The thing is, nothing matters except the fact that there are nearly 43 million US voters who are so abjectly ignorant and stupid that they continue to support Trump regardless of anything he says or does. This is realpolitik writ large. Just as Rome became a dictatorship yet retained the superficial trappings (a rubber-stamp Senate filled with self-serving lackeys) so the USA will continue to retain the trappings of a democracy. But the reality is that the Republican Party, given a choice between serving the interests of the USA or their own personal interests (e.g. clinging on to the illusion of power) definitively opted for the latter. And because 43 million dull-eyed howling and drooling voters support Trump, the GoP will support Trump regardless of the massive harms he’s already inflicted on the USA and the new harms he’ll inflict after his victory in 2020.

Thus the USA is over, it is most certainly not a “democracy” except in the narrow sense that simple-minded people are periodically permitted to vote the way they’ve been told to by Internet memes & gifs generated by Russian troll factories and, shamefully, the Republican Party’s own propaganda wing.

But that’s why representative democracy as presently instantiated is totally unfit for purpose in a complex inter-connected world.