It's pretty wild how "normalized" it got within my generation.

What's more wild is how much of the US believes that the other party would be much worse.

To be clear, Republicans are absolutely the current cause of this insanity that's going on. The two party system doesn't help, but Republicans have committed insanity while claiming everyone else is doing worse. Trump is a literal pedophile who openly admitted to hating immigrants his entire life. We all saw this coming.

That's how Russian propaganda works

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

It didn’t. You started paying attention. That’s all that changed. Hillary Clinton was pulling exceptional performance on cattle futures and Paul Pelosi had a strange knack for picking stock that reacted well to laws his wife pushed for. It is brazen today because they’re just launching $MELANIA and shit like that and selling pardons but that’s only because that’s user-visible. If someone siphoned your taxes or performed insider trading you wouldn’t even know.

But corruption has been part and parcel of US politics. Or are we supposed to believe that things like the Chappaquiddick incident were actually innocent accidents?

When I was younger I remember thinking that George Bush pardoning Scooter Libby was outrageous. Then I found out what these people were up to routinely.