Right I mean, I was a lifelong Republican–and am still a conservative, who left the party in 2016 specifically because of Trump. Both parties have long been big tent, coalition parties. Since my very first election decades ago, there’s been elements of the Republican party I’ve not been thrilled with. But I had usually been okay with the party’s primary power brokers and most of its higher tier elected officials, who were often a few steps removed from the more dangerous and idiotic parts of the Republican base.
I started to see this rapidly change actually during the 90s, but even then it was too a degree that I didn’t think the party itself was in peril. When the party rejected W. Bush’s fairly reasonable immigration package, to me that was a watershed where I started to feel like the elites were losing control of the base, and by the 2010 emergence of the Tea Party I actively viewed the party as being in a state of war with an extremely dangerous faction. I naively assumed with the victory of Romney in the 2012 nomination battle that some degree of sane Republicanism and the brand of conservatism I support was ultimately going to prevail. But I ended up being quite wrong about that, the period 2012-2020 has largely seen the complete and probably permanent death of my wing of the party, with almost the complete gutting of high level Republicans on this side of things.
With Trump, who was clearly an anti-democratic figure in 2016 long before the Capitol Insurrection/Coup attempt, I viewed that as a red line. To me political positions stop mattering if one candidate rejects democracy as a concept, because in democracy we preserve our right to express our differences of opinion about policies, by voting against the concept of democracy we imperil the ability to do that, meaning it is the most important position of all, one that is historically baked in to every candidate of both parties. But now a huge percentage of Republican politicians and candidates have openly rejected democracy.
I didn’t spend much time considering whether I was going to vote for Trump or not in 2016–he was anti-democratic, so I was never going to vote for him, regardless of any policy positions. Same in 2020. Same in 2024 if he runs again there is no one the Democrats could nominate whom I would not vote for–and there are figures in the Democratic party that are anathema to virtually every major policy preference I have.