Trump's campaign rhetoric so often flirts with incitements to violence that most of those comments scarcely even make the news. We are long accustome… - Mark Danner

[I]n a system of government built on dispersed power that can function only through compromise—in which a policy progresses through the bureaucracy by officials "working" a problem, not dictating a solution—Trump's authoritarian strain was repeatedly frustrated. He knew instinctively how to dominate the news cycle. But for all his self-promotion as a genius in "the art of the deal," his inability to focus or to lead meant that he never figured out how to convert that attention into power within the government that would help him put his policies, however ill-judged, into effect.
Instead he fought against the obstacles that the institutions and the laws represented.

By virtue of Trump's embodied grievance, his shamelessness, and his daring and skill at shaping a narrative—and then, when it is debunked, shaping another—Trump proves himself victorious, again and again, in attracting and holding eyeballs, which are the golden currency of our age. That American politics was destined to be absorbed by television and the communication and entertainment media it spawned could be foreseen as far back as John F. Kennedy, but the "reality star" Donald Trump is this new world's first grand apotheosis.

[Observing the Trump rally at The Ellipse preceding the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021] The imagery of Trumpism is about strength and cruelty and dominance even as the rhetoric is about loss and grievance and victimization: about what was taken and what must be seized back by strength.