When President Donald Trump left Washington last January after losing his noisy battle to overturn the 2020 election, it was tempting to heave a sigh of relief and rejoice that the guardrails of democracy had held.
But there was a more sobering lesson in our near-miss with a coup d'état: Those supposed barriers were more fragile than we knew. They're really just a vulnerable fabric of laws, rules and norms.
And during his four years in the White House, Trump appeared bent on shredding all of them.
