Americans have never understood politics well enough for a drop-off in our attention span to matter. The Founders provided for state legislatures to pick senators, and they actually thought that electors would be wise men chosen for their ability to figure out who would be a good President.

A representative democracy manages by exception. The assumption has always been that the people would be too busy producing goods and services to worry about politics. When things are good, we vote for the incumbent; when they are bad, we vote for the other guy. The worse things get, the worse the other guy can be. In Obama's last term, Congress never had an approval rating over 20%.. So the people elected an asshole because he was the otherest guy they could find.

The fault lies with the people responsible for Congress's low approval rating. For me, that's Mitch McConnell, a scumbag who abused the filibuster where a statesman would have fixed it. The 60-votes-in-the-Senate dynamic has killed compromise and with it good government. It's the pinhole in the balloon through which all the air escapes. The modern filibuster rule made our government hijackable, and it is being hijacked. Trump is surely a threat to democracy, but no bigger a threat than democracy, as practiced by our Senate (including Democrats, who have had the chance but not the wisdom or courage to fix the rules) has been to itself.