Before Trump Broke Democracy, the System Weakened It

This isn’t a crisis of one man. It’s the collapse of trust built by decades of bipartisan lies, media complicity, and a democracy that stopped working long ago.

Why Nobody Trusts a Damn Thing Anymore

The New York Times ran one of its bolder editorials about resisting Trump and saving democracy. As usual, I found it irritating. They still haven’t internalized what’s obvious to most people outside of power: Trump is the symptom, not the disease.

The NYT Editorial Board says,

“It pains us to write these words. Whatever our policy differences with other modern presidents, every one of them fundamentally believed in democracy. They viewed freedom, constitutional checks and balances and respect for political opponents as ‘the bulwark of our Republic,’ as Ronald Reagan said in the opening of his first Inaugural Address, while praising his predecessor Jimmy Carter.”

Paragraphs like that underscore for me that I live in a world different from the editorial board at the Times.

They live in a world where the old lies didn’t feel dangerous—because they weren’t the ones in danger. When the media, government, and corporations lie constantly, the truth becomes impossible to spot. And that's where we find ourselves today—in a world where flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, and 9/11 inside jobbers are breeding like rabbits, while the mainstream media looks on with bewilderment.

That quote shows what happens when you confuse polite rituals with a functioning democracy. Reagan quoting Carter doesn't make the system legitimate; it makes it polite. It's the difference between a country club and a democracy: the first requires decorum, the second demands accountability.

And what we've had, for decades, is the former dressed up as the latter.

If you're Black, poor, undocumented, disabled, or just unlucky enough to be in the wrong house at the wrong time, you already know the system doesn't work the way they say it does.

Ask Courtney Price. She just moved to Elyria, Ohio for a fresh start when the SWAT team burst into her home and lit up the place with flash-bang grenades—blew out the windows while her baby was in a swing by the glass. Her son, Waylon, was on a ventilator with pre-existing heart and lung conditions. After the cops realized they had the wrong house, they left a search warrant for someone who hadn't lived there in over a year. Doorbell audio caught it clear as day: “It’s the wrong house.”

Now the police say the baby was fine. But that night, he stopped breathing. Turns out he had chemical pneumonitis—inflammation from the flash-bangs—and burns on his face and chest. But the official line? Nothing to see here. Move along.

This isn't a one-off. This happens all the time. FBI raids, local cops, wrong houses, wrong people, dead dogs, injured babies—and no one's held accountable. It's just another day of “standard procedure.”

And it gets worse. Cops can straight-up take your property—your cash, your car, your house—without even charging you with a crime. It's called civil asset forfeiture. In 2014, police departments seized more property from Americans than burglars did. They don't need to prove you're guilty. They just need to say your stuff was “involved” in a crime, and then you have to go to court and prove your innocence. The Fourth Amendment? Fifth Amendment? Just suggestions, apparently.

Let’s not forget "free speech zones"—those fenced-off corners where you're allowed to exercise your First Amendment rights far away from anyone who might actually hear you. Or the surveillance state built after 9/11 that tracks your calls, reads your emails, and monitors your movements without a warrant. Or how we’ve locked up whistleblowers who revealed war crimes while protecting the people who committed them.

So when the Times clutches their pearls and says Trump is doing damage unseen since Reconstruction, I gotta say: where have y'all been? And yeah, Trump is a dangerous menace but he didn’t put us in this position he’s taking advantage of it.

This country’s been hemorrhaging democracy by a thousand legal loopholes for decades. Trump didn’t invent the power grab. He just did it without the mask.

I keep hearing the calls for saving rather than restoring democracy. For all the panic about Trump “threatening our elections,” both parties have been undermining genuine democratic representation for generations. Gerrymandering has created districts so mathematically twisted that politicians choose their voters, not the other way around. The Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act piece by piece. Voter ID laws, polling place closures, purged voter rolls—these have been used to suppress minority votes long before Trump appeared.

The Electoral College has handed the presidency to the popular vote loser in 40% of this century's presidential elections. In he U.S. Senate, Wyoming’s 580,000 residents have the same power as California’s 39 million. The filibuster blocks overwhelmingly popular legislation on everything from healthcare to voting rights. None of this started with Trump.

The problem isn’t just that a would-be autocrat is attacking democracy. It’s that the democracy he's attacking has been dysfunctional for decades. Lying down on the tracks to stop Trump without addressing these failures is a band-aid on a bullet wound. Our foundation is cracked—and until we rebuild it, we’re just decorating a condemned building.

So yeah, people are skeptical. They hear something from the FDA, the Fed, the New York Times, or the White House and instinctively don’t believe it. It ain’t mass hysteria, it’s lived experience.

And we’re talking big lies here. Lies that killed millions of people and caused immense suffering. The Grey Lady, at it again, told us Saddam Hussein had WMDs helping to sell that war. Turned out, Dick Cheney and his office were feeding them lies off the record, then Cheney would cite the Times pieces based on his lies to justify the war on TV.

Later, the Times admitted their reporting “was not as rigorous as it should have been.” Too late. Thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were already dead, and we'd spent trillions on a war based on bullshit.

We were told opioids weren’t addictive. Purdue said it. The FDA nodded. Then some of those same regulators went to work for Purdue. Hundreds of thousands of people died. No one went to prison.

We were told the lab leak theory was racist nonsense. Then suddenly, it was “plausible” again. What changed? Not the science. Just the politics.

We’re told we have the best healthcare in the world. But our life expectancy is lower than other rich countries. Most of our gains came from fewer kids dying young, not miracle drugs. But the myth persists, because it keeps the billing system intact.

The Fed says wages have risen. But most people feel poorer, not richer. They’re right. Productivity has soared while wages have stagnated. Our main tool to curb inflation? Increase unemployment, even though we know it kills.

And we’re told our foreign policy is built on human rights. But for months now, we’ve watched Israel kill tens of thousands of Palestinians, bombing hospitals, blocking aid, targeting journalists. Holocaust survivors have called it genocide. Historians have called it genocide. It is genocide. But most U.S. media still won’t say the word. Because saying it would mean admitting complicity.

This is why trust is gone. This is why people roll their eyes at the phrase “protect our institutions.”

The real crisis isn’t Trump. It’s belief. People don't believe this system works anymore—and they're not wrong.

• Wages haven't budged, but costs keep climbing.

• Healthcare bankrupts people every single day.

• Cops raid the wrong house and call themselves the victim.

• The Supreme Court is taking luxury vacations paid for by billionaires.

• The same folks who sold us the last war, the last lie, the last bailout, want us to trust them again.

So when the Times says it “pains them” to write that democracy is in danger, what they really mean is: we liked it better when the system failed more quietly.

They want us to go back to pretending. Pretending that checks and balances still check. That Congress hasn't been handing power to the executive branch for 40 years. That the courts are neutral. That the press is objective. That the problem is the orange man and not the broken machine.

But as long as we treat Trump as the disease, instead of the symptom, we're gonna keep prescribing the wrong medicine. And the next mutation could be even worse.

Until we face what actually led us here, we're not defending democracy. We’re just defending the illusion of one.