If anything, those four years showed how poorly the system holds up against bad actors simultaneously in all branches. I'm not sure how you can solve that, though.

Yeah, it's an extremely fragile system and it only takes a few dozen people out of 350 million to end democracy in this country.

- You only need a few dozen state reps in a few swing states to override the popular vote and choose their own electors.

- 51 senators to reject the election results.

- A rigged Supreme Court that could choose a case from a lower court related to elections and rule whatever they want.

We think we have a robust and stable democracy, but we're already halfway there in most of these events.

Corruption is a rot, slow, like a corpse decomposing. It's an ongoing process that is only opposed by daily actions of cleaning off barnacles. America collected a lot of barnacles from those four years, and the rate at which they've been purged is probably too low. The recent spate of anti-voter laws and gerrymandered districts just shows the steal is ongoing.

And those 4 years are not over yet, the echoes continue.

I am reminded by Julius Caesar, who, unlike Donald Trump, was smart and competent. Caesar pushed against institutional democracy in Rome (such as it was) and found that very little pushed back.

Only one of the stab wounds was fatal. Without the one (barring sepsis), he would have been emperor himself.

Not that it ended up helping any.

The one destroying the republic was gone, but the destruction remained.

Gaius didn't destroy the republic, he just wanted to be the one to step up to the throne of its shambline corpse. And it would have worked, if not for those meddling... senators.