No matter how this presidency ends, even if prematurely, we must contend with the damage already done to our democracy. President Donald Trump isn't entirely to blame. Trust in government has fallen steadily for decades with only brief periods of improvement. But Trump has accelerated an established and ominous trend, and so far there's no end in sight.

With special counsel Robert Mueller investigating possible collusion between Trump and the Russian government, with the rapid erosion of democratic norms and with the president's legitimacy increasingly in doubt with every new revelation, trust in government is likely to fall continuously, as will faith that the government can address our most pressing problems.

The most recent revelation came Monday evening when The Washington Post reported the astonishing level of sophistication of Russian operatives who purchased Facebook ads in 2016. With relatively little money ($100,000), they were able to create anti-immigrant, anti-black and anti-Muslim messages that could have been seen millions of times, according to one expert. Facebook said that a "quarter of the ads bought by the Russian operatives identified so far targeted a particular geographic area." I'll take that to mean the white working class Midwest.

"In many cases, it was more about voter suppression rather than increasing turnout," said Sen. Mark R. Warner, D-Va., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That would be in keeping with a senior Trump campaign official, who told Bloomberg days before the election that the campaign was engaged in at least "three major voter suppression operations" aimed at voting blocs former secretary of state and then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton needed to win: "idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans."

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After the election, Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner gave us an idea of what those "voter suppression operations" might have looked like. He told Forbes he hired the data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica to develop a digital campaign strategy. "I called some of my friends, some of the best digital marketers in the world and asked how you scale this stuff ... I called somebody ... [to] give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting ... We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states."

Cambridge Analytica is connected to Robert Mercer, the reclusive billionaire who underwrites Breitbart News and also Breitbart's CEO, Steve Bannon. (Bannon sits on Cambridge Analytica's board.) According to the Post, "the divisive themes seized on by Russian operatives were similar to those that Trump and his supporters pushed on social media and on right-wing websites during the campaign." In late October 2016, Bannon told Bloomberg: "I wouldn't have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn't known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine. ... Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power."

Distrust of elected leaders can be a sign of democratic health, says Pippa Norris, a political scientist and the author of "Why American Elections Are Flawed (And How to Fix Them)." But trust in government experienced a pronounced downturn in the years after 2000 when the Supreme Court stopped the recount in Florida, handing the presidency to the candidate who lost the popular vote. Then came 2016, which "deepened the fractures."

Foreign interference isn't new, Norris says. What is new, she says from her office at Harvard University, where she runs the Electoral Integrity Project, is our realizing how vulnerable our elections are.

A decentralized system of government like ours is good for preventing widespread security breaches, she says. But in a tight race like 2016, all you need to do is pick your targets. Norris put it this way in her book: "It would just take minor security breaches to some digital voting registers, electronic voting machines, or software aggregating vote tabulations, in a few local polling places in a couple of swing states, to reduce the credibility of American elections, throw the outcome into chaos, and trigger doubts about the legitimacy of the eventual winner."

We spoke on Monday of last week. On Friday of that week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security informed election officials in 21 states that the Russians hacked their systems, one successfully. A day later, Clinton, on Joy Reid's show on MSNBC, said: "Now we're hearing these bragging comments from Russian media persons, from Russian members of Parliament and their government saying, 'Yeah, you know, we picked a president. We won an election,'" Clinton said. "That should terrify every American. I don't care what party you are. Maybe it was me today. It could be somebody else tomorrow."

Rebuilding trust in elections requires a bipartisan effort. Norris suggests creating a standing commission composed of Republicans and Democrats similar to the Security and Exchange Commission. It would provide information to state election officials, best practices, transparency and support for civic and party actors to reform at the state and local level. The goal, Norris says, is to strike a balance between the real need for security (typically a Republican concern) and the real need for political enfranchisement (typically a Democratic concern). "In principle, there shouldn't be disagreement," she says.

But, of course, there is deep and profound disagreement, and that's in part due to the Republicans' benefiting from foreign interference, poorly run elections and low voter turnout. We already know Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to denounce Russia's meddling, even threatening President Barack Obama if he went public. Norris wrote that trust correlates with turnout: The less voters trust the government, the less they vote. As for poorly run elections, Norris wrote: "There is indeed evidence from this study that US elections suffer from several systemic and persistent problems—and Donald Trump and the Republican Party appear to have done well in states with the most problems."