I'd also argue that Trump IS a big part of the problem.
It takes a truly narcissistic personality to do the damage that he's done. There have been very few people that have been so completely self-absorbed, so fundamentally selfish, so lacking in redeeming qualities, even with the pretty extensive rogue gallery that the GOP has been pushing for the last fifty years. That he was not a career politician I think should also be factored in - he was at least on paper - a plutocrat who managed to buy his way into office, likely with other people's money.
Certainly the conditions favored a Trump - we've been skirting the edge of fascism for a while now, but 2016 became the perfect storm, and Trump was tailor made (as a Russian asset, if nothing else) for the so-called populist push from the right. The Democratic party was bruised and divided, Clinton, while an able politician, also had been in the public spotlight for nearly three decades at that point, and carried with her, right or wrong, an incredible amount of political baggage. Trump lost the general election, but that was not his objective - he just had to cheat sufficiently, and cheating has ALWAYS been his superpower.
We, and by this I mean both parties, don't really know how to deal with cheaters. For Democrats, it's an especially difficult conundrum, because we are by definition the party of law and order ... we have to follow the rules. Trump broke the rules, repeatedly, and most politicians at the time couldn't handle that. His acolytes could and did, but they were not Trump, and in general they fell afoul of those rules.
What makes this year different, in my belief, is that Kamala Harris knows how to deal with cheaters. She knows how to PROPERLY wield the law, and I think that Donald Trump is beginning to realize that he has, in effect, created his opposing force, someone who could check and stop him, and it has him terrified now.
I don't know the future. I hope, very much, that Trump is defeated in a landslide. It's too much to believe that he will be a broken man, you have to have the capacity for reflection and remorse to achieve redemption, and Trump has ALWAYS been broken. He's incapable of feeling remorse for his actions, and his only regret is that he should have cheated even more. However, I hope that he flees the country, because i do not believe that this country is going to be able to heal until Trump is gone.
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