I think the really striking thing is that for whatever reason there was a common perception, particularly amongst his supporters, that Trump has some sort of policy-based critique on America's role in the world. It probably comes from the fact that a normal person is likely to have that sort of critique. Plenty of people criticize the purpose, morality, and efficacy of American military interventions abroad. That's a normal part of discourse in this country and have been since the early days of the Republic. Trump got a real pass from people who simply assumed that this is what he was talking about the whole time.
But Trump has no policy critiques because he doesn't even comprehend things on that level. He's not arguing whether patriotism is a worthwhile value to espouse, he's not sure what that word even means. He's only able to pantomime the values of others. His critique on our involvement in Iraq, likewise, has always been that it went wrong - because he wasn't the one in charge. He has, obviously, no problem with American foreign intervention save for the part where he's not involved. For all of the anti-war people who somehow decided that Trump was somehow a voice of reason - the unsaid half was always that he was anti-war when it doesn't involve his direct leadership. Plainly, he happily will send troops to their deaths, frequently on arbitrary whims and pointless exercises, as long as he's in charge. Because he has no innate sense of morality or principles he's not above defending any value society at large finds repugnant, because he doesn't understand that feeling of repugnance. He praises Nazis, white supremacists, and terrorists because, in almost self-parody, he literally thinks they did nothing wrong.
And this sort of stunted moral compass is such an aberration that a significant chunk of Americans are simply in denial that any person can be like that at all. That, and an exaggerated, practiced pantomime act he spent his life using and reusing, means that unless you are able accept the notion that he is so aberrant that your heuristics in evaluating someone's values in relations to your own is entirely erased so you can look at a person completely as a blank slate, there's almost no way to fit what Donald Trump actually is into anyone's normal moral framework. And so many simply give him a pass and pretend like he's talking about what a normal person is talking about in the context. That is, as it turns out, almost never the case. He is actually supporting neo-Nazis who happen to vote for him, like how he is actually talking about wanting to fuck his daughter, like how he actually does not understand the debate on America's role in the world. We let him onto the adults table, but he's only having kids table conversations, and can only kids table conversations because it's all he can understand.