1. Yes. Here's the thing you should understand about me & prob should esp if you support my worK $.

The threat of Trump was singularly "bad" in a way that no other candidate/prez was bc from Day 1 it was clear he'd be willing to stage a coup. In America

The country was divided https://twitter.com/BakesDeb/status/1358423162174775306

2. by two types of people, those that recognized this "enhanced:" threat in Trump, esp in the context of a radicalized GOP & those who for whatever reason just couldn't. A small group of these people were Rs & right-leaning Indies. A large portion of Ds & left-leaning Indies are

3. also able to recognize this, but by no means all. The way to know if you fall into this camp is to think back to the 2016 Rep primary, once it got down between Cruz & Trump- if you weren't actively praying Ted f'ing Cruz somehow pulled off a miracle & won the nomination- you

4. don't (or at least didn't at the time) appreciate the vast diff between THE IMMININENT DANGER in a man like Trump & a man like Cruz in being even the powers of the presidency. Obvs- this does not refer to policy/ideological/racism/bigotry/& just pure personality awfulness.

5. What separates/separated Trump from Cruz in minds like mine, in minds like Obama who spoke about Trump as an existential threat to our democracy, in the 400+ GOP national security officials that penned an op-ed to their GOP peers begging them not to make Trump Commander-in-

6. Chief (and BOY were every one of their concerns born out), what made most of the Rep Party brain trust exit stage-right & form Never Trump, all of which was unprecedented party Civil War (war-ending, that side losing!) stuff I sure I never thought I'd witness- what triggered

7. all of it was their belief (like many of ours) that Trump, singularly, presented an existential threat to our institutions, to the rule of law, to the continuance of our constitutional Republic. Indeed, it was their ability to see this too, as well as our friends in other

8. other countries, which has always provided a nice, fixed reality point- something you desperately need when your national government & large chunk of your media system is involved in an intense "gaslighting" exercise that I shit you not, they lifted in part from the Nazis

9. in order to convince their half of the electorate that up is down, blue is yellow, and all the other "alternative facts" one needs when one is trying to slide a democracy into an authoritarian state- esp one under the tutelage of an actual crazy person (a fact we're very lucky

10. for in fact. Indeed, through this sordid & depressing process we picked up one very imp piece of intel & that is that we must never, ever, allow Mike Pompeo to become prez). So yes, then as is still true now- if you ever want to now if you are being accurate or partisan in

11. your assessment that the GOP has been overrun by extremism & now poses a national security threat to the country- one can always turn to int'l news & you'll find out very quickly that to them- our major party is like if their crazy far right nationalists nut party was running

12. things. And BTW- that is making things hard for us in terms of our strategic partnerships bc all of NATO allies recognize that this party full of extremists stands to regain power- and a lot of it, within 2 yrs.

Like others, some from "blue check" world, I took a lot of

13. grief for "Trump derangement syndrome" back in 2016, 2017, hell even after the Titanic was half sunk in 2018 bc I was sure that man would not leave office peacefully from Day 1. And yet, that's exactly what he did. My "vision" of it was always more of an isolated "cry baby"

14. temper tantrum, and frankly the stuff w the ILLEGAL calls to GA, the ILLEGAL efforts to turn the DOJ against their own legally elected govn't- that's precisely the crazy shit I imagined from Trump bc he is NUTS. And I expected that likely the system would reject him. BUT,

15. the thing I did not expect, and the thing that has left us turning now into a larger crisis, is that the whole of the Rep Party, literally OFFICIALLY, would attempt to assist a coup. That the party would use its control of the Senate & its House caucus to delegitimize a prez

16. election, that they would refuse to acknowledge the winner & thus intentionally create a climate of doubt to do so, to create a scenario in which the public might be conducive to a coup? Everyone really should take a second to think about that. BC that is what @GOPLeader &

17. and @LeaderMcConnell intentionally did- by not acknowledging Biden's win themselves, by enabling their robustly crazy caucuses to do so on right-wing media- the @GOP legitimized a coup effort in America. To me, this part of the story has been vastly under appreciate at

18. our peril, @strikepac will make this a "bread & butter" issue for the Midterms. BC once you kill democracy, bread lines follow. You only to look at the images of Soviet Russia to that. The GOP, as a party, collectively tried to democracy this Jan.

We will never forget