TBF I think his rise should have demonstrated to everyone where politics-as-bargaining ends up - in absurdity.
From this side of the pond, the US political system has for years been completely and utterly dysfunctional. It produces bad leaders, bad policy and bad outcomes for the US and the world. The few people (on both sides) who do turn up and try to reform it invariably either get personally compromised by trying to make the system work or get sidelined / ridiculed.
In that sense it should be entirely understandable why people, deep down, support him. They are wrong, but the current alternative is also wrong.
Politics-as-bargaining works, provided people send competent representatives to Washington. That hasn't been happening reliably for some time now. If you want my opinion, decades of gerrymandering have resulted in the House being filled with members who can get re-elected by posturing to a local audience without any obligation to produce results. They can get away with just blaming the other side for their failures. It's not much different in the states with 'safe' Senate seats, which is a lot of them.
Most House general elections are not competitive, and the electoral threat is from within one's own party. That gave the Speakers and their strong fundraisers in leadership far more power over the rank and file than they had possessed in decades, which is why we see far more party line votes in the House than we once did. We're back to pre-Civil War politics, fighting over indivisible social issues, and having the most extreme politicians on both sides vacuum up the media oxygen. Reality is that extremism is newsworthy, and that maps directly onto fundraising and political survival in the present environment.
There's a stack of quality bargaining theory that says this never ends well. Crazy as it may sound, we want politicians fighting over zeroes in budget deals and pork barrel politics. If it makes any sense, it's similar to how we would prefer EU politicians to be fighting over terms of trade than over immigration.
When we fight over numbers, there's an underlying assumption that we're better off together than we are separately. Problems tend to get solved as a result. Once we start fighting over things that are indivisible, that underlying assumption breaks down. Somebody 100% wins and somebody 100% loses on any binary-outcome issue, and the fight becomes finding a way to stick it to the other side. That pathway leads to dysfunction and divorce.
