I realize this probably isn’t a penetrating insight unique to me, but I’ve come to the conclusion that what Donald Trump and the right-wing machine that supports him really want is to be seen as strong and powerful, like the US is supposed to be in the comic-book version of US history these people are fond of. The easiest way to achieve this is to throw your weight around oppressing people while rationalizing this oppression as a fight for freedom and justice, and the quickest and most obvious way to do this is to declare war on someone and then bomb them back into the Stone Age.
There is no obvious opportunity to do this, however — someone is already doing it in Gaza, for example, and in Ukraine, and Russia and China are too big a target. So the next best thing is to oppress your own people! All you have to do is find — or better yet, create — enemies within, a strategy that has worked very well for plenty of dictators in the past. Invent a reason why they are bad, hold them up as an example, imprison or rendition them, and brag about the result. And it seems that some proportion of the US population is more than willing to accept this as a substitute for real strength.