The chances of Donald Trump being elected President of the United States next week are only slightly worse than a coin flip. The polls are tight, and tighter still in the seven swing states likely to decide the election. Despite his criminal convictions, his disastrous first term in office, and his obvious unfitness for the role, there is a distinct possibility that American voters will return him to power.
There are conversations to be had about how we got here – about the sickness which has ravaged our culture and our politics since dawn began to break on the damage caused by the 2008 recession; about the slow but certain strangulation of public life, public spaces, and the public good – but, with a week left in the election, those conversations don’t have any practical benefit right now.
There may also come a time, if Donald Trump returns to power and attempts to make good on even half of what he has promised, for harder conversations: conversations about civil disobedience, about the difference between what is lawful and what is right, and about the cost of doing it.
But this moment in limbo, as we wait to find out which kind of storm we are sailing into, is not the time for either of those conversations, one too late, the other too early. Now is the time to prepare for near-term possibilities, and to talk about what we can do in that near-term if the worst of those possibilities becomes reality.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about what to expect if Vice President Kamala Harris is declared the victor: Donald Trump will attempt to steal the election again and, though unlikely to succeed, the effort promises to be another dangerous blow to the few sinews struggling to hold the body politic together. Now we have to face the other possibility, that Harris is not declared the victor, and get a grasp on what to do in the scenario that many of us are reluctant to even imagine.
It’s not possible to conceive of all the ways the worst impulses of a second Trump administration can be resisted – we don’t yet know exactly what a second Trump administration will hold, or what kind of resistance will be necessary – but it is possible, here in limbo, to get our minds around a few best-practices to help orient and sustain ourselves in the chaotic aftermath of a Trump victory and the beginning of a second Trump administration.
In that spirit, I give you this non-exhaustive list of things to do if Trump wins:
Take a Breath
Inhale a deep breath, hold it for a few seconds, and then slowly exhale.
The central nervous system, in addition to its host of other life-sustaining functions, plays a critical role in receiving and interpreting threats and stress responses from the autonomic nervous system. Though potentially life-saving, stress responses triggered by the autonomic nervous system are hard on the body, and chronic stress from a nervous system that’s constantly assessing and reacting to threats is a quick road to poor health, both physically and mentally.
Stress cannot always be avoided, and in times of prolonged stress the only thing we can do is hope to control those traumatic stress responses. It is a small miracle, then, that science and medicine have discovered that one of the most efficient, and only, ways to manually regulate those stress responses is with controlled breathing exercises.
Living under the first Trump administration was stressful. The chaos, the governing-by-tweet, the omnipresent feeling that you could look away from the news for an hour and miss something republic-shattering. Living under the second Trump administration – one which has had years to plan its revenge, and to map-out how to avoid the pitfalls and snags which encumbered the first one – promises to be worse.
Controlled breathing will not beat back the rising tide of fascism, but it will help keep you alive and in control of your faculties so that you can. So, take a deep breath, hold it for a few seconds, and then exhale slowly. We’re all going to need it for what’s coming if he wins.
Resource: Deep Breathing Exercises for Stress
Be Circumspect
The rise of a distinctly 21st century style of propaganda has been the constant background noise to the last decade of American and international politics. First perfected by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and put to use serving his interests in Georgia, Ukraine, and even the United States, the signature technique of this century’s propaganda masters is something the RAND Corporation calls “the firehose of falsehood,” but which Steve Bannon more memorably phrased as “flood[ing] the zone with shit.”
In its simplest form, the idea is to blast false, propagandistic messages as loudly and as frequently as possible on the assumption that frequency and repetition will be mistaken for truth by a sizable portion of the audience. And there’s some truth to that assumption: as RAND put it in its 2016 paper on the technique, “Repetition leads to familiarity, and familiarity leads to acceptance.”
“Especially after a significant amount of time has passed,” the think tank authors wrote, “people will have trouble recalling which information they have received is the disinformation and which is the truth.”
If Trump wins, the nation is in for at least another four years of flooding the zone with excrement, inevitably in ways intended to serve his purposes. Clinging to verifiable truth will be more important than ever, and that means being careful, circumspect news consumers will be more important than ever.
Resource: The Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook, by On the Media
Don’t Fall for Conspiracy Theories
On that note: be wary of conspiracy theories – and understand that you are susceptible to them in the same way (though not necessarily to the same degree) as your MAGA/QAnon uncle.
Belief in conspiracy theories is not the sign of a weak mind, it’s the sign of a desperate mind. People don’t cling to conspiracy theories because they are stupid, they cling to them as life rafts, finding more comfort in the explanation of a secretive cabal than in the reality of our political entropy. And, often, they cling to them because of the frisson of feeling in possession of secret knowledge.
If Donald Trump wins the Presidency, those who oppose him will be understandably and acutely at risk of falling for conspiracy theories – of finding some explanation beyond the crushing reality that our institutions will have failed, our enemies will be in power, and there might not be a clear way out, and clinging to it. The nerves wrought by the campaign have already sown some conspiracy theories among some Democratic voters who otherwise would not think themselves susceptible to such things, like the notion that Trump’s shooting in Butler, PA was somehow fake.
It happens to all of us from time to time. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug. But the erosion of our shared reality and ability to find agreed-upon truths only benefits the authoritarians in our midst, and resisting the allure of comforting conspiracies is a critical part of staying awake to the actual threat.
Resource: Identifying Conspiracy Theories, by the European Commission
Know Where You Stand
At some point in the last few decades, it fell out of vogue on the political left to discuss values, with the self-proclaimed savvy set in the Democratic Party opting instead to appeal almost exclusively to a sort of values-adjacent pragmatism. Following that road, the party has walked itself into a potentially terminal corner where its identity is based entirely on opposing its opponents rather than on projecting a vision of its own. If Harris wins the election next week, that’s a problem the party should seek to remedy in the four-year respite it will have been given – because, victory or no, the We’re Not Them act isn’t going to work forever.
If Trump wins, though, laws and institutions and the guardrails around politics and society will be thrown into chaos, and those values-based judgements the party has eschewed may become one of the few compasses left to us. It might no longer be enough to know what stance party leaders think will be most beneficial in the next election – we might need to know what we actually believe, where we actually stand. Because it might no longer feel worth it to leaders to risk their electoral chances by opposing mass deportations. And it might feel like a political miscalculation to stand in the way of laws censuring teachers, or forcibly detransitioning our friends and neighbors.
Your values are the convictions that political calculations can’t shake. I can’t speak to what yours are, but mine demand I take a stand when those with less power or influence or privilege than me are victimized by those with more. That’s not going to change if a second Trump administration comes and inevitably rattles our sense of political expediency. It’s worth taking the time to sit with yourself and identify what you truly value: only then can you know what it demands of you.
Resource: How to Find, Define, and Use Your Values, Harvard Business Review
Take the Threat Seriously
Perhaps most importantly: take the threat seriously. It’s a quirk of the human mind that we are biased towards normalcy. We expect that the things which happen next will look a great deal like the things which have happened before. As a consequence, we inevitably feel a little silly realistically entertaining the possibility of things happening which look nothing like the things which have happened before. It feels melodramatic, for instance, to consider what it might look like if an American President ruled entirely by executive action, or commissioned the wide scale violation of civil liberties, or refused to leave office at the end of his term.
And yet, Donald Trump has threatened every single one of those things. Next week, he might be set upon a path to make good on those threats. If he does, the past (at least the past in this country) will no longer be a sufficient guide to what to expect in the future. For those lessons, we will have to look to other countries: to Italy in ‘22, to Germany in ‘33, to Spain in ‘36. If he wins, our best chance to prevent the necessity of those lessons is to stay conscious of how bad it can get, and to push back at every opportunity. It is not our acquiescence which will let his worst impulses flourish and his most dire threats materialize – it is only our apathy.
So, if he wins, do not tune out, do not “give up on politics,” do not assume that someone else will handle it. If he wins, take the threat seriously: he means what he says.
Resource: If Trump Wins, The New York Times
It doesn’t feel like a lot, stacked up like that. In fact, it feels a bit like taking a knife to a nuke fight. But, in the event that Trump is declared victor in the aftermath of the election, these measures are going to be the first-line of defense for maintaining some semblance of sanity and readiness as the chaos descends. This list says nothing of the worst-case scenarios, or even the worse-than-expected scenarios – it says nothing of what you or your community might most acutely fear from a second Trump administration – but we can only plan for what we can plan for, and we can’t plan for those yet.
And, of course – if we’re lucky – that planning might all be for nothing. There is wisdom in planning for all likelihoods, especially in a situation as close as the presidential race currently is, but there is little to be gained from wallowing in the worst eventualities. In the meantime, control what you can control: vote, sign up to make GOTV phone calls in those seven critical swing states, knock doors for a local candidate you believe in.
We have run variants of next week’s experiment twice before: once, Trump got about 46% of the vote and won; once, he got about 46% of the vote and lost. The only thing we can assume going into next week is that he’ll probably get about 46% of the vote. Beyond that, we hope, we pray, and we plan.
In the apocryphal words of the great Yogi Berra, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”
