In the days since Trump won, I’ve been steadying myself. I’ve passed from fear to anger, and somehow to a strange calm. I’m no longer holding my breath. I’m still horrified by what this will mean for myself and the people I love. I’m well aware of what Project 2025 promises in the months ahead, and that this is indeed the plan that an unhinged conservative movement has been steadily tweaking and adjusting since the 1980s. The Mandate for Leadership series dates back to the Reagan administration.
We are about to ride out the dreams of a gaggle of corporate criminals as they ransack their way through a new type of national coup. I know our rights and democracy will need to be defended and protected. I know the path forward is with a moral fortitude that many of us have foregone in the name of consumer comforts. We cannot be lulled into normalizing fascism at this time, and we must keep reminding each other of what we’re actually up against.
We face a climate and ecological emergency.
We face global apartheid and genocide.
We face corporate oligarchy and technofeudalism.
And we all deserve something far more beautiful and liberatory and precious beyond all of this.
In the last week my heart has been feeling a fullness that I haven’t experienced in a long time. I’ve been feeling so much love and appreciation for my community in Lancaster, which I’ve been reconnecting with this past year. I am in deep gratitude to everyone fighting to make this space more welcoming, for the trans kids, and people of color, and queer communities, and religious minorities who experience the denial of a proper welcome. I’m proud to be working with Lancaster Stands Up to fight to make this community better.
Last week, we organized an emergency community meeting in the city, and I gave a speech about how we got here. I spoke about the thing that many of us have in common: a deep distrust in our systems and a collapse of shared reality. I hope you’ll find ways to build community wherever you are, and to keep seeking clarity through the difficult times ahead.
How Trump Met the Moment
Some wild times are upon us. We have a lot to reckon with on how we got here. The path to Trump was paved in clues, though it may be a while until we fully understand what happened in this election. A week ago, it looked like Harris was behind by millions of votes. Now it’s clear that she’s closing in on the popular vote. Regardless, Trump won. In the wake of burned ballot boxes, mail-in ballot delays, bomb threats, and voter challenges, he will be our next President. With a Supreme Court and Congress beside him. And we are witnessing a media ecosystem normalizing his ascent to power. With a lame duck in Biden as he fails to work to protect the people who will be most hit by what’s to come. Our mainstream society is sugarcoating fascism. How did this happen?
I know some of what I need to say right now might be hard to hear, but now is the time we have to learn these lessons. We have to be different. Trump’s movement has been waging a covert war since the confederacy lost in 1865. Let’s not forget that some movements wield figureheads, but a figurehead removed doesn’t stop a movement. Trumpism is the result of our collective national racism, misogyny, queerphobia, xenophobia, and ableism. He channeled our hate AND our ignorance. This is a movement that is starting to unmask what it actually wants. It wants to get rid of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote. It wants to get rid of trans people in public. It wants to say that “slavery wasn’t so bad – it was a job opportunity.” It wants to say that Palestinians are less than human. It wants to say that COVID’s totally over and never even happened, even as disabled and sick people cry for healthcare. There are mask bans in some places now. And all along the way, the Democratic establishment has offered to bargain with these undercurrents that want to deny basic human rights for a whole lot of our people, and a whole lot of the world. Because we are a modern empire, let’s be real. We have military bases and business interests all over the world. And good-paying industries that left the country to exploit people in other places. And that trickles down and hurts us here, and there. We need to understand how we’re connected, and that our push for freedom here involves people across the globe.
Ignorance and misinformation gave us Donald Trump. I do believe some people voted out of desperation that Trump would disrupt our current economic order and make things better for working people. The cruel joke of it all is that Trump isn’t going to deliver on that. He’s leading a movement aligned behind creating an economy of exploitation to benefit people who already own enough. Forbes Magazine will tell you who really won the election: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, JP Morgan Chase, the private prison sector, the banks. They all made gains in the days since Trump won. And Musk has been talking about the necessity for a recession – temporary hardship for “Long-term prosperity”. What we don’t want to acknowledge is: the rich make money off of economic crisis. They have innovated how to do this. They buy up homes when the housing market crashes, to rent them back to us. They use speculative finance to bet on whether a crash might happen. They buy up industries like newspapers just to strip them of their value. They commit fraud by overcharging public funds to pay for private gain. Read Propublica, or any investigative news outlet and you’ll start to understand why conspiracy theories are in vogue these days. There is real harm happening, and real reason for distrust. There is still a REAL world left, beyond AI and the vast swamp of disinformation online, and we’re trying to find our way through that. Meanwhile, if you’re like me, you don’t own a home, you don’t think you’ll ever retire, you don’t have adequate healthcare, and you feel helpless watching the people you love struggle to deal with all of the same challenges.
While the billionaires are going to space, we’re working overtime in a society where the social contract is deeply broken. Elon Musk, a man who made $70 billion dollars in stock value in the days since Trump got elected, has purchased his first President. It only cost him $130 million. And winning the Irony Olympics, the richest man on Earth will soon be the co-head of a new Department of Government Efficiency. He plans to slash $2 trillion from national spending. This is OUR MONEY and we should be deciding how it serves our communities. Meanwhile this man is apparently worth $300 billion. These numbers are impossible to comprehend.
Here we are in Pennsylvania where the minimum wage since 2009 has been just $7.25 an hour. If you’re a worker with a disability, you might make $3.50/ hour. If you’re a tipped worker it’s less than $3. A minimum wage worker would need to labor 17 million hours to buy their own President, at least. That’s a few lifetimes. A billionaire and a working person are living in segregated realities.
Since the Reagan era, we’ve been living under a unified pro-corporate agenda at the federal level. Both parties have championed the Wall Street agenda that calls for more private control of everything to the benefit of the wealthy. Meanwhile, the rest of us are increasingly divided, surveilled, and criminalized. In my lifetime, I’ve watched national leadership aligned in ramping up deportations and prisons construction and policing budgets at the same time that our schools are underfunded, people are crowdfunding medical bills, and nobody can afford to OWN anything anymore. The American Dream was built on the idea of homeownership – that’s the main way that families build intergenerational financial stability. But this dream didn’t trickle down as needed reparations to Black families who experienced red lining and a history of horror in this country, and now in the midst of this housing crisis, it is becoming harder for people to get that stability across the board. While we’re grappling with the visible presence of homelessness growing in our community, did you know 44% of single family home purchases in 2023 were from hedge funds and private investors? A home should be a human right.
What happened to progress for all? To economic justice. To the promise of a 4-day work week as we automate everything. To the vision that our children’s lives would be easier, while instead they’re doing lockdown drills at school. To the hope that we could retire and have a pension.
What happened to multiracial democracy? This is our dream for the United States. This should be the dream we’re defending for a multiethnic Palestine. For a world where climate refugees deserve safe harbor. Where walls aren’t built. Where our common interests are affirmed, and our diversity has space to take root in a million different ways. Where we don’t demonize people of other religions or statuses, or self-expressions.
What happened to safety for all? Where it’s not “Your Body, My Choice.” Where your conversations with a doctor are private and not politicized. Where everyone has a safe bed at night, and beloved community. Where we still trust our neighbors. Where we hold firm in our outrage when atrocities are committed, even if we voted for the person doing them.
Kamala Harris could have run on lifting up the minimum wage beyond $15 to a livable wage. Harris could have called for an arms embargo on Israel to stop the genocide in Palestine. She could have recommitted to her former position as an advocate for Medicare for All. She could have called out the massive transfer of wealth that is draining the life out of our communities.
While everyone’s focused on the behavior of people who voted for a rapist, we forget about all the people who have internalized that democracy is not here now. Millions of people in this country do not vote, maybe because they believe that the system is broken in ways that no candidate alone will ever fix. Maybe they can’t get off work to do so, or Maybe after experiencing our criminal justice system, they no longer can, or they’re afraid to. In 2020, a study estimated that 75 million eligible Americans did not vote. These people have a lot to teach us about how we get out of this, at the ballot box and through a broader movement for justice.
This year we saw really interesting and seemingly contradictory voter behavior. Trump won in a number of states that all approved protections for abortion rights to their state constitutions. Harris might have been a better advocate for abortion rights, but people in exit polls and post-election interviews said they trusted Trump more to deal with the cost of living crisis.
Many people looked to him and trusted him to repair our broken social contract. They watched as he claimed to be a candidate for peace (while the Democrats heartily do fund war); He claimed he would fix the corruption in Washington (when the Democrats don’t want to name how big money corrupts politics themselves). He said he’d take on inflation. Meanwhile the Dems tout their economic program, without recognizing that GDP gains don’t help people pay for groceries in the midst of price gouging. He has understood the success of the messages that Bernie Sanders has been touting for years, and he has pretended to claim some of those for his own platform, even if it’s a tremendous lie. Trump is a marketing man, and our country bought in again. Why didn’t the Democrats hear that message this time? The question for us here now is: What does this mean for our communities and how do we move forward?
Michelle Sayles 