‘We are going to keep fighting’: How Pennsylvanians are preparing for Trump’s second term

Two nights after November’s election, women in Pennsylvania and throughout the country began sending out a flurry of texts and emails. 

The messages alerted women to an online meeting to be held that night, Nov. 7, as a way to help people process Donald Trump’s win and figure out exactly how a second Trump presidency would impact them and those they love.

It was a last-minute gathering, and the meeting’s organizers, from Red Wine & Blue, a grassroots group that works to engage suburban women in politics, weren’t sure how many people were going to show up. 

A few hours after the texts and email went out, more than 8,000 people had signed up.

“At the end, when we were down to just playing a video with a beautiful song from the musical ‘Suffs’ as the background, 2,000 women stayed on that call because they weren’t ready for the connection to be broken,” said Sherry Luce, the Pennsylvania program director for Red Wine & Blue and a resident of Radnor, a suburb of Philadelphia. 

“Many are already reaching out and asking us to do more, that they need to feel more connected,” Luce added.

Across the state, people are looking to connect and mobilize in the lead-up to the new Trump administration. From conservatives and Republicans who oppose Trump — who make up about one-third of Red Wine & Blue’s membership — to educators, reproductive rights advocates and environmentalists, Pennsylvanians are banding together to prepare for a Trump presidency that is expected to attack civil rights, roll back environmental regulations, deport undocumented immigrants — who annually pay billions in federal and state taxes while unable to access federally funded public benefits — gut health care, and restrict access to abortion and other reproductive care, among other actions.

“There’s anger; there’s denial. Some have already moved toward acceptance and are ready to galvanize and move forward,” Luce said. “That’s where I am right now: Alright, it happened. It’s done. Now, what is our solution? How do we come back from this?”

Everyone interviewed for this story said part of the answer is community. 

“There is strength in numbers,” said Vic Walczak, the legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. “I think there’s an inclination among a lot of people now who are disappointed by the results of the election in wanting to disengage, and that I think is absolutely the wrong thing to do. It’s understandable, but this is a moment where people need to engage and make their views known, especially when the Trump administration starts.”

‘Really scary for our future’

Immediately following the election, Ariel Franchak, a reading specialist who lives in Enola and works in Carlisle in south central Pennsylvania, knew she would need some time to process her sadness over the results. Only then, Franchak explained, would she be able to figure out how to combat the onslaught of anti-public education policy she and other educators expect from the Trump administration.

Franchak, who had originally gotten involved in politics because of right-wing groups and politicians pushing book bans, said it felt like a “horrible flashback” to 2016 when she heard Trump won. While she managed to go to work the next day, she collapsed in tears once she returned home.

“It got worse when I got home that night, because I just couldn’t function,” Franchak said. “It was almost like when my father got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and I was just so beside myself that I couldn’t function. I couldn’t make dinner for my kids or husband. I’m like, ‘I’m going upstairs,’ and I crawled into bed and I just cried.”

Trump’s win makes Franchak deeply worried about the country’s already marginalized students. 

Plus, she’s worried about her job, a position that’s paid for with federal Title I funds administered by the U.S. Department of Education, which Trump wants to dismantle. Ending Title I would lead to the loss of more than 180,000 teaching positions that serve millions of students nationwide, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress.

“If kids don’t get reading support because they can’t fund reading specialists, then we’re going to have a lot of kids that don’t know how to read and don’t read on grade level,” she continued. “So that’s really scary for our future.”

After the initial panic and sadness subsided in the days following the election, Franchak said, she feels ready to combat destructive policies and work for a country that embraces all of its children and funds public education.

Franchak plans to get more involved with her local Democratic club in an effort to organize, resist Trump’s policies, and support those who are going to be hurt by the incoming administration. 

‘We have been here before’

Like many of those interviewed for this story, Signe Espinoza, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania Advocates, already knows what it means to fight policies and rhetoric that harm Americans under a Trump administration.

“We have been here before and we have come out stronger as a movement,” Espinoza said. “I think all I can say right now is that no matter what lies ahead, we are going to keep fighting for all Pennsylvanians. We always have. We always will.”

The fear people are feeling in the wake of the election will help to fuel the resistance work that will be needed in the years to come, Espinoza said; it will be especially critical when it comes to addressing the ongoing and deadly fallout from the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which Trump took credit for and which was made possible by Trump’s appointment of three right-wing justices, and the Trump administration’s plans to decimate reproductive health care.

“We know that every day we live under Trump’s abortion bans, people are suffering, and the reality is that people have and will continue to die,” Espinoza said. As for what the battle for reproductive rights will look like exactly, Espinoza said, there’s organizing work happening throughout the state and country, and advocates will be working with Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who supports abortion rights, and state lawmakers to both protect and expand access to reproductive health care.

Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor and state lawmakers routinely came up in conversations for this story. With the Trump administration poised to implement policy expected to harm large segments of the population, those interviewed said they believe Shapiro and Democratic lawmakers will be an important buffer against at least some of the actions of the incoming administration.

“I think that we’re in a very interesting position here in Pennsylvania, where we’re facing a Trump administration and an antagonistic administration at the federal level, but we’re incredibly lucky to have someone like Gov. Josh Shapiro, who’s going to be able to stand as a bulwark against that, like we saw him do as attorney general during the first Trump administration,” said Molly Parzen, the executive director of the Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t daunting work ahead, Parzen emphasized. 

Trump has, for example, talked about rolling back President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, the largest federal investment in green technologies in U.S. history.

“A second Trump term, I think we’ve known all along, has the potential to have devastating impacts on a number of issues, the environment obviously included,” Parzen said. “We saw his rhetoric on the campaign trail about ‘Drill, baby, drill,’ all the fracking he wants to do, how he plans to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which you know is the single biggest, most transformational action we have ever taken on climate change. We know that oil and gas executives have bills ready for him to sign on day one, and that he will be a president for polluters, not for people.”

Patty Torres, a Reading resident and the co-deputy director of Make the Road PA, who immigrated to the United States from Ecuador in 1993, and other immigrant rights advocates are focusing on community-level organizing and encouraging state leaders like Shapiro to do everything in their power to protect immigrants targeted by the Trump administration and limit state and local cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Thousands of immigrants in Pennsylvania are at risk of being deported once Trump takes office. Trump routinely pushes the false narrative that undocumented immigrants are dangerous when, in reality, undocumented immigrants are less likely than U.S.-born citizens to commit crimes.

It’s not just people in government who are able to take on the Trump administration. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, is readying legal action against an administration that ACLU officials expect will unlawfully target its opponents. The ACLU filed 400 legal actions against the last Trump administration, including to protect abortion access and to stop the administration’s attempts to dismantle the country’s asylum system.

Still, there are limits to the organization’s ability to challenge Trump, said Walczak of the ACLU of Pennsylvania. 

“I think the ACLU can be effective, and we can stop and slow a lot of things, but we can’t save everybody,” Walczak said. “A lot of folks, rights and liberties are going to be violated by this administration. Ultimately, the people have voted President Trump into office. And if they don’t like what they’re seeing once he gets into office, if their grocery prices don’t, in fact, come down and continue to rise, and there’s a lot other things that are now happening that they don’t like, it’s really important for them to engage, to express their dissent, and, most importantly, to vote in the future, the next time there’s an opportunity to potentially change the nation’s trajectory.”