The US has never been a democracy. Did you notice that the person with fewer votes won in 2000 and 2016? It's a plutocracy, designed as such by the so-called founding fathers, wealthy men who were explicitly skeptical of democracy and of course denied the vote—and much else—to women and black men. The electoral college, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the veto, the weak federal government granting much power to the individual states, the difficulty of amending the Constitution, were all intended to curb democracy.

I'm not saying that the founders wanted someone specifically like Trump, though of course they did envision wealthy men in positions of power. But those today who clutch their pearls over "democracy" and "norms" are actually, perhaps ironically, yearning for a stable plutocracy. Many cry over January 6 2021, but I wonder why we didn't have a new American revolution on December 12 2000, for example. The answer could be that Al Gore had more loyalty to plutocracy than to democracy, and was rewarded with great wealth after leaving office, like Clinton and Obama too.