Trump winning the election wasn't necessarily because he was "objectively wanted". It could be because he was less disliked than Biden at the time. Plus I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people voted Trump but then his first couple of weeks made them go "hang on a sec...".
> Trump winning the election wasn't necessarily because he was "objectively wanted".
Isn't that exactly what the popular vote is though? Maybe people weren't passionate about it, but my loose understanding of the US popular vote is it's quite direct unlike preferential voting, so the people who chose him actively chose _him_.
I'm not saying there aren't regrets, but it seems to me defintively that the majority of voters selected him as the president they wanted.
Well, you said it's "odd" if people don't trust Trump, since they voted him in. I'm saying that plenty of votes may have been because they trusted Biden even less. In a 2-party system it's difficult to distinguish between "I want A" and "I really don't want B".
Trump is a populist. Populism is sort of like an advertiser being surprised when he discovers that sex sells even though no one ever talks about it. The ultimate trump card in modern politics is to pander to those sorts of predilections. One of the responsibilities of the ruling class is to temper many of the primal instincts that people have, which requires handing out bitter medicine. But that only works if everyone in the ruling class agrees. If one elite breaks the consensus and chooses betrayal in this prisoner's dilemma and survives, then he instantly wins the popularity game. That's why it's called populism.