Nobody thinks they're living through the collapse. That's the thing about it. Germans in 1930 thought things were pretty normal. Bad economy, political chaos, sure - but the system still worked. The courts still functioned. There were still rules. And then, piece by piece, the system bent until it broke.

The Weimar historians didn't need one dramatic moment. They needed cumulative erosion. They needed prosecutors deciding cases were too politically sensitive. Judges finding technical reasons to dismiss charges. Officials citing "optics" when asked why institutional guardrails weren't activated. Slowly, the idea that certain people were above the law stopped being shocking and started being just how things worked.

We're in that phase. Not the dramatic phase where tanks roll down the street. The boring phase where a president faces 34 felony convictions and nobody goes to jail. Where classified documents charges evaporate. Where a Special Counsel's investigation gets buried. Where the people who planned to overturn an election spend a few months in prison before getting pardoned back to relevance.

The scary part isn't that Trump is acting like an authoritarian - he's been transparent about it. The scary part is how easily institutions are accommodating him. Federal judges finding technical reasons to slow-walk cases. The Justice Department deprioritizing prosecutions. News cycles moving on. Public attention flickering toward the next outrage.

Historians studying the collapse of democracies don't find it in one dramatic breakdown. They find it in the thousand small decisions where people with institutional power chose convenience over principle. That's what Weimar looked like from the inside. That's what it looks like now.