I also hope you're wrong but worry that you're right. The irony is that the left may be helping to create the future authoritarian tyrant they've spent the past 4+ years falsely claiming Trump is. That's something that really worries me - it's easy to see the creeping authoritarianism of the left today, but backed into a hopeless corner, a strongman on the right could very well rise up to confront it. The result will be that we're all fucked.
I still have so much trouble understanding how anyone with 2 brain cells could simultaneously entertain the notion that Trump is an authoritarian dictator, but also that he's one of the only heads of state who didn't use covid to pursue massive unilateral power grabs and allowed federalism to play out and states/governors to manage their own affairs. Then when the most widespread riots in my lifetime broke out, he still held back and didn't seize any more unilateral power. He is also the first authoritarian dictator in history to have nearly the entire press against him for his whole term, for none of them to be jailed or prosecuted, and to either lose an election or to have so little power as to not be able to prevent it from being stolen. A true tyrant indeed! The cognitive dissonance involved to think this is beyond my imagination.
You don't even have to be a Trump supporter to realize this. Honest lefties like Jimmy Dore and Glenn Greenwald, who both hate Trump, know this too. Naturally they are sidelined and marginalized by the mainstream press for pointing it out.
But Greenwald just published a great piece about this very topic here, in which he makes a compelling case that Bush/Cheney were significantly more authoritarian and worse than Trump, and while he writes from a left wing perspective that I don't share, I think he's spot on about this, and if the left was honest instead of blatantly opportunist, they'd agree too.
But to the main point, I worry you're right and the arrogance and lack of any sense of scale or introspection of the left, will create the actual monster they have spent 4 years pretending Trump is.