My daughter and son in law (sil) are middle of the road, maybe even conservative leaning. But they hate Trump, especially my aeronautical engineer sil, hate hate HATES him with a passion. We had such a big fight about it once (he'd been drinking and wouldn't drop it) that I have to refuse to even discuss politics with him at all.
They're staying with me right now while they look for a house. Tonight we all took our dogs outside before bed and he walked over and stood beside me. Looking around the yard, he quietly (sadly?) said "I find myself missing Trump". I was stunned and said nothing. He turned and walked slowly into the house.
I.......I can't EVEN.
Trump was the punching bag, a rage outlet for a lot of people. I think a lot of people genuinely are addicted to rage and need the cortisol rush, or whatever the hell rage produces.
Now that he's not there, maybe they are realizing they're raging against the wrong thing.
Stay quiet, don't question it, don't provoke anything, and maybe he'll elaborate.
I see that sooo much with some of my husband's liberal relatives. They use capital letters to point out the hate they feel in the comments on FB. But I can also see how they were whipped to that by the Dem groups on FB. OccupyDemocrats had multiple memes/posts a day that they would share and would make me livid but they LOVED them. I have to save OccupyDemocrats is much quieter now!
After the 2016 election, I noticed that a lot of the hyperbole that was being thrown at Trump sounded familiar - "He's going to take away Women's rights!" and "He'll be harassing the gays and rounding them up!".
The impression I got from all this was the possibility that since 9/11, people (women in particular) had a deep - and subconscious - fear of Islam. Not surprising since the media continually stoked that fear when it served them. BUT because the Collectivists didn't dare criticize Islam, they couldn't express it for fear of being cancelled, so they projected all that fear onto Orange Man Bad. The reactions were just so over-the-top for it to be just Hillary losing the election. She's just not that charismatic or likeable a person.
After that, it just started to look disturbingly similar to Orwell's "2 Minute Hate".