We should have paid more attention to Jorge Ramos.
His article this morning lists some red flags about Trump:
" I had the honor once of being kicked out of a Donald Trump news conference. I asked him a question he didn’t want to answer and a security guard threw me out. It happened on Aug. 25, 2015, in Dubuque, Iowa, during Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign.
The news conference revealed with astonishing clarity who Mr. Trump really was: a dangerous populist, an anti-immigrant bully, and a threat to democracy and the free press.
Some were paying attention. But as Mr. Trump’s base of support grew, journalists and politicians began paving his way to the White House. Ignoring that early warning sign in Iowa cost the United States dearly.
My tussle with the president in Iowa can be traced back to the announcement of his presidential campaign a couple of months earlier, when he rode down an escalator in Trump Tower and then made a speech in which he called Mexican immigrants criminals and “rapists.” Those racist comments were simply unacceptable.
So, like any sensible journalist, I wrote to the new candidate and asked him for an interview. However, instead of answering my letter, he posted it on Instagram along with my phone number. As a result, I received hundreds of hateful calls and texts and I had to change my number.
He then gestured at a nearby security guard, who started pushing me back from Mr. Trump, and eventually I was forced out of the room. As the guard pushed me out, I told him not to touch me and that I had the right to ask a question. Outside the conference room, one of Mr. Trump’s supporters told me to “get out of my country,” not knowing that I was a United States citizen. Hate is contagious.
At the time, I believed, as I still do, that the new normal established by Mr. Trump was great for ratings, but not for civility or democracy — and I made this clear publicly. If Mr. Trump could attack me, he could attack other journalists. And that’s exactly what he did as president, by calling certain media organizations “the enemy of the people.”
The United States will never fall prey to tyranny. The nation’s balance of powers has survived quite well for nearly two and a half centuries. And yet the celebrations I saw in the streets of Washington and other American cities after President Trump’s defeat last month reminded me so much of what I experienced in Nicaragua in the 1990s after the fall of Sandinismo and in Mexico in the 2000s after the fall of the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s “perfect dictatorship,” which had lasted 71 years.
All were celebrations of unburdening, of something close to revenge — the bully who had dominated public life for so long had finally been forced out. A huge weight had suddenly been lifted from everyone’s shoulders.
We journalists should have been tougher on Mr. Trump, questioning his every lie and insult. We should not have let him get away with his racism and xenophobia. We should never again allow someone to create an alternative reality in order to seize the presidency.
Perhaps it was the pandemic that was most responsible for putting an end to Mr. Trump’s presidency. But the entire debacle might have been avoided if we had simply paid greater attention — and offered more resistance — to the words and gestures of the undeserving man who descended the golden escalator of Trump Tower in 2015."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/international-world/trump-ramos-authoritarianism-media.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage