Or, and I’m just tossing this out here, or he’s an actual idiot and democracy was always a race to the bottom?
The failure modes of autocracies are more obvious: bad kings, low information decision making, incompetent bureaucrats, and no way to remove them peacefully without waiting for them to die.
IMO we kind of lucked out. I shudder to think of what might have happened if Trump, Musk, and that whole crowd were reasonable people who could work together and take criticism.