At the same time I'm not sure what people expected when the political momentum was built entirely around the rallying cry of "restoring norms". What did people think that meant?
The norms involved lying about a war that destabilized an entire region and absolutely no attempts were made to ever hold anyone accountable for it. (And yes, it was known that the reports about Iraq trying to obtain yellowcake from Nigeria was fraudulent before the war started. People in power either didn't know (which means that they are incompetent), or didn't care. Either way it makes it pretty clear that they aren't people you can trust overall. It was not just a matter of "bad intelligence" but people not giving a damn and wanting to a do a thing anyway and content to use whatever justification they could, or people being dumb fucks with less awareness of world events than a high school sophomore, despite their all-important expertise, experience, and qualifications.
Why would people have thought returning to those norms (even if we could, which we can't) would be sufficient to get us out of all the messes we are in? The goal of the political project was to attempt to restore the status quo, not to solve current problems or secure a future or anything like that. The thinking even of the "progressive" party was more or less backwards looking as well... given that, how can it possibly be suited to the present moment?
I hate to say it, but to me it seems like the reason people fell for "restore the norms" was that they just don't care about the human cost of our imperial adventures if it isn't something the media is running a story on 24/7 (like women in Afghanistan recently). It took Americans dying from COVID in the US for them to feel like we'd drifted from some sort of acceptable baseline, and that might be giving people too much credit. More likely it was more about Melania tearing up the rose garden and the "dignity of the office" and so forth.
At least Obama offered a vague "hope and change". It was never really explained exactly what that mean (what exactly will change?), but that was part of the genius in it. People could fill in the blanks for whatever they liked. This time we just got bullshit about a mythical past, except unlike the ones conservatives talk about, this was one within living memory of everyone of voting age, who should have been able to see that it wasn't all that great before Trump swooped in.
I realize morally hectoring people for waking up from apathy too late does nobody any good and people hate it, but I just need to vent. We've been living in a 1984-esque world where truth doesn't matter since way before Trump. Trump didn't invent the "post truth" era, he's just trashy enough that people lost comfort with it. I know this is going to read as an obnoxious "I told you so" statement which it probably is, but I feel a need to say it regardless. It turns out shrugging off wrongdoing abroad has ripple effects that enable wrongdoing domestically.