He won simply by refusing to realize he lost and just continuing on as if nothing happened, previous presidents would have tried to walk back their controversial statements and get caught in a PR nightmare. Trump simply was too insane to realize he made a mistake, and the rest of us realized we were so used to “playing the game a certain way”, we had no idea how to deal with Trump.
When Romney was caught on tape talking about how “33% of Americans don’t matter” he knew he was fucked and desperately took pictures of himself looking confused and out of place at a McDonalds to show he’s “Down with the poors! Even eats the same gruel and wine or whatever these Non-5 Star Restaraunts serve…”, which… Didn’t help matters.
With Trump, you catch him bragging about sexual assault and instead of doing an awkward community outreach program where he tries to convince everyone “I’m totally down with the bitches and the hoes!”, further alienating voters in the process, which is what we expect a politician to do… He just goes on talking about how muslims need to wear special IDs and how Mexico is “sending rapists and druglords!”, and… instead of us ever getting to the part where he goes “Oh shit, I shouldn’t have done that.” and start waffling…
People just kinda get used to him being the “says crazy things guy”, it doesn’t matter what he’s saying, he says it with such confidence…
Which is why changing the approach from “Trump is a racist” to “Trump is just… fucking weird and I can’t be the only one who notices this?” works so well, as that gets people to actually stop and go “Oh yeah, that is weird isn’t it?”
It’s like back in 2016 Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush were race horses giving a good show, and a rampaging bull runs out of the track out of nowhere… And instead of going “Oh my God, there’s a rampaging bull on the race track! Evacuate the race track while we call animal control!”
They just start treating the bull like a valid race horse and criticize the Hillary Horse for running “Not so elegantly herself, to be fair to that rampaging bull.” Not because she is, but because they need to seem impartial.
And the audience just said “Okay, I wanna see what the bull’s gonna do.”, and since no one stops him from simply goring the jockeys of the actual equine with his horns, he wins and instead of the Judges (Electoral College) going “Clearly, somehow, somewhere, someone fucked up. We can’t give it to the rampaging bull”, they said “What could possibly go wrong?”
Anyway then Trump threw out Obama’s pandemic response plan, replaced it with nothing, and several tens of thousands died during Covid as a direct result. Because Trump isn’t an elegant race horse navigating the course, he’s a rampaging bull who keeps trying to kill the medical staff when they treat people’s wounds (in this metaphor… when he kept contradicting health experts, including the guy he put in charge of the CDC…), because we’re too used to a rampaging bull not being here to think anything is weird.