Unfortunately, decades of media conditioning and extreme polarization has led to a situation in which the normal checks and balances have been severely degraded

Unfortunately, decades of media conditioning and extreme polarization has led to a situation in which the normal checks and balances have been severely degraded or are non functional. A significant fraction of the population is happy to overlook excesses from 'their' side. Combine that with extreme gerrymandering and you have the recipe for a situation where a majority of elected lawmakers have no real fear of an election loss. We have a situation where the same people who were apoplectic about Hunter Biden's laptop are whistling past things like the pardon of George Santos and the Binance founder(with Trump admitting he didn't who CZ was). There is no easy path back from this situation. Democracies that have reached this stage of late have struggled to come back.