Photo: Leonardo Muñoz/AFP/Getty Images
We should talk about what’s coming next.
Trump was reelected by a country reeling from economic difficulties caused by a pandemic and convinced that hurting others would better their situation.
This new Trump administration has no real plans of its own for fixing those economic woes and will inherit an economy that is, by most metrics, successfully recovering from the pandemic. But this election will provide a mandate for implementing an unapologetically white supremacist, misogynistic, oligarchical, Christian nationalist agenda.
We are in a dangerous place — easily the most dangerous position this country has been in the past 70 years, if not ever.
Checks and balances are gone. The shifts that have happened in Congress since the last administration mean that Donald Trump’s agenda will meet no resistance. The Supreme Court has already begun the biggest rollback of rights since Reconstruction and is creating a permission structure for dictatorial rule.
With full control of all three chambers of government, we can expect to see an entrenchment of this white supremacist agenda into law. As Jamelle Bouie wrote, “A majority of Americans may not want it, they may not even expect it, but they’ll be on the way to living in a United States that treats the ‘rights revolution’ of the 1960s and ’70s, to say nothing of the New Deal, as a legal and political mistake.”
To put it plainly, Trump’s election has ushered in the end of the Third American Republic — that is, the brief period of time since 1965 when the United States could be considered a democracy. With the reelection of the Trump administration, we are in a new era that wants to wipe out the economic and social protections of the past 160 years.
Corporations have already signaled that they would fall in line with a new Trump administration in exchange for tax breaks, less oversight, and anti-labor policy. The media will move to a more sympathetic posture for the Trump agenda as a means of self-preservation.
The Trump administration will be made up of the worst people imaginable: JD Vance, Steven Miller, Chris Rufo, Charlie Kirk, and Elon Musk, to name a few. Their policies — mass deportation, popularizing revisionist history, anti-DEI legislation, dismantling the Department of Education, enshrining into law that there are only two genders, criminalizing the abortion pill — will enhance the violence and the confusion of this time.
Attacks by right-wing groups, who have been waiting in the wings, will be condoned as they were on January 6. Protest activity will be labeled anti-American and persecuted. Local police and the U.S. military will work together to commit legal violence against everyday people who step out of line with the government’s draconian, newly sanctified laws.
Trump’s election has ushered in the end of the Third American Republic — that is, the brief period of time since 1965 when the United States could be considered a democracy.
This administration will bring ideological warfare as well. There will be a federal push to retrench traditional racial and gender hierarchies and roles. They will pass a national abortion ban, which will, because of the supremacy clause, render any state protection for abortion meaningless. Marriage equality, women’s equality, and racial equality will all be undermined and vilified, if not outlawed.
We can also expect challenges to longstanding pillars of equality, in particular the 14th Amendment, birthright citizenship, and the Voting Rights Act. Even the most basic functions of democracy are no longer guaranteed.
The sweeping violence of this agenda will be used to distract from tax breaks for the billionaire class and the gutting of the social safety net and health care. The only positive — if you can even call it that — about the level of mayhem that this agenda will unleash is that the violence of it, once visible, may cause a swift alignment in the public against the administration once people realize their rights are being taken away.
Internationally, this will usher in a new world order. Russia and Israel will be able to do as they please. The genocide in Gaza will ramp up until there is nothing left. Israel will take over the land and allow new Israeli settlements to be built indiscriminately. Increasing the urgency for an arms embargo during the Biden administration’s lame-duck period would be a useful intervention, but it will likely just be a temporary one.
The structural limitations of what can be accomplished in the next four years and its aftermath will be profound. The damage will be permanent.
But there is room to organize. A bias toward action is key in this moment before the Trump administration takes power. Much can and must be done in the next few weeks.
Organizers must mobilize the public to pressure the Biden administration and congressional Democrats to rush judicial appointments that could challenge Trump’s expressed intent to disregard checks and balances on executive overreach, allocate unapportioned funds from the Inflation Reduction Act, and block legislation that will make it easier for the Trump administration to weaponize the government against the civic sphere.
Movements should also take this time to prevent the erosion of rights and reinforce the tenets of equality. This can happen on a state, local, and institutional level. Local governments in California and Illinois are proactively preparing to not comply with the incoming administration and entrench protections for civil rights, climate protections, immigrant families, and reproductive freedom via special sessions.
People in every state, city, and locality should push their governments to follow suit. The same demands to shore up protections for equality can be made of corporations: We can organize to push corporations to go on the record to protect the labor rights and human rights of their employees.
Students should mobilize to protect their rights on campuses, which are sure to be terrains of struggle. They should push college administrations to protect the rights of every member of the student body regardless of immigration status or gender identity, as well as the right to protest and the right to receive an open education, rather than whitewashed, nativist, Christian nationalist propaganda before the new administration is sworn in.
There are also critical actions that can be taken in the medical and legal spheres. The Trump administration will likely create barriers to lifesaving gender-affirming medication and reproductive health care. The medical field should come together to strategize how they can continue to provide lifesaving medication and care ahead of the Trump administration. There will also be a new attack on the parental rights of same-sex parents; the legal sphere should consider what actions can be taken to bolster those rights and make such measures affordable and widely accessible.
We must establish as many spaces as possible so the victories of the rights and economic movements of the 20th and 21st centuries remain in place. This will help create as many obstacles as possible and help us hold on to space in the public sphere for the long term.
We must also be prepared to seize the moment and capture the public when the Trump agenda’s promises begin to collapse.
As the violence of the incoming administration comes into full view and promises of economic deliverance via mass deportation inevitably and invariably fail, we need grassroots movements taking action to help the people understand that what they are seeing is the false promise of white supremacy. The Trump administration is signaling through the appointment of white nationalist Stephen Miller as head of its domestic policy that its agenda will not be one of economic improvement, but a highly unpopular one focused on remaking the ethnic and social composition of America.
If implemented, Trump’s policies will only hurt the economic reality of most Americans. As the American public experiences economic stagnation coupled with the pain and violence of the Trump agenda, the coalition that elected Trump to office will splinter.
We must also be prepared to seize the moment and capture the public when the Trump agenda’s promises begin to collapse.
Mass deportation may impact as many as 1 in 15 American families. Eliminating the Department of Education, erasing Black history, and banning books are all wildly unpopular ideas, as are efforts to limit bodily autonomy and same-sex marriage. These policies will all create a backlash. Resurrecting segregation for regular people while passing policies to accelerate the accumulation of wealth and power by the ultrawealthy and corporations will create an opportunity to make new meaning of what we are experiencing as the devil’s bargain of white supremacy playing out before us and show how the only beneficiaries are the 1 percent.
To be clear here, the solution to this moment is not to, as some are suggesting, throw out Black people, immigrants, or trans people from the vision of an America that works for all. It is to explain that the route to economic salvation goes through rejecting the false promises of supremacy and dehumanization peddled by the 1 percent and electing a government that works to rectify discrimination and toward making a multiracial democracy that protects and respects the dignity of us all.
This will not happen by itself. People power is the foundation for narrative power and — as has been true for all of American history, from the abolitionist movement to the civil rights movement to the present — grassroots mass movements will be critical in shaping the meaning of this moment. We need to support and join organizations that do more than just mobilize against every new horror, but also capture the backlash to grow a durable membership and advance coherent campaigns to push back against this administration. Caution: This is not just any organization; these are organizations that are prepared and structured to absorb new people into a durable base.
These organizations should be prepared to support people to take action to link the attacks on our freedoms, advance a coherent narrative to help people understand the economic and social cost of the divide-and-conquer strategy of white supremacy, name the real villains as the 1 percent and oligarchs, and point a way forward to creating an economically prosperous multiracial future by taking action in the 2026 and 2028 elections.
If you are a millennial or a member of Gen Z, Get Free, the organization I helped found, is doing exactly this. Sunrise Movement is another movement building membership at scale for young people. Base-building organizations like SURJ and the Working Families Party are smart places to get involved if you are older.
Hope for our future relies on our ability to use this moment to grow our people power and advance a clear story about what is happening. We must do what we can in the months and years ahead to bring together those who had the clarity to vote against white supremacy this election, those who will be repulsed by the violence they voted into power, and those who sat this election out but now see what is at stake.
Together we will be the base we’ll need to ensure elections happen in 2026 and 2028. It will be the movement that may one day regain control of our government, begin to undo this damage, and trek back to the north star of creating a truly multiracial democracy.
