Yeah, ask the countries invaded and meddled by the US if they think the country is a democracy. What’s happening is imperial boomerang. The quote below is very prescient and literally applicable to the US right now, emphasis is mine:

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

— Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

I don’t want to sound gleeful at what is happening to the US as someone who is from a post-colonial country, but it is inevitable in the US as an imperial power that the corruption and brutality imposed on others had run out of space outside and then came back home. Imperialism, when there is no longer anywhere to conquer, conquers itself. This is what happened to many great powers of the past.