I keep coming back to "all this for literally Donald Trump," but it fits. There's not some more competent aspiring autocrat who'd somehow "earn" or "win" this. This is how it has always gone: feckless/evil elites attaching themselves to the sociopath they believe will get them where they want to go.
Some of it predates him. There's FedSoc guys from the Bush Jr era who have been pushing for the "unitary executive" idea of the Presidency (at least when Republicans have it), where the President is essentially a King who can only be constrained by Congress withdrawing funding for concessions.
