This time around, Trump's campaign would take place in the full knowledge of his authoritarian impulses and his willingness to use violence -- on January 6, 2021. A second Trump presidency would make the first one look conventional and calm. The ex-President, for example, called on Tuesday for homeless Americans to be loaded up from city centers and taken to tented camps. He mocked trans athletes and said presidents should be able to send National Guard troops into Democratic states where governors didn't fight violent crime. He called for quick trials for drug dealers to speed swift executions and demanded the return of "stop-and-frisk" policies in cities that critics decried as institutionalized racism.

"Our country is now a cesspool of crime," the former President said, painting of a vision of country hostage to "drugged out lunatics" and "sadists." He promised to purge the education system and to sack "rogue" bureaucrats who constrained his wildest impulses the first time around.

In short, Trump was advocating an all-powerful presidency that would trample over the guardrails of the law and the Constitution and the elected power of governors. In other words, an administration that would be even more aberrant and authoritarian than his first.