I currently live in a country where an evil man once achieved absolute power and was universally called The Leader (der Führer). He gained power democratically, his party collecting roughly 30% of the vote from people who knew exactly what he stood for. After all, he had laid out his plans in detail in his book, and his brown shirted mobs had been bullying their way around the streets for years. At his rallies, vast crowds strained to get a glimpse of him, often with tears of joy and vapid, awed expressions marring their faces. Some would actually faint with excitement.
Once he had the power, he got rid of any form of opposition media. He had no need to justify the way people were taken out of their homes in the middle of the night, or how he started his wars, because there were no journalists left to question it. Listening to anything but the official state radio was a punishable offense - even a capital offense once the war began. Radios were produced which didn't even pick up distant stations like the BBC, so radio had a single voice (not much different than AM radio in the U.S. Today).
As a result, his support grew. His rallies became even more extreme.
Then came the fall. One can argue that his loss of popularity was merely because he had brought destruction and defeat to the country, but whatever the reason, it was over. And the moment the state propaganda machine was dead, a different kind of thinking took root. Within a short time, it became nearly impossible to find anyone who admitted they had supported him. The adoring sycophants at his rallies had all conveniently died in the war, or so went the explanation.
Jump forward 75 years.What will happen after the fall of Trump? If his propaganda machine -Fox News, Sinclair, Limbaugh - finally dies off, and the indefensible is no longer defended, how long will it take for the deluded millions to discover what he did to the country, and how long before they start finding it uncomfortable to admit they were among his followers?
Predicting how Trump will be regarded in the future is easy - this will be considered one of the worst moments in America's history. Future generations aren't going to understand how it happened and are going to be demanding explanations, and it's going to be hard to find honest explanations among the really guilty – the Trump voters and the current GOP.
There are countless people in the country where I live who are ashamed of what their grandparents were. Some write books as a sort of atonement, others simply won't talk about it. I suspect America is going to reach the same point.