If Trump Wins, We Will Need Solidarity, Not Blame

We need to be ready to help each other

The election is tomorrow; probably by sometime this week we will know—or at least have a good sense of—who is going to be the next president.

If that next president is Trump, a lot of people (including me) are going to be despondent, and very afraid. Trump has promised to hurt people and communities he views as enemies. There is every reason to believe that he will make good those promises to target immigrants, Latinos, women, trans people, LGBT people, Black people, Democrats, and more.

When people are scared and in danger, there’s a natural impulse to look for others to blame—and especially to look for others who betrayed you. Everyone hates and fears MAGA. But precisely because MAGA will be empowered, it will be easier to attack other people in pain who are more likely to also be scared. A lot of Democrats will blame Arab and Muslim Americans and third party voters for any Harris loss. Meanwhile, progressives will blame Harris and will perhaps even celebrate, insisting that her loss shows the power of the coalition against Gaza.

Again, it’s natural when you’re hurt to lash out at people you can maybe hurt, rather than focusing on the person who hurt you but who is effectively untouchable. I get it. And so I am writing this to remind myself, and maybe you too, that infighting and blame will not help following a Trump loss. It will make everything worse.

If Trump wins, we need to put aside blame and focus on solidarity. We are going to be in for a bleak four years, and possible a bleak much-longer-than-four-years. Vulnerable people are going to be targeted. Vulnerable people are going to be killed. People who don’t usually consider themselves vulnerable are also going find out that their privilege was largely an illusion. It’s going to be nightmarish.

Resistance is going to be difficult. But resistance starts with solidarity. And we need to think about extending that solidarity even to people we may not like—or rather, especially to people we may not like.

If you’re a liberal Zionist Democrat who supports our current Israel policy, you need to be ready to stand up and protest when Trump starts to disappear pro Palestinian protestors who you kind of wish would disappear too. If you’re a leftist sort horrified by the genocide in Gaza (like me), you need to be ready to speak up when Trump sends people like Dick Cheney or Kamala Harris to a blacksite without trial, even if you also kind of think they should be tried for war crimes. Mainstream journalists you hate are going to be arrested, and you need to be willing to show them solidarity. Students who have said things you don’t like are going to be beaten by cops, and you need to be willing to have their backs.

Fascism is an ideology of revenge; it promises to hurt your enemies. And it hurts so many people that some of the people it hurts are in fact likely to be people who you, personally, harbor ill will towards. It’s easy to say, well, fuck Trump, but at least he’s making that person suffer. I hate Trump, but if I’m going to be miserable, at least I can know that that person is miserable too.

But leaning into fascist revenge is not a way to stop or fight fascism. The way to fight fascism is to refuse revenge. It’s to insist that everyone, even people you sometimes hate, are human beings, who deserve better than to be ground up into meat for the bellowing orifice of some orange carny’s ego.

I hope with all my heart that Kamala Harris wins, and that this post is therefore unnecessary. But I’d urge you, just in case, to think of someone you really dislike who may well be targeted by Trump—Mitt Romney, for some perhaps; maybe Jewish Voices for Peace for others. What will you do when Trump comes for them? What would solidarity look like? Those are going to be much more important questions than “who do we blame?” if Trump does get back into power.