Preparing for a second Trump presidency

Goals:

• How to prepare for the state coming down on all of us

• How to build relationships and trust – resilience if he wins

• What does it look like to get us ready to then support young people, both now and if he wins

• Starting now to build resilience

• How to protect the people he’ll go for first – e.g. nonprofits

• Be eyes wide open about it.

• How to resist the normalization of hate, and strengthen local communities.

What do we already know that we can expect

• ICE raids.

• Anti-trans action.

• Targeting Muslims.

• Targeting people who are woke – i.e. Black folks who organize for justice, tell true stories about history.

What happened in the transition from T to B, what has changed and what hasn’t changed

• Immigration, detainment, deporting pretty much the same

• Conservatives are pretty nimble, different ways of doing the same thing. If they loose federal power, they shift to state / judiciary action.

• He still has an army of people willing to do Jan 6 again. So much of the infrastructure he set up is still there.

• Communities learning mutual aid during the pandemic; Vision Change Win got a lot more participation around community safety planning; the efforts to increase digital security.

• Fascism in this country is real

• There are some older-school republicans who may be amendable to taking action against him. Lincoln project.

• With the uptick in protests around Gaza, abortion, gun violence, there is more organizing for action in a way that was dormant before.

• With the model of militant resistance to Roe being overturned, we can apply that to additional contexts.

• Things may get dark, and they’ve been dark, and there is still ways to generate hope.

Actions

• Union organization, local organizing – a lot of trust comes local organizing. Have to build the basic building blocks today, much more than if we try to react if he’s elected.

• Looking at the landscape of technology today; what efforts we have to validate information; how to counter deep fakes.

• Focus on local organizing. Building mutual aide capacity.

• Stoke in-fighting among conservatives

• More of us are more ready to respond to violence.

• Against Despair – Mariame Kaba. Hope is a discipline. It’s easy to give up hope, and so it’s important to practice hope. “Let This Radicalize You” – how do we turn challenging circumstances into steps forward.

• Protecting / prepping people against doxing (finding personal information and making it public / using it to harass, attack others).

Resources

• Vision Change Win

• The Janes (documentary)

• Pride (documentary on gays and lesbians supporting miners; story of solidarity)

• Mariame Kaba: Let This Radicalize You.

Conservative groups to be aware of:

• Highlander

• Understanding Project 2025: 90-page doc from coalition of conservative groups to immediately seize as much power