Every strongman is not a hitler, mao or stalin. Especially, when they come through with largely "free" elections.
Abuse of power as President is different from putting 6 million people in gas chambers and marching around and being responsible for deaths to 10s of millions of people.
To be fair, the issue here is that he seemed to be an undesirable despot. A good despot is actually better than a democracy, but they are just terribly risky every regime change. And a bad despot is.. well, terrible.
Like Nazi Germany grew stronger and stronger and grew to be the leader of Europe (+)?
((+) until it was vanquished of course by democratic countries -- but where do you find democratic countries, when you need one?)