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.”

There is an ancient archetype at work here. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy—of seeing the future—but cursed that she would never be believed. Her name is sometimes used as a pejorative for an overacting alarmist, which, appropriately enough, misses the point. Cassandra was, after all, right. When the Greek army seemingly abandoned the siege of Troy, leaving behind the Trojan horse, she pleaded with the Trojans not to bring it into the city. They did so anyway, and armed men burst out of it, dooming them all.

Why did we see this story again? Why did some immediately see America’s dark future, while others fought them so long and so hard?

As part of my research for this article, I interviewed 37 Americans who meet the profile of a latter-day Cassandra—a descriptor that I do not attach any negative connotation to. While there are some Cassandras among professional commentators, my focus here is on those in the Democratic base. I spent around half an hour with each, trying to get a sense of both their views and who they are as people. Many are quoted in this essay.

Who Are Cassandras?

The first thing to say about fascism’s Cassandras is they’re usually women. Not all women are Cassandras (most aren’t), but most Cassandras are women. My sense is that Black Americans, of either gender, are likelier than whites to be Cassandras, and trans and nonbinary people are heavily overrepresented within the group. 

Cassandras live across America; from coast to coast, in urban, suburban, and rural areas, in red, blue, and purple states. The assumption that Trump Derangement Syndrome, to use the right’s mocking phrase, is a malady peculiar to big, blue coastal cities could not be further from the truth. I met Cassandras from Brooklyn, but I also talked with many in smaller towns and cities across the South. A very, very common trait—even for big blue city Cassandras—is having lived in a heavily Republican, deeply conservative area for a long period of time. 

Universally, Cassandras have a strong sense of their own values. In contrast to some politics enthusiasts who pinball between different tribes, they tend to be lifelong liberals. Many of those raised by conservatives recall arguing with their parents about politics as children. 

It’s also worth noting what Cassandras do not share: income level, social class, or type of occupation. I talked with janitors and Wall Street bankers, lawyers and landscape designers. People out of work, retirees, and food delivery drivers. Army vets and animal vets. Software engineers and mechanical engineers. And, yes, college professors. Much has been made of the cross-class nature of Trump’s strongest support. That the same is true of his strongest opposition is far less discussed, if it’s even considered worthy of discussion at all. 

And they sound different. Some are confident speakers, some are more nervous. Some carefully think through every word, others simply launch in. Some are bubbly, some somber; some have that metallic dryness in their voice that comes from being afraid for long periods of time.

But what they said was the same. 

The Cassandra Song

I started by asking when they started feeling alarmed by Trump. “Around the summer or maybe late spring of 2015,” Marcia, a 54-year-old Korean American woman who works in software in Texas, told me. “Yona” (a pseudonym, due to fears of violent retaliation), a white nonbinary 38-year-old, also in Texas, echoed that: “From the beginning ... when he was in the Republican primary.” Cassandras clocked that this movement was truly dangerous early. “When he announced he was running for president, when he came down the [escalator],” recalled another Texan—Kristin, a white, 58-year-old college professor.

What were they afraid of? Authoritarianism, political violence, racism, sexism, corruption, as well as threats to bodily autonomy and LGBT rights, were the common themes. Everyone mentioned at least one of those, and the vast majority mentioned multiple. “All the implications that I knew the election would have that have all come true, essentially,” as Emily, a 38-year-old white female writer in Chicago, put it. Cassandras are defined by seeing in MAGA not just policies they disagreed with but a loaded gun pointed at the heart of our politics and culture. “It just felt to me like we were the Weimar Republic; the lying press, the way he was weaponizing American people ... the othering of people—Hispanics, they’re rapists, and all of that,” said Sonia, a 52-year-old white woman who works in marketing in Los Angeles.

Why were they afraid of this? Or, put better, how did they correctly see all this coming? Virtually all the Cassandras would make the same points. They used different examples and discussed them in different ways, but the bones of the argument were the same. The experience for me, as interviewer, was like hearing the same song played by different musicians—once by a folk guitarist, then sung by an opera singer, then played by a heavy metal band, then a string quartet, and so on. Very different styles, but clearly working from the same sheet music. 

I started to think of this as “The Cassandra Song.” It plays as follows:

For any of the outcomes Cassandras feared, they could cite rhetoric from Trump. For example, Ryan, a 43-year-old white professor in Texas, mentioned “his refusal to accept an election, if lost ... that’s a moment where, OK, this is someone who’s antidemocratic.” This had been clearly stated both in the 2016 primary “and in the debates with Hillary.”

The common understanding at the time was that all of that was political theater, or rhetorical excesses—that Trump had no real convictions. But Cassandras didn’t see it like that. “I kinda think people have it reversed,” Joe, a white 30-year-old from upstate New York, who now teaches at a university in the U.K., said. “Lots of people don’t detect that he’s lying about what has transpired, but they think he’s full of hot air about what he wants. But in reality, he’s a total liar about what has happened, and he’s deadly sincere about what it is he wants.”

Daniel, a 35-year-old Black Army veteran who is now a student in Michigan, recalled how Trump had led Republican primary polling as early as 2011 “based on his [then] recent embrace of birtherism”—the claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. “This was telling me that the Republican Party was open to racism as a fundamental part of the attitude and the thinking of their leadership,” Daniel said. “But because the vehicle for that was such a ridiculous claim, to me that meant that the party was also open to ridiculous claims about other groups of people, about politics. Essentially a non-reality-based politics. And that kind of politics is of course going to be an authoritarian politics.”

All the Cassandras, in their own way, would lay out these elements—he says it, he means it, the base will back it. They didn’t condescend at all, but clearly felt they were reviewing fairly obvious facts about the world.  

And looking back, it was all obvious. The mythical Cassandra hardly needed divine gifts to sense that the enemy army vanishing and leaving behind a giant horse statue was—to paraphrase the ancient Greek sources—“a bit sus.” Her modern counterparts were not uncovering some carefully concealed secret, but simply using their eyes, ears, and basic reasoning. 

So why did so many fight them so hard? 

“I’m Not Being Hysterical”

Americans associate, often subconsciously, our two main political tribes with gender stereotypes. Conservatism is presented and understood as male, liberalism as female. Republicans are the “Daddy Party,” Democrats the “Mommy Party.” This affects how we hear the claims made by either side, and how seriously we take them. 

We tend to discount or dismiss female fear and pain. Because women are seen as less rational and more emotional, we are more likely to assume they are exaggerating or to dismiss them as “acting crazy.” I talked with Professor Yolonda Wilson of Saint Louis University, an expert in bioethics (and herself a Cassandra), who told me: “There’s good, documented literature that women’s pain is not regarded with the same level of seriousness” as men’s. We can see this........

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