What you're missing is nuance.
When you say "the obviously erratic, racist, bigoted, tax-dodging, incompetent, incoherent, sexually assaulting idiot", you're taking the opposition beliefs as fact, just like the Republicans who claim Clinton is an "obviously erratic deathly ill man-hating murdering warmongering power-hungry alcoholic liar."
Look at each candidate from their point of view. For example:
> thinks if you win an election you get to lock up your opponents like a crazy third world state.
Trump does not believe he can lock people up arbitrarily. He believes he can appoint a special prosecutor to look into Clinton's alleged wrongdoing surrounding her emails. He believes the only reason no prosecution happened already is because of political pressure.
There's a huge difference there. You may still, reasonably, find that belief concerning, but it's on a whole different level than "Trump believes he can lock up his opponents" just because he wins. Generally when you look into any claim about Trump or Clinton the reality is a lot more reasonable than one side or the other makes it seem. There are billions of dollars and massive, organized campaigns doing everything they can to paint everything the other person does as insane.
In general, the Clinton campaign is better at this, because they don't go around actively antagonizing the media like the Trump campaign does, and they have a lot more experience in the field. That said, you do still see of total nonsense about Clinton treated as fact even in "objective" sources - let alone the kind of insanity that propagates in the conservative media. For example, the latest meme is that the Clintons had Scalia murdered because of a wet-works email (that is actually about something totally different if you do even a little investigation.)