This should have come as little surprise. For decades, polls have suggested that many Americans prefer the smack of strong leadership, even at the cost of jettisoning democratic norms. Back in the mid-1990s, for example, one in 16 Americans thought that a military dictatorship would be a “good” or “very good” thing. By 2014, two years before Trump’s shock victory over Hillary Clinton, that figure had leapt to one in six.

The commonplace has it that Trump was a president like no other, especially when it came to trashing so many norms. None of his predecessors incited supporters to storm the US Capitol in a bid to overturn the result of a presidential election. However, the country’s 45th president tapped into a centuries-old tradition of iron-fist US heads of states. Historically speaking, he is not such an outlier as is ordinarily supposed.

President Andrew Jackson, who served between 1829 and 1837, is the most obvious example. Dubbed “King Andrew I”, this brutal former general rode roughshod over Congress and has been likened by historians to an “American Caesar”. John Adams, the country’s second president, tried to ban the opposition, while Thomas Jefferson also subverted the spirit and letter of the constitution. The boldest move of his presidency was also the most legally dubious: the Louisiana Purchase agreed with Napoleon, which almost doubled the size of the United States, was not just a land grab but a power grab.

In the early 20th century, Woodrow Wilson, that supposed paragon of progressive virtue, bordered on the despotic when faced with the twin threats of imperial Germany and the Bolshevik revolution.

Even the saintly Abraham Lincoln was prepared to break the constitution in order to save the union. As the American Civil War raged, “Honest Abe” ripped up the First Amendment by censoring the press and arbitrarily imprisoned thousands of political opponents, some for merely singing Confederate songs. Yet for all his transgressions, he resides still on his historical throne of grace.

Back in the 1930s, when totalitarianism was rampant in Europe, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was frequently assailed for being an American dictator, and for violating the unwritten convention set by George Washington that presidents should serve no more than two terms in office. Yet voters re-elected him three times, thus endorsing his norm-busting.

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First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who suggested to her husband that he should be a “benevolent dictator”, noticed that the line from his 1933 inaugural address that drew the loudest cheers was his call for a strong presidency that would test the bounds of the constitution.

Just as Americans have lionised muscular presidents, they have rejected those perceived as weak. After Watergate, Jimmy Carter dispensed with many of the trappings of Richard Nixon’s imperial presidency, such as the playing of Hail To The Chief when he entered the room. Yet after complaints he had dispensed with too much pomp – former president Gerald Ford complained in 1980 “we have not an imperial presidency, but an imperilled presidency” – he quickly had to summon back the trumpeters.

Nor it is insignificant that men with a martial background and bearing have often ended up as commander-in-chief. Beginning with George Washington, this military roll-call includes Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight D. Eisenhower and lesser-known presidents, such as William Henry Harrison, Franklin Pierce and Zachary Taylor. Other wartime strongmen, such as generals William Sherman and Douglas MacArthur, were urged to run.

History has also looked favourably on presidential rule-breakers. It is not just Trump who has paid homage to Andrew Jackson, whom he looked upon as his presidential soul-mate. Old Hickory’s portrait still adorns the $US20 bill. When Nixon, the only president to resign from office, died in 1994, his funeral was attended by all five living presidents – a posthumous reaffirmation of the legal pardon granted by his successor and one-time vice-president, Gerald Ford. In the post-Watergate rehabilitation of Nixon, we find an augur of the post-January 6 exoneration of Trump.

It is a mistake to think that the disgraced tycoon’s enduring popularity flies in the face of US history, and that he is an ahistorical aberration. Quite the contrary. The fact that he could make a triumphant return to the White House offers yet more proof of the abiding appeal of authoritarian style leadership in American politics.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of the upcoming book, The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.