The Americans Who Saw All This Coming

[Stuckinthebush]

The Americans Who Saw All This Coming—but Were Ignored and Maligned

https://newrepublic.com/article/204254/survey-2024-election-cassandras-trump-2025

Imagine I sent you back in time to July 2015 with the goal of saving liberal democracy in America. Donald Trump announced his candidacy a month ago, the polls are showing him with a narrow lead, and the media—while noting his extreme rhetoric—are mostly treating this as a fun diversion. You can’t prove you’re from the future, and you’re limited to broadly legal means. Can you persuade enough people to take it more seriously?

After all, you know what’s coming—January 6, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, checks and balances failing, massive open corruption, troops on the streets, abductions by masked men, and concentration camps. But when you warn of these horrors, it sounds outlandish. People won’t believe you. If you insist, you’ll be dismissed as hysterical. Despite knowing the future, you won’t be able to prevent it.

This is not that far from the position many ordinary Americans found themselves in at the start of the Trump era. They weren’t time travelers but saw what was coming clearly enough. They called Trump’s movement fascist from the very start, and often predicted specific milestones of our democratic decline well in advance. They were convinced they were right—and often beside themselves with worry. Accordingly, they did everything they could to get others to listen.

But not enough people did, and many attacked them—even as events proved them right, again and again. As late as February 2025, respected legal commentator Noah Feldman was casually asserting our constitutional system was “working fine” and Jon Stewart was scolding people who used the word “fascist,” claiming all they had done “over the last ten years is cry wolf.”



Comment: Long but excellent article framed in critical gender theory.

[ms liberty]

1. This is an excellent article about those of us who saw it coming.

K&R

[barbtries]

3. i felt like i did,

but in reality i underestimated how bad he would be. i recall my boss, a truly brilliant woman, saying that maybe he'd get better once he got to the WH. This was after the 2016 election. I said, "no he will not, he is not capable of changing."

After he'd been president for a bit, I mentioned to a co-worker that he'd stopped growing emotionally at about the age of 2, and my friend laughed. I said, I'm dead serious.

but still. so much worse than I actually imagined it could be. That I would live long enough to see democracy wiped out in my lifetime? Nope, I did not see that coming.

I think the best I can say for myself is that I recognized the pathology when I saw him coming down the escalator, and that my level of denial was less than most.

[PatSeg]

8. Same here

I knew it would be very bad even in ways I couldn't imagine, but honestly he outdid even my grimmest expectations, especially in this 2nd term.

[Silent Type]

2. Kind of hard not to see it coming as trump road down the escalator yelling racist/bigoted crud.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. Bookmarking. What I've read so far appears to be spot on. This is the thing that has always amazed me ...

different people can look at Trmp and some see IMMEDIATELY he's an obvious sleazeball ... he looks, talks, and acts like a sleazeball in everything he does. He's like the absolute worst possible extreme comic parody of a bad salesman -- someone who wants to trick you into doing something profoundly against your own best interests, and doesn't see anything -- anything -- wrong or even questionable about doing that -- in fact, he brags about it. Trmp has always considered lying, cheating, stealing, and threats of violence as just another part of the business model, notable only for their success compared to more positive approaches. And there was never the remotest chance that was going to change.

Others look at that same horrendous wreck of a human being and consider him a truth-teller, a guy who tells it like it is, someone who will really shake things up, a real leader -- and you have to immediately question their sanity, their gullibility, their ignorance, and just about everything about them to try to understand how they could be so appallingly blind to what the man is. How could anyone possibly have such totally nonfunctioning judgement to think -- even as a fleeting hypothesis -- that this ogre might be good for the country ? Of course, if you're a bloviating bully yourself, someone who sees nothing really wrong with ignoring all standards of civilized conduct, demeaning your opponents and even former colleagues, treating whole sectors of the population -- including women, who are a majority -- as truly, literally subhuman, lying about everything, even when it's so obviously lying that even your supporters don't believe it (but won't say anything), attacking your best allies, killing those you regard as enemies on the slimmest of excuses -- you probably were willing to consider Trmp as "one of us" without having to face the shameful standards as to how "us" was defined. So you let him run rampant over every law, every convention, every aspect of human decency, thinking you were gonna be OK because you were "with" him. But you forgot that old lesson, learned many times over the years -- there is no honor among thieves. Now he's ruined your markets, ruined your business, left your family begging for healthcare, left you in danger of losing the roof over your head -- and you think he's going to care ? Even going to do something about it ? He won't, and he won't. Grab a life saver, a piece of wreckage, a floating corpse, anything to hang onto -- because you are on your own. Trmp has got his, which used to be yours, and he's going after more. You were expendable. You have been expended. This is your future, for as long as Trmp keeps his position. And it's too late to be seeking the vaccine against Trmp -- you can only hope you wake up after they put you under the respirator, sometime in 2028. If you still have your life then, it will be all you have managed to keep.

And if you have any conscience at all, try not to think about all the other people whose lives were ruined by your support for this monster. It would be too hard to live with that much guilt.

[Zorro]

5. I saw all this shit coming in 1968

[wiggs]

6. 2016 still mystifying but 2024 mind boggling and tragic. nt

[FakeNoose]

7. K & R bookmarking

Thanks!

[BaronChocula]

9. I don't know...

Even if you were able to warn people of what was to come, there are a lot of folks who like the sound of a lot of bad shit until they see it happening. Think about all the unknowledgeable voters who claim that "we need to shake things up in Washington" because they don't have the information to address specific issues. If you warned them about January 6th ten years ago, they'd probably think "well at least the people are shaking things up."

The felon ran on mass deportation. Many people supported that platform and then cried tears of regret when their employees were spirited away. People like that have no sense of cause and effect. They're illiterate at logic. They have no foresight of consequences. They don't learn from experience. And there are a lot of people like that in America.

[Warpy]

10. Anybody who voted against that pusbag saw some of it coming

and those of us who listened to his campaign promises and to economists telling us what they would mean saw even more of it.

Nobody saw all of it, certainly I didn't see the prolong obsequiousness toward Putin. I thought at least his advisers would catch a clue and put the brakes on ieven if he's still blinded by his greed.

[erronis]

11. Putin played the long game. Slowly insinuating his power into the US - Congress, SCOTUS, Executive

He has done a fantastic job with a very poor hand. Using the NRA as a funnel for money as well as a wedge issue that reached across the political and demographic divides.

Putin understood very early how to use the media to manage his message. Social media were just an accelerant. The "Internet Research Agency" (a Russian tech group) was very early into using the internet as a weapon. With the development of bot farms they again magnified their reach by many orders of magnitude.

Propaganda, blackmail, extortion, death threats, mob tactics. The russians are masters and have been working in the US for many decades.