alt Hacker News"People" don't have that luxury. Especially internationally.
From an international perspective, America is Trump, in a way that is far more acute than even when it was Obama or GWB. Back then you could understand POTUS as sitting on top of an enormous apparatus that didn't just act out his whims; in the current situation we have to treat him as a sort of dimwit emperor.
I think you can say the same about how it is viewed domestically, as well.
Perhaps the right wing always thought that the government was the personal weapon of the sitting president, and that is why they are so comfortable with actually making it so, but the left wing has predominantly seen it as an enormous bureaucracy governed by policy and laws that only changed relatively slowly, and not at the whim of an individual.
Now when I see data and the source is the federal government, my reaction is "this is probably fake, or at least biased heavily." Makes me a little sad to have that reaction, e.g. I used to like going to the NIH web site to find information, but now I assume it has been curated to meet an ideological narrative.
I also do not have a lot of confidence that this situation will be a one-off aberration and the democrats will bring sanity back and implement better safeguards against the next demagogue. On the contrary, I think it is very plausible they will see this as an opportunity they had not dreamed of before.