Yes, read history or take a serious gov class.

This was almost a 1:1 repeat of 2016 and yet lemmy is still getting spammed with denialism posts with hundreds of upvotes.

Trump is representative of the systemic issues America has left unresolved, not a cause, and the writing has been on the wall for decades; so much so that people think old media (ex: simpsons) was very cunningly predicting the future when in reality it was parodying the same issues at the time.

The one key difference has been the rather recent introduction of the internet. You can often find both much more reliable and higher quality information in less than a minute that what you could get from something like 10 newspapers combined 30 years ago. Especially for the younger generation, not everyone is falling for the same stupid tricks anymore.

Great example is Washington Post. People think it dropped in quality after it was bought by Bezos, but ask any international academic and they’ll probably tell you WaPo was always hot trash.

All this stuff you see being “worse” has been predicted for years on end, so while you can technically say it is “new”, it’s nothing unexpected. Even the next level filthy mouth ramblings of Trump are just something the previous guy did off camera (cough bush).