Donald Trump has repeatedly shown himself to be a fascist, a political thug, a cult leader, a pathological liar and a malignant narcissist. Those are just facts; to deny them is like denying the law of gravity. For at least the last six years, a small group of public voices (myself included) have tried to warn the American people and the world about the existential danger that Donald Trump and today's Republican Party represent to American democracy and society. For at least six years, the mainstream news media and the chattering classes have at best ignored us, or decried our warnings as hyperbolic and ridiculous.
This continued even after the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump and his confederates attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and effectively end American democracy. Too many of those same voices insisted that a coup could not happen in America, that the dangers were exaggerated and that "the institutions" had held. The attack on the Capitol, they said, was a "spontaneous riot." Trump's attack force was not armed and would not have harmed Mike Pence or prominent Democrats, and the whole coup plot was disorganized and ineffective. An important corollary to that was the presumption that Trump himself was too stupid or inept to engineer or follow through on such a scheme, regardless of what may or may not have transpired on Jan. 6.
