If Trump was THAT BAD, personally, why didn't he endorse Hillary and campaign for her?
Anyway I think most people in the GOP were lying to themselves all the way up until November 8th that Trump would finally change once he got elected, but electing him only rewarded his boorish and disrespectful behavior. Why change when he ran and won the presidency on his first try with no experience? It only confirmed his crazy.
I think you're right on both the assumption that he'd change to be more effective and how winning only seemed to verify his delusional world-view.
It wasn't just the GOP who thought he'd change, that 'crazy Trump' was a marketing ploy for the election. I know I thought he'd be a much more effective advocate for (imho, awful) Republican policies, and even though I derided him during the campaign, I never dreamed he would be such an incompetent and stupid president.
And having his 'genius' confirmed is something he shares with Hitler. (Bear with me - this isn't directly about Nazis, fascism, or all the horrors of Hitler's regime.) When Hitler took power, and started making aggressive foreign policy moves, his advisers and general observers thought he was stupidly insane. But he had a string of successes in defiance of conventional wisdom: the Anschluss, Alsace-Lorraine, Sudetenland. Hitler became convinced he was a supra-genius, and his conservative advisers fearful fools. He went all in, with Poland, then France and finally with Russia.
And it was on that last one that probability caught up to him. Hitler had never been a genius. He was just a guy who, in essence, got lucky and had favorable circumstances. But I doubt he ever understood that, except maybe at the end right before killing himself.
Most of Trump's life, especially his time as a politician, has been the same. While we on the left can criticize Clinton for losing to
Donald Trump of all people, the same is true from the other side. How much 'political genius' did it really take to win against a Democrat who's a poor campaigner with low charisma, embroiled in an FBI investigation, in 2016. One who's also the first woman major party nominee and has had mud (earned and not) flung at her for
decades?
That Trump is mentally ill in ways that will only confirm his biases will just exacerbate the problem. Trump is going to keep thinking how awesome he is, until he makes an 'bigly' decision that explodes and sets off some sort of uncontrollable conflagration.
