It seems that more people are drawn, or even compelled, to attach to extreme points of view over what used to be the norm. Why is that?
"If it bleeds, it leads" - Increasingly the media is drawn to covering extreme points of view because that is what appears to get more readers, viewers and ratings. In fact it has come to our attention that Meta (formerly Facebook) was increasingly stoking anger because it appeared to connect more with members than calmness.
Oxytocin is no match for an adrenaline rush - Oxytocin is what underlies compassion, empathy and emotional connectedness and enables new mothers to bond with their infants and children even when those children scream, tantrum or won't feed or sleep. It is necessary for the survival of the species. On the other hand, most of the tech CEOs - Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, Pichai, Cook - are not particularly good at emotional connection and some are even on the Spectrum (Musk said on Saturday Night Live that he had Asperger's Syndrome). As a result, emotional connection doesn't drive them. However excitement which is fueled by adrenaline and especially an adrenaline rush does. And they have addicted the masses to seeking out excitement and adrenaline rushes over emotional connectedness, i.e. excitement trumps emotional connectedness. However the only thing more powerful than the excitement of an adrenaline rush is the angst of an adrenaline crash. As a result, people have to keep feeding an adrenaline rush to avoid the crash and this is what corporate America knows and keeps stoking by selling products and experiences that will keep the excitement going. Coming from the business vs. service world, Trump instinctively knows this and will turn any adverse event - such as merchandising his mug shot and selling his aggrieved victimhood to his base, who feel excited by it and will fund him to keep it going.
"The only thing we have to fear is the fury of runaway grievance" - FDR famously said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," because he knew that once fear got out of control it could turn into panic which would cause chaos. Trump knows that once you tap into the aggrieved victim mindset, it frees you of taking any responsibility for solving things because the power of blaming others and making your problems someone else's fault is so seductive and addictive.
Can we get the genie of aggrieved victimhood back in the bottle? - I think there is a way. What might do that is having a series of publicly televised town hall meetings with Republican and Democratic congress members with extreme points of view (such as AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene), but are able to not scream over or interrupt each other (that might be a challenge, because by definition, extremism doesn't listen to anyone that has a different point of view). A skilled facilitator/moderator (maybe a Chris Wallace or even a Luke Russert, if he wants to step back into his dad Tim Russert's shoes, which I doubt) would then proceed to ask these people what matters most to them, what their most strongly held points of view are and then what caused them to come to those beliefs and why and more importantly what did they rule out and why, to arrive at them. Validating these people's paths to their extreme positions (a.k.a. empathy) can go a long way into calming people down and bringing them back towards a more normative point of view and the chance to turn diatribes into dialogues. You can’t walk in someone else’s shoes and step on their toes at the same time. See this article to give you a taste of that in action: The Vaccine Debate: How to Turn and Argument into a Productive Dialogue.