Comment by simoncion

> ...although if you were inattentive you might expect that it was the opposite.

Speaking as a USian:

If one hasn't been paying attention, one might have missed the deterioration of the courts and law enforcement apparatus, the normalization of many types of fraud (accounting included), the consolidation of news companies and subsequent decimation of effective investigative journalism, as well as the gradual deterioration of healthcare over the past several decades (with bonus acceleration of the healthcare deterioration around 2019 when folks decided to get the fuck out of a profession run by people who evidently gave few shits about the safety and wellbeing of its practitioners and the efficacy and timeliness of the care given to those served by it).

I'll not claim that this Administration isn't the most visibly worse one we've had in quite a while, because that's plainly untrue. This Administration does do absolutely awful things that -in a just world- folks would be tried and imprisoned for, and do those things very loudly and visibly. But, well, there's a lot of precedent for Administrations doing (and/or turning a blind eye to) just godawful things.