinely tied into Trump the man. There's some who buy into "MAGA" as a broader idea, or "America First," but if Trump does die or, hell, even retires and endorses a successor, what portion of the current GOP will just stop participating for want of an inspiring leader?
Vance is positioned as a legitimate successor, but Trump could throw him under a bus too before going out. Succession fights get ugly. And a decent number of people, on both sides of the aisle, have their careers/livelihoods pinned on Trump's activities and they'll have to re-align quickly if they can't hook on to his train any longer.
See also how the dems started to gargle Bush's balls for some unknown to me reason that one time.
The going joke is always the "strange newfound respect" for someone that they had maligned as hitleresque before.
I am just barely old enough to remember how vicious the attacks on Bush II were (and hell, I think some was justifiable!), but hey, the guy paints now, how endearing!
Even fuckin' CHENEY gets a pass now. Probably helps that his daughter is quite Anti-Trump (which could be a bit of a tell, no?)
And I do truly believe that even Trump will be seen with some level of nostalgia once he's gone.
If it is any consolation, I was perhaps 16 in 2001 and now that I am 40 I can say that my anger at W has solidified rather than evaporated. For me he will always be the president who made torture official US policy and managed to start not one but two large scale wars which the US ultimately lost. His stupid stunt on that aircraft carrier. Mission accomplished my ass. From US-internal perspective, he was mostly fine, but his foreign policy was quite the disaster, and Trump will be hard-pressed to cause a similar loss of utility even if he decides to invade Greenland.
That's about the sum of it.
Domestically he did introduce a lot of programs for spying and policing that I CONTINUE to disagree with, but foreign policy was, as you say, disastrous, and while I think Obama had a horrible foreign policy record as well, its hard to quantify just how much damage the warmongering did in sheer human lives cost on top of the economics of it. I look back and I cannot think of a SINGULAR positive thing that came out of it.
Okay, we unseated Hussein, but that led to the rise of ISIS (man, haven't thought about them in a while) and a general upswell of sectarian violence in the region. And they can barely hold their official government together. I genuinely appreciate that Trump made his campaign to squash ISIS as limited in scope as he did. EVERY instinct in me assumed he's put boots on the ground and pull us into another boondoggle because that seemed to be SOP by that point.
The Taliban instantly taking back Afghanistan was quite the cherry on top.
If it wasn't for the destruction of libya and the spurning of Erdogan I wouldn't think the current "migrant crisis" would have happened in the EU quite the way it did, with that no rise of nationalistic parties either. They really fucked up the internationalist global consensus they had going on.
Not in the way it did, but easily in a recognizably similar way.
The Arab Spring revealed systemic issues that were underway well before 9-11, and which would have remained primed for violent escalation even without the American invasion of Iraq. People like to focus on how ISIS had an Iraq power base, but are less inclined to note the series of uprisings against the Assad dynasty or Saddam regime, or how the fruitseller in Tunisia who figuratively and literally lit the match was responding to bog-standard petty tyrants common across the region. Names and places would have changed, but the Middle East would still be a tinder box primed to start major- or even larger- humanitarian crisis. Iraq-Iran alone could light Syria in a different way, if an fruit-seller riot spreading to Iraq led to crackdown on the Shia majority when the Iranian paramilitary capability is already present across the region.
In turn, nothing about the Arab Spring divergences would have really changed the African inflows, or the Russian incentive to use humanitarian border rushes via Belarus, or so on. Deviations might change election cycles, but not fundamental drivers.
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