Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls" -Aristophanes The public learns the lesson that X is necessary when they see the consequence of not-X. Hopefully there is a gap between total lawlessness and the public realising that some laws are good and not just "red tape".
I had hoped that things under trump would have been much worse, so as to shock the public into re-evaluating their civic values.
An alternate response to "Things aren't bad enough for people to change their ways," is to revise our predictions of the likelihood of catastrophe, and eventually decide that perhaps things aren't quite as doomed as we think.
For things like climate change, where we have scientific evidence of the necessity of change, it seems like it needs to get worse before the change will happen, though I still don't hope for things to get worse. But for something as subjective as civic values, it seems especially wrong to me to hope for disaster just for the sake of shaking things up. After all, there's no guarantee that a disaster under Trump would move civic values in the right direction anyway.