Fear and trembling on the left

Like thousands of others, I made the pilgrimage to Pennsylvania in October to campaign for Kamala Harris.

I believed that another Trump administration would be much worse than his chaotic first one: worse for the climate, for environmental justice, for immigrants, for women, for young people — and for most of the people who actually voted for him. This is because he has no intention of meeting their needs as he looks after his billionaire supporters and works to eliminate the “deep state” (what most of us refer to as the “government”) through Project 2025 destroy.

Melinda Tuhus

I canvassed with Seed the Vote, a company that recruits, trains, and supports volunteers to door-knock and bank with local partners in swing states. Their strategy is “Block and Build”: Block Trump from another term while building the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Well, the “block” part didn’t work out, but I think the thousands of volunteers who worked with them helped lay the foundation for what we need to do in the future.

In small towns and suburbs outside of Philadelphia, I spoke to several Republicans and Democrats about the economy and could certainly empathize with them, as inflation gave me supermarket sticker shock for two years. But I also shared that prices are no longer going up and I’m seeing my grocery bills go down lately.

When I expressed my view that inflation was the result of several things that happened before Biden’s term – massive spending during the Trump administration to develop Covid-19 vaccines and payments to keep people afloat when their Jobs disappearing (things I definitely supported) like…as well as supply chain issues and corporate price gouging – they seemed interested in this line of thought. Some of this popular spending continued for a time under Biden.

The polite conversations with people — even those with Trump signs in their yards — made me feel like things aren’t as bad as they seem when we hear Trump’s rants about immigrants eating pets or the size of a golfer’s penis .

But now that Trump returns to the White House, there is fear and trepidation on the left as his second term promises to be more disciplined and follows the Project 2025 playbook – a 900-page document with hundreds of concrete proposals and job descriptions for the new federal employees, who will carry out this.

The new regime will decimate or even eliminate federal agencies like the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, appoint hundreds of new judges (a no-brainer with a Republican-controlled Senate), pass billionaire-friendly tax cuts, and erode our civil liberties. With MAGA controlling the White House, the Senate, the Supreme Court and probably the House of Representatives, things are looking bleak indeed.

But despite the sadness and outrage, we are still organizing. Two days after the election, a coalition of 200 groups hosted a Zoom call with 120,000 participants – that’s not a typo. At least 6,000 people have signed up to learn about holding local meetings to discuss the way forward. And I have already participated in my first post-election march in New York City called “Protect Our Future.”

With Trump’s promises to deport millions of immigrants (who do the essential work that most U.S.-born Americans don’t), impose high tariffs on imports (which drive up prices), and defund the Environmental Protection Agency , boosting fossil fuel production, etc. If he were to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement (all of which would mean climate chaos for all our children and grandchildren), his second term would be a disaster not only for progressives and moderates, but also for his own supporters. Elon Musk, who was just appointed by Trump to a soon-to-be-created Department of Government Efficiency to gut the federal budget, has admitted that such a move “will necessarily involve temporary hardship.”

As Senator Bernie Sanders and our own Senator Chris Murphy have said, we must be open to listening to and rooting for Trump supporters when they become disillusioned with their leader when he does nothing to help them buy a home to help or raise food prices down.