I wish I could say the past few days have been hard for me to get my head around. Unfortunately, it’s about what I expected.

Last month, I urged caution regarding prematurely optimistic outlooks on 2021, warning people to bundle up for a cold winter. One of my specific worries what the impact of President Donald Trump’s harmful rhetoric regarding the legitimacy of the election.

That’s a nice way to put it. Here’s a better way. I worried about the impact his outright lies about a stolen election, which were disproved time and again by election officials and in courthouses around the country, would have on our country.

I was told that I was just a “grump” or that I should lighten up and show some optimism. Someone even wrote to my boss (not to me) to express their disappointment and to keep politics out of these papers.

Not to say I told you so, but ... no, wait, that’s exactly what I mean to say.

The results of the president’s efforts to discredit the election process was nothing short of an attempted coup – an act of sedition designed to disrupt the processes of our democracy. And, like I said, it wasn’t a surprise.

Without rehashing all of the events of that day and the days that led up to it,  suffice it to say that the president and his staff encouraged this brazen attack on our government by continuously attempting to undermine one of its pillars through misinformation. It occurred right up to the moment these terrorists occupied the Capitol. Worse yet, even as the events unfolded, Trump doubled down, taking to Twitter to perpetuate the lie that the vice president had the power to overturn an election and was simply refusing to do so.

As I watched on television as millions did around the world, I can say without hyperbole that the last time I felt like this – attacked as an American to a core-shaking level – was Sept. 11, 2001.

In the days that have followed, we have seen Republican lawmakers and members of the president’s cabinet attempt to distance themselves from him, but it’s far too late for that as far as I’m concerned. His supporters speaking out against him now and leaving posts to which he appointed them is the equivalent of collecting your belongings, getting out of your seat and lining up at the rear door before the bus has come to a complete stop.

These are Republicans and supporters who basked in the delight of control of the White House with a lunatic in the Oval Office who now want you to believe that this assault on our country was simply the work of “a few bad apples.”

But anyone who voted for and supported this man, spread or didn’t make efforts to dispel his lies, and attempted to demonize anyone who opposed a reckless and dangerous narcissist who allowed this to happen while simultaneously watching hundreds of thousands of Americans die preventable deaths is culpable.

Make no mistake, those “bad apples” came from your orchard. You cultivated the soil and allowed the contaminants to seep through the roots. You allowed it to spread through the trees to the point that the poison now permeates in the core of every piece of fruit.

In 20 years of voting, I had never once supported a Democrat for president. As an unenrolled voter, I have supported candidates on both sides of the aisle in other elections, but for president, I have never voted blue. I didn’t vote for Donald Trump in 2016, writing in another Republican candidate, and for that I, myself, have culpability in not taking a stronger stand, though I still believe the person I wrote in would have had the country’s best interests at heart. In 2020, I voted for President-elect Joe Biden not because I necessarily agree with him politically – believe me, I don’t – but because he is a man, I think, who believes his efforts also put the country’s best interests at heart.

We can disagree on policy and still have a discussion as long as that is the understanding that we’re all driving at the same thing – a safe and prosperous America. The issue is it has never been my belief that Donald Trump has any interest in that.

If it wasn’t before, it was never more clear than when the president tweeted election conspiracies as an “explanation” for the Capitol siege and then appeared in a prerecorded video laughably late in the game on Jan. 8 when his Twitter account was briefly reactivated, asking for healing after again casting aspersions on the process. Any such healing cannot take place with him in office perpetuating lies.

Of course, I question how much healing can take place at all. I wonder how deep the damage of this coup attempt actually is. After all, members of this mob carried Confederate flags and donned neo-Nazi apparel. The idea that they might forget about this and fade away is a pipe dream, especially when their leader has the resources and misinformation machine he does at his disposal. Remember, after all, in his Jan. 8 address, he did tell his supporters the work was not done.

It’s a chilly now folks, but the big freeze hasn’t come yet. We need to be prepared.