Was it really though? Let's just put the names Nixon and G.W Bush Jr. here. There's no reason to believe that politicians stopped being crooks since the time of H.L. Mencken. The main "principle" was catering to sponsors, rich buddies, special interests and the military-industrial complex handling out cushy jobs post-presidency.
>Theories with zero credibility are being treated as hard fact.
So like WMDs? Which were not just some "fake news" that played for 10 minutes in the media like we have now, but an orchestrated political attempt, that featured prominently in the NYT and other media, and was the excuse for a whole war.
That was not a Pizza-gate "National Enquirer" level BS or "attack on Bowling Green" stunt. Those fake news cost thousands of human lives on both sides, a destroyed country that got from relative stability to civil war / fundamentalist hellhole, and a trillion or so dollars. And also resulted in hefty profits (that trillion had to end in some pockets, even if they were arms manufacturers and contractors).
Or like the whole absurd "Russia hacked the elections" meme, when not only there's been no proof released, but even if those pesky Russians did what they are supposed to have done (released some internal docs and such) at best it's a minor incident with negligible impact on the election results (not to mention: nobody says those docs were false: just that the public shouldn't have known the truth. Not to mention: that's like 1/1000th of what the CIA used to do all around the world to get favorable election results).