Honestly, it ended in 2000, when the Supreme Court chose the President along partisan lines and handed victory to the candidate with fewer votes – and we did nothing. That’s when the Electoral College should have been burned to the ground.
Or it ended in 2009-2014, when the Democrats didn’t burn the filibuster to the ground to make the American Health Care Act pass in something other than the ratchet half-assed form that already had passed in the Senate. Or in 2016, when the Senate held a Supreme Court seat open for a year to prevent the President from filling it.
Or in 2021, when an attempt to overthrow the results of an election with actual violence wasn’t met with a sea of human gazpacho on the Capitol steps, and another “lost with the most votes” incident in 2017 was met with a shrug instead of doing away with the Electoral College as should have been done twenty years earlier. And in typical form, the American press, weak and feckless, acted as if losing office was sufficient punishment for all sins and regarded consequences of crime as somehow “partisan”. And since it would be “political” to prosecute a criminal running for office, he completely got away with it.
And now matters are worse.
I don’t know how to fix this, but it doesn’t get any easier from here.