The Nazi / Hitler comparison was always a poor fit, in my view. But what most people were actually saying was just "this person does not care about the laws and values that keep our government from being a tyranny".

And what happened is like Y2K: People who recognized the risks successfully worked to mitigate the worst of them. It's not really surprising, but it is frustrating, that just like with Y2K, many people thus concluded that it was not necessary to mitigate the risks.

For many people, mitigating risks provides evidence that there were never any risks in the first place. (You can probably think of more examples of this.)

But unfortunately, people were correct when they identified that Trump's character combined with increasing control over one of the two political parties could pose a that to our system. And now it's harder to mitigate the problem, because the control over the party has advanced significantly further.