Dictators don't spring up over night: they achieve and maintain power because people don't care enough to defend democracy. It takes time for people to lose faith in democracy. Either that or they never had any faith in it at all and desired an authoritarian form of government from the beginning.
During the election, and even after he won it, Trump has continuously worked to delegitimatize American democracy by asserting, despite plenty of evidence that says otherwise, that widespread electoral fraud and various conspiracies were acting against him. The entire system was "rigged against him". This is the exact same kind of rhetoric that would-be autocrats use to justify dispensing with democracy.
That alone should disqualify him from the presidency since he's intentionally harming societies support for democracy itself. Evidently it wasn't. Instead he won showing that a significant portion of the electorate isn't concerned with the health of their democracy and instead put far more importance on bread and circuses.
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