Your first paragraph is exactly right in it's questions. Depending on how successful Trump ultimately is, will his successor be able to continue.

Your 2nd paragraph is hard for me, a US citizen, to see. Reagan was in fact a complete faker and a liar. US religious leaders are also fakers and liars.

Your second paragraph is right on the money.

The difference now is that prior politicians had at least some interest in actually governing the country. That limited just how viciously they could engage with their political opponents. There was never any golden age of collegiality, to be sure, but even people like Newt Gingrich wanted to at least try running the country in between political campaigns.

And yet there's no immediately apparent runner-up gigabastard. All of the politicians, even Trump's most dedicated sycophants, are still hampered by the notion of wanting to actually run the nation. It doesn't work without a 100% commitment to smashing your enemies. If you let the conversation drift to figuring out valid policies, people lose attention, and realize that you're an idiot.

None of the other tech-bros seem to have it, either. If Musk or Zuckerberg or Bezos run for office, they're going to discover that people don't actually like them. They're smart enough to think that they can actually talk about policy, and nobody really likes policy. They want simplistic, vacuous solutions. Musk has the requisite cruelty to distract people from that, but he's not enough of a buffoon to really entertain the far right.

Musk kind of does a similar thing, and it _kind_ of works for him, but not as well as it works for Trump. It's a bit of an oddity, alright.