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The very situation we are in now was greatly enabled because lots of people did what you are doing. Dont lose sleep and sacrifice your health (edit not help), but if you were ever an undecided candidate while Trump was running, or you don't know what an oligarchy or nepotism is or why they're relevant, or can't recount what happened on Jan 6 2021, you NEED to pay more attention.
Honest question, in the pre-Trump days people rightly pointed out that the "ruling class " (Koch brothers, Adelsons, Soros, Bloomberg, etc. etc.) would try to buy influence in their preferred party but also donated to the "other side".
Those people were called oligarchs.
Now that Trump has taken the reins, the term has turned toward him. If you look at the donors in 2024, the top six or so donated to the Republican party (Elon tops that list) but it's not THAT far off from previous years.
Aside from the obvious (Trump being a dangerous radical, to put it mildly) has anything changed in the way influence is bought and sold, or is the increased use of "oligarchy" more of a tactic to try and mitigate the damage that Trump can do by calling it out as loudly as possible?
I'm Canadian, and I've heard the term oligarchy thrown around in reference to American politics for many years, but never do often nor so forcefully as in the past two months.
On top of what everyone else has said, I'm gonna be that person and bring up capitalism, which I'm defining as private ownership of business (as opposed to state ownership, or ownership by the workers, etc). Capitalism concentrates money, and by extension power, which is never good for people without it. I'll admit I'm biased as a socialist, but at this point the biggest indictment of capitalism for me is that most of what we're seeing these days isn't new: rampant wealth inequality which leads to institutions decaying, followed by liberal and conservative elites being either unable or unwilling to fix problems that are plain for everyone to see, followed by people being radicalized.
The new thing is global warming, which can't be attributed solely to capitalism but is being exacerbated by it. A handful of people who get their money and power from fossil fuels would rather burn the world to ashes than give up that money and power (yes, they're probably investing in renewables, but if they treated global warming like the existential threat it is, they wouldn't be bankrolling climate deniers.
(this should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the Soviet Union or the current Chinese government, they are/were both also results of capitalism failing but neither of those is relevant to democracy failing in the West™ also I'm not a tankie, authoritarianism of every stripe is bad)