Once Americans pardoned an attempt by the sitting president to overthrow US democracy the game's over.
America desperately needs a huge revision to the powers conceded to individuals and should instead mature to a slower, maybe less effective at times, but stronger democracy that nurtures parliamentary debate and discourse.
Responsibility for Merrick Garland's failure to adequately pursue Trump lies at Joe Biden's feet and will likely be the thing he is remembered for most in the history books* despite the fact that he had some decent domestic policy (and some horrific foreign policy).
* (assuming we work our way out of the current mess, if we don't he will be remembered for far worse things given that he's Trump's reflexive whipping boy despite the fact that it makes Trump look weak to keep droning on about Biden)
By this logic it was “over already” at the end of the Civil War. Suspending habeus corpus, ignoring the courts and then meeting with public indifference will be the point of no return. Trump’s third term would just be the canary passing out.
That may be true. The North won the war, but let the ideology that caused it fester.
Like any ideology, you can't actually destroy it with force any other way than burning books and, eventually, men.
And whether or not that would have been wise: the war was extremely costly for the North and there was a non-zero chance that if they started dropping every third Southerner from the gallows the federal government would lose legitimacy in the eyes of the survivors on both sides of the Mason-Dixon and that'd be it.