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This seems a little prone to presentism. On top of the disclaimers you had to throw in, Lyndon B Johnson famously would wave his dick at reporters and got the FDA to pretends eggs were unhealthy just to paper over inflation. Nixon was Nixon. Ford started off the whole 'pardon the last guy' trend. Reagan had the exact same untrustworthy sack-of-shit empty-suit cargo cult leader stuff pointed at him, continuing well after he left office. Clinton interrupted national television to disclaim whether he, in fact, had sex with that woman, enough of a cult of personality that he got thrown into random cartoon intros, and a variety of hilarious corruption that at best gets the disclaimer 'not proven'. Dubya was Dubya. Obama's cult of personality has his defenders insist today that his worst scandal was a tan suit, after literal court settlements and his attorney general being held in contempt of congress (by a bipartisan vote). Biden Purged as or more aggressively.
I'll give you Carter, who was merely incompetent in his areas of expertise.
Trump's a culmination of the long-standing paean against democracy, but he's far from a novel or extreme one. The institutions hadn't rotted by coincidence.
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