Here at First Draft, we have our own Cassandra. This week, The New Republic published a feature by Toby Buckle about some other Cassandras.
This is not just a thing about women named Cassandra. This is related to THE Cassandra.
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.
The article profiles a group of Americans Buckle calls “Cassandras”—mostly lifelong liberals who saw the dangers of Donald Trump’s political movement early on and warned others about the threat it posed to American democracy. Based on interviews with 37 people, the piece shows how these individuals were often dismissed as alarmists despite drawing on long personal experience, close attention to politics, and strong moral convictions. Many of them are women, Black Americans, and LGBTQ people, and they describe how their warnings were shaped by firsthand exposure to conservative politics and by a deep sense that Trump’s rise represented something fundamentally different from normal partisan conflict. The article emphasizes that these voices were genderized in public conversation—that is, their warnings were more easily dismissed or caricatured because they were women or otherwise outside the traditional centers of political credibility.
Buckle contrasts these Cassandras with “anti-alarmists,” who argued that Trump’s threats were exaggerated and that institutions would restrain him. Cassandras reject that view, saying their concerns were not emotional overreactions but clear-eyed assessments that were ignored due to media norms and cultural biases about who is taken seriously in political debate. The author suggests that the public tendency to genderize political warning—especially when it comes from women—helped marginalize these perspectives before 2016, and that these once-dismissed voices now reflect a broader shift within the Democratic base, which increasingly favors confronting Trump and his movement directly rather than minimizing the risks or seeking compromise.
My own story as a Cassandra is similar. Very early in the 2016 campaign, I couldn’t see Trump winning. But his early leads never vanished. Nothing seemed to knock him down for long, and it became clear he was a real threat to win.
Despite an odd media narrative that Hillary had the election locked up, which, by the way, ran parallel with stories about her emails and her health, I didn’t see it that way. The polls were not really off, another media myth about the 2016 election. They showed a very close race. But none of this stopped the lectures I heard, read, and saw given to others like me. America, my child, is AMERICA, and no way would the greatest nation in the world elect someone like Trump.
This turned out to be, of course, wrong. But somehow, Team Cassandra kept taking hits. Well, the left is just as bad, I’d hear, something I found incredibly insulting, given what Trump and the right were doing and saying. Polarization was The Real Problem, which implied that somehow opposing horrific policies like child separation was on the same level as child separation. I will also never forget the pained expression of a friend when I said that Republicans are actively and aggressively anti-democratic.
The theories Buckle and the Cassandras posit for this approach among the punditry are pretty spot on. The reactionary centrists and anti-alarmist crowd, people like Thomas Chatterton Williams, Corey Robin, Noah Smith, Jon Stewart, and others were offering impatient sighs and eyerolls to people pointing out the obvious, that Donald Trump had at the very least fascist leanings. I agree with Buckle that some of this is likely because many of them can’t imagine having anything like principles and value seeming “level-headed” above all else. I also like his analogy of a wife during a home invasion who is dealing with a husband who dismisses the idea that the people breaking into their house and screaming about killing them are serious threats. My own analogy is a school principal yelling at students, “now now, children, we do NOT run in the halls” during an active shooter situation.
Why did we see it coming when others didn’t? Buckle notes that all of the people he talked to had the following in common:
- Trump (or senior people in the movement) said (insert bad outcome or values).
- We had good reasons to think he/they meant it.
- We had good reasons to think his base wanted it.
That is what I thought. But I kept hearing that he didn’t mean any of this, that he was full of hot air, and I just didn’t get it. I agree, strongly, with this guy from the article.
“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.”
I guess if there is anything good about the current moment, many more seem to get it than did at this point in Trump’s first term. Maybe what broke them was Trump winning again. I literally got yelled at a few times when I said that Trump losing in 2020 probably wasn’t the end, that this was going to be a long fight. People seemed to want to move on and fall back on the same wrong thinking that caused them not to see Trump’s rise in the first place. But whatever it is, there are fewer anti-alarmists in the rank-and-file. A good example of this can be found in the No Kings protests. The protests are full of what are known as “normies” these days.
Buckle shares my wish that party leaders would better understand that we are ready and willing to fight, that we don’t want to compromise with fascists. I think that if the party in 2026 and especially in 2028 tries to field candidates who talk about “uniting the nation” and “moving on,” they will find out we are not having it.
The Cassandras will not be ignored again.
The last word goes to Florence + The Machine.