One of the things that people ought to understand (but generally don't) is that any form of democracy — any form of government, in fact, but democracy is particularly sensitive to the principle — runs on institutions, not laws. Democratic institutions are generally accepted norms of behavior that people adhere to not because they are afraid of punishment, but because they respect other citizens, and respect the form of government as valid and legitimate in and of itself. In that sense, it hardly matters whether Trump's actions are illegal. The question of their legality should never arise, because the actions deeply violate political norms in the USA.
And for those 'law and order' minded people, no: a system in which everything was controlled and mediated by laws would not and could not be a democracy. That would be a totalitarian regime by definition.
The problem we have with Trump is that Trump does not respect anything. He does not respect our form of government, at least not in any way that he might allow institutions to exercise control over his own behavior. He does not respect other citizens. All he wants from other people is blind loyalty, and he doesn't even respect that (judging by the number of his own supporters he has been willing to throw under the bus when they have outlived their usefulness). Trump is transactional and teleological: he decides what he wants, and he does whatever he thinks is the easiest and surest way of getting it. Our institutional norms mean nothing to him at all, except that he knows that violating those norms will piss his political opponents off, so violating them (in his mind) is a win for him either way.