It was the aftermath of Donald Trump's shock victory in the 2016 election and - aside from his toddler-like Twitter tirades, his blatant mocking of minorities and his self-confessed entitlement to "grabbing" women - Amy Siskind started to feel like something wasn't right.

"Unlike our typical republican or democrat, Trump didn't have policies or a vision," Siskind, author of The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump's First Year (Bloomsbury, $35), tells whimn.com.au. "Much of his campaign was based on attacking others - he was using metaphors, like the Mexican wall, to actually target people who were not white and much of his uprising had very much a populist feel."

Siskind, a former Wall Street executive, began reading up on past authoritarian regimes where she found disturbing similarities to the happenings in her own country. One expert in particular recommended writing things down to avoid the "frog in water to coming to boil" effect - basically, where things change so slowly, degree by degree, that they start to seem normal.

So Siskind began keeping her own record: a week-by-week list of actions taken by the Trump regime that pose a threat to existing democratic norms. Starting with just nine items, The List is now filled with more than 160 after Trump's first year in power.

But despite the list expanding at "a rather alarming pace", Siskind has found most of the disturbing impingements on democratic rights are going largely unnoticed. "I find that each week as the list has grown that probably 80% of our news coverage goes to 20 to 30% of the stories and the rest of the stories in the weekly list either get single-source coverage or just local coverage," Siskind explains.