I was pretty shocked not only at how far right media twisted the contents of the Podesta emails into wild conspiracy theories like PizzaGate etc, but fully disgusted at the sheer volume of people who just ate all that up without a moment of critical thinking.
Even still, no sane person thought that Trump was going to win. Even the couple days before the election, all the polls had Hillary up by a wide margin. I highly doubt that Julian was hoping for a Trump presidency. I think it's much more likely that he was imagining a Clinton presidency, but where people were a lot more critical of her actions.