By deregulation of what is allowed to be called “news”, yeah. Though if we were that fragile to begin with… I wouldn’t put all the blame onto him.

Reconstructionism in the American South also played a role, in papering over some of the differences that lead up to the war, rather than dealing with them in a forthright manner, see e.g. Nuremberg trials.

And ofc before that, people outright owned people as slaves, and even today the number of people who simply don’t care in the slightest is extremely high.

i.e., we aren’t so much suffering from something like cancer as we are something more akin to a genetic defect, which even predated the Constitution. That is not to say this was inevitable - we’ve had so very many opportunities to turn back from where we’ve been headed… But neither we, nor the Russian disinformation campaigns directed at us, seem to want that to happen.