The US system takes the commendable notion of protecting the (rural) minority from the "tyranny of the (urban) majority" and solves it by giving the (rural) minority enough of a power boost to tyrannize the (urban) majority instead. It's the overcompensation to end all overcompensations. The main reason the Republican Party has been able to radicalize the way it has is because the system shields it from accountability to the population at large. Which is the very antithesis of democracy.
In the Netherlands, we have a coalition system where the party with the most votes gets first dibs on forming a coalition and we have enough parties to make it practically impossible for any one party to get enough votes to form a government on its own, so if a party got the most votes, but nobody else would be willing to work with them, the other parties get a shot afterwards. So one way or another, the majority of the population gets represented. If the coalition falls apart at any moment, new elections are held in short order. In this system, if a person like Trump did a hostile takeover of a party, that party would risk marginalizing itself since folks who didn't buy his schtick would consider other parties and the party itself would have a difficult time forming coalitions even if it did win a plurality.
The US system places a high value on stability, so it's designed to be inflexible. Whoever gets elected in November serves either 2, 4 or 6 years, no matter how badly they screw up. No tumultuous periods of having 3 elections in a single year. The senate is designed to act as a brake on popular demands. Federal judges and SCOTUS judges are appointed for life. Altering the US constitution, where many of these mechanics are defined is realistically impossible. One could argue that for a country as influential as the US, stability is a good thing. But at this point, the system is stably rotting away and its inflexibility means the rot cannot be addressed.
