The people who showed adequate public alarm about Trump last year (aside from Democratic activists)
...tended to be mainstream well established political figures on the right. Yes, I know, that statement needs to be qualified, in several ways. For one thing it is clearly a blatant generality, with many exceptions. Beyond that the most obvious qualifications center on the words adequate and public. There were lots of political figures, both insiders and observers, who knew last summer that Trump posed a grave and existential thereat to our democracy, who either only expressed those views in private, or who used much more moderated phrases in public at that time. Others became increasingly more alarmed and outspoken after election day, when the significance of Trump's maneuvers to overturn the election became more evident.
Again, lots of people, including our Democratic leadership, spoke about varied serious threats that Trump posed to America, dating back to the 2016 campaign. Very few though saw the real potential of a coup in 2020/21, or the literal short term dismemberment of our Democratic Republic. And if if they did they didn't use terms like that in public. You know who did though, aside from some grassroots Democratic activists? Some who personally knew Trump well, like Michael Cohen and Mary Trump, which probably is why their warnings were so dire and early.
Another group who refused to pull their punches or mute their warnings, was is in some ways much more significant : Republican insiders. I'm talking about leading "Never Trumpers", many of whom long felt as at home inside the inner workings of the Republican Party as they did in their personal family house. In particular I am thinking of Steve Schmidt, but there were many others like him. They had front row seats to how quickly Donald Trump was hollowing out the Republican Party, like a parasitic entity consuming its host. It is one thing for a sociopathic despot to win the presidency once, before his true nature is sufficiently revealed to those who preferred not to see, until they absolutely had to. Some Trump voters might fit into that category. But top elected Republicans and Party officials never had the luxury of harboring delusions about who Trump really is. They knew exactly who he was, they literally rubbed shoulders with him, but still gambled that they could contain him. And when they lost that gamble they acquiesced to all of it, the hate, the narcissism, the incompetency and greed. And when that narcissism metastasized into a lust for autocratic rule, they meekly fell in line rather than lose any remaining last shred of their grip on power.
Most of the national media was just adjusting to the unseemly necessity of labeling the President of the United States a liar when a few Republican insiders were already warning all who would listen that Trump was destroying not just our democratic traditions, but our democracy itself. Many inside politics were accustomed to taking with a pound of salt the so called "ravings" of leftist cable TV commentators, but this was something else. This warning came from inside the "Republican House."
I think we must acknowledge, show respect for and give thanks to the role that "Never Trumpers" have played in the ongoing fight to save our democracy. People like them made it easier for people like Anderson Cooper to start openly talking about Trump's past and future coup attempts (in words that are no longer veiled) as early as he did, and that could not have come a day too soon.
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