I think you're giving FAR too much credit to her. I don't see her as polished or crafty at all. I mean really QUITE the opposite of that. Rather, I attribute her success to the UTTERLY stupid people who voted for her. They are stupid and most concerned about virtue signaling.
Yes, stupid can be an explanation. Isolated in their media bubble can be another.
Tyranny is perpetrated by mass quantities of ordinary people who have been convinced that they are serving a righteous cause. Very few go all in to something they believe to be inherently evil.
An example is the Rona. You have relatives who are no longer part of your life because of their strident belief in the vaccine, masks, isolation and shutdowns, right? Did they believe those things were going to help or hurt the population? Why or why not? The evidence is clear that the vaccines rolled out under Operation Warp Speed were usless at stopping covid, as were masks and isolation which itself brought along many unexpected (?) consequences. One of those consequences is that now people in a different media bubble have come to believe ALL vaccines are bad. In 2026 measles is making a comeback in the USA (!!!).
America, when it falls, it will not be due to an armed invasion. It will be from inside the country, a civil war where multiple sides who believe they are righteous in their cause see the other side as an existential threat. Social media is the most likely source of this strife.
How much of your day is spent on TikTok? The app was developed by the CCP and blocked in their own country, because, reasons. Congress passed a law banning it. The president signed the law. SCOTUS upheld the constitutionality of the law. Yet it has not been enforced for over a year. This should alarm any constitutional absolutist! Yes, it was sold, finally. But the CCP still has the algorithm and a majority of ownership. The enemy is coming in through our phones and screens, sent by troll farms in Russia, China, N Korea, Iran. They are accounts that have hot babes or Chads or Greek statues as their avatars and we are more willing to believe what they tell us is important than what is important to our actual human neighbors.
The great beauty of our Constitution, the thing that wrote American Exceptionalism into existence, is the requirement for persuasion and compromise to get anything done. The media and news bubbles we are living in has made those two concepts seem weak and unpatriotic. Our Founders saw a small, slow and unresponsive government as a feature, not a bug.