The US’s democracy has been under fire from foreign nations and corporations for years. It has slowly degraded because of it. What we’re seeing now is the “all at once” portion.
Depending on how you reckon, you could argue it started much earlier than that. Some people say the downhill decline started with JFK, others say it started with Reagan.
They got it when the PATRIOT ACT was passed. That was the proof that all our rights and liberties are conditional, and Trump uses the revelation of that back then to pull off everything he is doing now
EIU reclassified the country from "full democracy" to "flawed democracy" in 2016.
V-Dem went from "liberal democracy" to "electoral democracy" in 2025.
When you have a wide variety of entities measuring the same trend, it is probably broadly correct.
The hope the good citizenry find a fix.
[To be fair the trend is global unfortunately: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/countries-democracies-aut...]