At this point, most of Trump's inner circle can't risk a return to rule of law. Without a Republican president securing pardons, many people in power can get jailed.
Strongmen are hard to replace, but that creates power struggles within the inner circle rather than a calm return to liberal democracy.
Project 2025 was written and executed competently because of people other than Trump. There will be a Project 2029, a similar step towards autocracy.
With Google replacing its search with AI and similar substitutions being made across media, the information that people will be consuming >90% of the time will be malleable everywhere all at the same time in the same way.
Those data centers popping up everywhere aren't being built for nothing, they want AI to be so plentiful as to suffuse everything, so that events can simply be hallucinated into or out of existence, and you can't tell the difference between Mandela Effect, Memory Hole, or genuine change in available evidence.
This is why tech company leaders were put in the most prominent position during the inauguration; it is through them that the post-truth state of a stable fascist regime will be accomplished.
They can't let this project go to waste. They've invested trillions in this, committed countless felonies, and burned bridges with allies and economic partners across the world. Either they continue to commit or their ambitions collapse forever.