Over the past week, I’ve been canvassing all across Philly, talking to undecided Black male voters, middle-class white loyal Democrats, and white, working-class voters who turned from Obama voters to Trump loyalists. I’ve seen the FULL range of feelings and emotions that Pennsylvanians have about the upcoming election. (More on that in another post I hope to find the energy to muster to write!)
The more I talk to people, and the more the days pass, the more the weight of the upcoming election begins to bear on me. And while, for the past few weeks, the 2024 election has felt incredibly abstract and far out, I am starting to sit with the question of…
What if Trump actually wins? And what are we as organizers, as movements, as bystanders in a crumbling democracy, to do?
So. Here are the 4 things I think we do if Trump is elected president.
And I caveat this by saying, this is no perfect analysis. It’s me trying to wrestle with strategy through writing. I encourage people to engage with me in this discussion about where movements and organizations go if Donald Trump wins.
One. We must take to the streets and engage in mass protest, mass organizing, and mass action.
In 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president, he moved swiftly to enact a suite of executive orders, from the Muslim ban to removing the United States from the Paris Agreement, to carry out his agenda for America.
If Donald Trump is elected president, luckily, we have a blueprint for what he aims to do, and much of it has been laid out in Project 2025, a plan for the next administration created by the Heritage Foundation, an uber-conservative think tank.
If Donald Trump is elected, we must make it clear that we will not accept authoritarianism, we will not accept fascism, and Americans will not accept a dictator. And that every turn of the way, whether Trump is working to gut key government agencies that provide real benefits (NOAA to EPA to IRS) to the public, working to expand oil and gas drilling at a time when warnings about the climate crisis sound off, or working to remove women’s rights to an abortion, we will resist.
Two. Push for massive democracy reform. I get frustrated when people say that nearly half of America voted for Donald Trump. This is not true. In 2020, 74,224,319 votes were cast for Donald Trump (and 81,284,666 votes for Joe Biden.) The population in the U.S. in 2020 was 331,449,281. This means that just roughly 22% of the country voted for Donald Trump. The more startling statistic is that many Americans (36%, though in previous election years turnout has been lower, hovering around 50 to 55%) don’t vote or engage in our electoral process at all. Why? Because many feel that their vote doesn’t matter, their vote doesn’t count, and that both political parties are corrupt and beholden to corporations, not the people.
Our democracy is deeply broken in this country, and as a result, many people tune out of the process altogether. We have an electoral college system that often defies the will of the people, as was the case in 2016 with Donald Trump winning the election through the electoral college, though he lost the popular vote against Hillary Clinton.
We have a Senate that disproportionately gives power to rural states. We also have the filibuster, a political procedure that requires essentially a 60-vote majority for any legislation to pass through the Senate. As written in Tyranny of the Minority, “Sparsely populated states representing less than 20 percent of the U.S. population can produce a Senate majority. And states representing 11 percent of the population can produce enough votes to block legislation via filibuster.”
We have a judicial system where Supreme Court Justices serve unlimited term limits. (The U.S. is the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure for justices. Most countries either have term limits, mandatory age requirements, or both.)
We have laws that enable corporations (post Citizens United) to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections. (This enables corporations and corporate PACs, from the Koch Brothers to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to spend a shit ton of money essentially buying out politicians and elections.)
And due to the veneration held around our Constitution, a document that was written 237 years ago, and could no way predict the current political moment we’re in, is incredibly difficult to amend. You must have ⅔ of the House and Senate, and ¾ of the states, to ratify an amendment to the constitution.
We are trying to push for a win in a game/system whose rules have been so deeply rigged against us; that the idea of a multi-racial democracy is quite the threat to white supremacists and the wealthy, they will do anything they can to maintain our current democracy that allows for minority rule. (And also shift the rules of the game in their favor.) Given the increasing challenges facing society - from the genocide in Gaza to climate change to the cost of living crisis in this country, it’s clear that we need government institutions that bend to the will of the people and popular opinion, not to corporations or a small minority in this country.
Three. We must place the blame for a Trump presidency on the Democratic party and demand new leadership. I don’t know who the political strategists or advisors are for the party, but they ought to be fired. From running Biden for a second term, continuing to pledge allegiance to him after a disastrous presidential debate, to fumbling the ball miserably on Gaza to seeking out Dick Cheney endorsements to pushing a milquetoast vision for America (though she’s been saying “We’re Not Going Back”, which really is not a compelling vision for this country), appealing to moderates and white, rural, conservative voters instead of energizing the growing base of young people, whose votes could be the margin of victory in key swing states).
The Democrats, if Trump wins, will place the blame at the foot of the left, for their refusal to vote for Kamala Harris given the genocide in Gaza. They will blame the Uncommitted Movement and Arab and Muslim Americans. They will blame young people for low turnout or for voting third party, and they will blame Black and Latino men for moving to Trump, when at the end of the day, their poor and awful political strategy will have been the reason the Democrats lost this upcoming election.
Four. All is not lost, and under a Trump presidency, we ought to go on the offense and push local governments in Blue cities as far left as we can. Trump will likely go after immigrants, go after climate, go after government agencies. This is a time when blue cities should be passing progressive immigration reform and declaring themselves sanctuary cities for immigrants. Cities should be passing local Green New Deals to the fullest extent, prosecuting and going after Big Oil, and strengthening their democracy at the local level. Cities should make clear to the Trump administration that majority of the public and the majority of people do not want fascism, do not want an authoritarian leader, and that progressive policies are popular and winnable. This will also lay the case for the Democrats on how they ought to lead and govern coming out of the rubble of a Trump win scenario.
Ok. Again, this is not meant to be a perfect analysis or assessment. I’m doing a lot of reading these days, and a lot of organizing, and I wanted to cohere a mess of thoughts together into something a little more cohesive.
I hope you enjoy and please engage me in these ideas! It’s meant to be the start of a long conversation about how we resist Trump, resist the specter of the Republican Party, and build a multiracial democracy for all that will tackle the biggest issues affecting all of society.