Leonard Pitts: We were told our institutions would save us

Once upon a time, there was an ideal. It was called the United States of America.And in 2016, the presidency of the United States was captured by the flamboyantly incompetent star of a TV reality show, a man who doesn’t believe in any ideal beyond his own enrichment and aggrandizement. Some shaken observers assured us everything would yet be all right. The institutions of democracy — the courts, the Congress, the news media and the agencies of the federal government — would sav