The USA became this through Trump being elected.
It was reinforced with Ronald Reagan. Remember how he spun the Iranian revolution and the bad economy on his opposition? Remember how he rode the Moral Majority wave?
It was taken up a notch by G. W. Bush and his band of trigger-happy self-serving country club elitists.
No one in between those points tried to roll back the progress. They're just as guilty. It's been a monotonic increasing function towards the current apex (nadir?).
Fear what comes next. If there is a next.
One could argue that the courts or congress/senate may not have been favorable during their time, but that wasn't true during the entire combined 20 years they had.
(siddnote - I think "nadir" was the answer to a crossword clue I was stumped on. I'd never heard it before that. And I thought I'd never hear it again. Interesting coincidence!)
An America that didn't like fascism would have never even let this man win the primary.
The rise of right-wing propaganda mass media has been simmering brains for 3 decades in a populist, grievance and resentment stew and positioned things perfectly for right-wing propaganda to explode in the internet age - once social media came around, it was a renaissance for the paranoid-style radical right-wing demagogues, and they exploded in numbers and reach. In turn, that tilled the soil for a Trump figure to come along to disrupt things.
Trump basically took all the recurring themes of grievance from right-wing media to the extreme to turbo-charge the anxiety and fear of the right, including most things that were generally considered wrong for politicians to say/do.
It's almost hard to remember the before-times, but Trump was the first modern presidential ticket that outright attacks the media (calling them the enemy of the people, fake news, etc) to de-legitimize them - it used to be a point of pride in this country that politicians didn't do stuff like this, because it's a feature of authoritarian regimes, not democracies. Right-wing audiences were very used to hearing that sort of thing though, because it was a common feature of the right-wing propaganda media they had been boiling in for years.
I can look past some of the stupid shit he says. He gets freedom of speech too, even if it is stupid speech. But attacking the press is insane.
That just means it’s legally permissible, not reasonable, respectable, or conscionable. Do not look past the things he says.