

Remember the Arab Spring? Massive protests in multiple North African countries, mostly peaceful regime changes. Those protests were hundreds of thousands of people - less than 1% of most country populations. Most of those nations were still going about their daily business like normal. Complaining about the awful government. Complaining about the disruption of the protests.
It’s really had to get people out of their daily routines.
In the US, there’s the extra issue that a significant part of the population are actually happy with recent events because they think it’s going to work out well for them, personally. Some of them think that the chaos is exactly the overthrow of 4 decades of terrible government they’ve been hoping for, and they don’t care what comes after.
Most of us, raised by Hollywood, imagine critical infrastructure has guards and ID checks. Keys. Guys with machine guns. The last 10 years, it’s pretty clear the major controls are just that no one tries. “I’m from DOGE” is going to be the penetration tester’s go-to social engineering hack for the next four years. Just walk in, press the Big Red Button, and leave.