We Can’t Relinquish Our Demands and Solely Play Defense During Trump’s Next Term

For many of our readers, the writings of Kelly Hayes and Maya Schenwar — longtime organizers and oft-time collaborators — are likely touchstones for orienting their own vision of the work of ending prisons. In the following interview, Hayes and Schenwar spoke with Inquest Coeditor-in-Chief Andrew Manuel Crespo and Managing Editor Adam McGee about how to respond to Donald Trump’s reelection.

Adam McGee: Trump has made no secret of his admiration for dictators and fascists, and whatever constraints were on him during his first administration, it seems likely there will be many fewer this time around. I don’t think it’s alarmist to say it’s within the realm of the plausible that his administration will attempt to dismantle our democracy. I already find myself wanting to slip into a “Hold the Line” mentality in which we just try to get everyone to the other side alive and with the bulk of our civil rights intact. But then in other moments I feel like that’s really pessimistic. How are you wrestling with these questions? Where do you see space for continuing to fight for abolition when in some senses that future feels further away than ever?

Kelly Hayes: Certain norms, laws, and competing interests constrained Trump during his first administration, some of which could be off the table now.

After the Access Hollywood tape, the Republican Party didn’t think they were going to win the 2016 election. They had not prepared for the radical potential of that moment, and they weren’t prepared for what it meant to wrestle with Trump’s ego, or to negotiate with his whims. One of those problems is off the table now. The sometimes-competing, but generally cooperative, forces that make up the MAGA movement, including Evangelicals, techno-fascists (like Elon Musk), and policy organizations (like the Heritage Foundation) have had plenty of time to speculate about what they might do with the smash-and-grab era of politics they’re about to enjoy. They know what they want, and some of them have outlined plans to get it. They still have the problem of contending with Trump’s unsteady nature. You can sing policy into his ear all day, but he is moved by animus, ego, and his own personal whims above all else. That will still be an issue for them. As we saw the last time around, he is not above allowing people to hoist him into power, and then throwing them under the bus, so everyone around him is in a constant position of precarity, even if they share similar goals. Everyone has to play the game.

Another major concern is that the military was, in some ways, an oppositional force during the first Trump administration. I have no love for the military, but when Trump lost the last election, and people were afraid he wouldn’t leave, I took comfort in the knowledge that a lot of generals hated the man. It’s obviously a moving target, but he has floated nominating Fox News host Pete Hegseth to be a puppet Secretary of Defense, and Trump has vowed to root out disloyal generals. If Trump succeeds in making the military his plaything, I think we’re in all-bets-are-off territory, and that’s utterly terrifying.

But even within that scary scenario, Trump would have weaknesses. One of the reasons most generals don’t want what Trump wants — for soldiers to become agents of law enforcement in the streets, and to police protests — is that it would not only erode the legitimacy of the military in the eyes of the public, but also potentially destroy morale within the military itself. During the Vietnam era, low morale among troops spurred acts of violent and fatal rebellion within the ranks of the U.S. military — hundreds of fragging incidents we’re not taught about in school — that were actually effective in reshaping policy, not simply with regard to the war, but in terms of how the military can even constitute itself as a fighting force. And as we have seen with other authoritarian regimes, when the military turns on a leader, it’s over. Forcing military personnel to act against their own countrymen can backfire. So, I think it’s important to remember that possibilities and opportunities for change exist in all contexts, no matter how bleak things may seem.

What does that mean for us, at the street level? I think some amount of protective-mode thinking makes sense. But I am not thinking about that on a purely legal or institutional level, because this fight isn’t limited to those spheres. The Evangelical movement operates according to the Seven Mountain Mandate. That mandate identifies family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government as sites of conquest. That is the agenda that took abortion access away from millions of people. That is the apocalypse-positive worldview that supports a bunch of policies that make a very real apocalypse more likely. That is an agenda that helped make Trump’s comeback possible, that backs austerity, vilifies trans people, and creates moral panics that ruin people’s lives. We cannot think in purely defensive terms when dealing with an enemy that has that kind of long game and those kinds of impacts. So, I am thinking about how we defend people in legal terms, yes, but also about how we forward our values across those sites of contestation.

I am also mindful of the fact that operating under extremely oppressive conditions is the ongoing reality for many people in the world, including some folks here in the United States, such as imprisoned people. So I think we need to look there, too, in terms of what it means to defend our very baseline ability to think and to learn and to survive, while also building culture and connection, and resisting alongside people who aren’t of our own choosing.

Maya Schenwar: Yes, I think that’s key: We need to retain a recognition that our movements — particularly movements that include people who are incarcerated, undocumented, systematically abandoned — have often operated against the odds. I think about how the 2020 uprisings played out during the first Trump administration, shifting mindsets, policies, and practices, and resulting in many city-level, state-level, and community-level wins: money bail abolition in Illinois, the removal of cops from schools in more than twenty-five cities, reductions in police budgets (though some of these ended up being temporary), an increase in non-police emergency response experiments, and the development of more community-based grassroots projects grounded in transformative justice and other anti-carceral approaches to addressing harm.

I must admit, I’m really scared right now, and have similar worries about the massive repression we’ll face. But I’m inspired by organizers who are already working intensively around some of the worst dangers of the Trump administration. Truthout recently published an interview that Derek Seidman did with three farmworker organizers, who — while never denying that the new administration will pose escalated threats to immigrant workers — emphasized that they’ve long been laying the groundwork to face down these attacks and keep building power. For example, Vermont organizer Rossy Alfaro pointed out that a previous organizing win, which significantly limited the collaboration of local police with ICE and border cops, may go a long way toward protecting immigrants in an increasingly hostile federal climate. Edgar Franks, political director of Familias Unidas por la Justicia, pointed to the way in which communities came together in mass mutual aid efforts at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to share food and medicine, emphasizing the ways in which communities can mobilize entirely independent of (and often against the grain of) federal forces to save lives. Franks argues that now is still a moment to make big demands and not forget our power:

We need to push for things like rent control and child care and a higher minimum wage. We shouldn’t be watering down our demands now. We should be even bolder. There are different ways of participating in democracy that go beyond voting, whether that be workplace organizing, marching and protesting, or community assemblies.

Similarly, I don’t think the election of Trump should mean we relinquish our demands and solely enter defense mode. On the decarceral front, here in Illinois, we are just beginning to launch an effort to stop the rebuild of a so-called “state of the art” maximum-security women’s prison. We can’t abandon our efforts to bring people home, prevent people’s incarceration in the first place, and build the relationships that make these kinds of efforts possible.

Andrew Crespo: As I think back over the past month, I’ve had a recurring sense that a lot of people are feeling a profound sense of alienation. I feel it sometimes acutely when speaking with other folks of color, including some of my students, who have sought me out in quiet moments to express how much it would’ve meant, symbolically, to have Harris as our president, even if they wished for more from her policy proposals. It feels to me as well that folks are grieving and processing mostly alone rather than in community, which contrasts with how I experienced Trump’s first win in 2016. Some of that comes from the extent of his win this time, and the clarity with which it shows he is not in any way aberrational. I’d welcome any kind of response you might have to that.

Hayes: I feel deeply for young Black people who are grappling with what this election says about the United States and the world we live in. I think about the Halloween parade in Pennsylvania where a woman costumed as Harris was in shackles, and what it must be like to be young and Black, knowing that team won. I can also understand why identity-based representation matters to some people. My own experience tells me that kind of representation doesn’t mean a more just world for marginalized people, but I do understand that longing.

I’ve also talked to women and trans people who’ve experienced sexual assault, or who otherwise fear the loss of their bodily autonomy, who are hurting, and, of course, Palestinian people who continue to hurt, and who had no capacity to get excited about a candidate on the basis of identity. It’s all bad and there’s plenty of hurt to go around right now.

Schenwar: Yes, it’s all bad. Like Kelly, I feel profoundly angry at the blatant white supremacy that pervaded the Trump campaign in every nook and cranny, and the sense of betrayal that comes with the fact that that team won is wholly understandable. At this moment, I think that feeling grief is a very reasonable human response, and making space for people to do that in community is important, to combat that sense of alienation, regardless of people’s views on the Democratic candidate.

Kelly and I are organizing an upcoming “Struggle Hour” (as opposed to a Happy Hour) where people can come together to cry, rage, and lament over rising fascism — and maybe start to build, if we have emotional capacity. But if we don’t, in that particular moment, just resisting alienation in our grief is a worthy goal.

McGee: What can we offer as a response for people who feel that the left’s pursuit of a certain kind of doctrinal purity may have missed the forest for the trees and cost Harris the election, thus ushering in much worse?

Hayes: I can critique the left all day, like any leftist, but the left isn’t responsible for Trump’s victory, or the pain that so many marginalized people are experiencing — myself included. The Democrats ran a centrist campaign, bragging about endorsements from the likes of Dick Cheney. It took movement momentum to beat Trump in 2020, and that was with Trump’s disastrous early mishandling of the pandemic still very much fresh in people’s minds. The Democrats saw that leftist ideas had momentum in 2020, and they worked to harness some of that energy. This time, they instead bet on distancing themselves from the left’s priorities and ideas. We make great scapegoats, but I don’t think we should accept the framing that the left is somehow important enough to tank elections, but not important enough for Democrats to consider or negotiate with. At what point does that become the failing of the people tasked with getting votes?

As for what the left needs to do now, I think the left — or the lefts, as Mariame Kaba says, since there is no singular, coherent left — is in extreme disarray. There’s a lot of unprocessed grief and trauma in our movements, and that can lead to cognitive distortions, like black-and-white thinking. I think we’ve seen some of that. I also think the isolation of the early pandemic hardened some of our worst tendencies. Far too many people are more focused on the performance of politics — strutting in circles on digital runways, draped in ideology — than on building relationships or building power. We need to get back to basics: building relationships, working across difference, and base building. We need a lot of political education, less ego, and more humility. We also need spaces that aren’t all about productivity, where people can figure out how to self-regulate emotionally, and resolve conflicts without declaring each other politically dead or burning every organization to the ground.

Schenwar: I agree. I think what matters most is the present and the future, and what we are going to do to build a united push against fascism and for the world we want. A few things have felt hopeful to me lately, in the broad-ish tent of the left. One is the coalition that I’m working to co-build among left media organizations (which includes Inquest!): the Movement Media Alliance. Eighteen social-justice-oriented publications and media organizations with varying vantages and sometimes-differing perspectives are coming together to help sustain each other, amplify each other’s work, and fuel collective storytelling power to uplift left movements. We’ve already build a broad-based collaboration to amplify work on Palestinian liberation (Media Against Apartheid and Displacement), carried out collaborative editorial projects around the DNC and now the post-election organizing landscape, supported each other around technology and finance and infrastructural decision-making, created spaces to vent and laugh together, and are preparing to launch a newsletter and an emergency fund.

Another source of hope for me, in this moment, is the large-scale coalition-building happening among membership-based progressive (and, in some cases, left) organizations across the country: More than 100,000 people from over 200 organizations joined the Working Families Party’s mass call a couple days after the election, and people from dozens of groups spoke to how, although they were distraught, they were also full of drive to face down MAGA by creating and strengthening alliances and refusing to leave anyone behind. Speaking of this commitment — and this is something Kelly spoke to earlier — this is a moment to take notes from our incarcerated comrades and our friends involved in deep mutual aid projects, doubling down on our dedication to care for the actual people around us, in our neighborhoods, in our communities, particularly the people most targeted by MAGA, such as immigrants and trans people. Incarcerated people show us constantly that we can do this: we can commit to taking care of each other, even in dire times.

Crespo: A student asked me recently what opportunities exist for decarceral organizing under Trump. I’m curious what sort of thoughts or advice you’d share.

Schenwar: Policing and prisons are primary tools of fascist leaders, and I fully expect Trump to be a pro-carceral president. His enthusiasm for the death penalty, his brags about plans to cage people in concentration camps at the border, his extreme and racist “tough on crime” rhetoric and sentencing proposals, his vows to prosecute his enemies, his enthusiasm for violent policing — none of this is hopeful.

The opportunities for decarceral organizing will have to come from us, figuring out how to mobilize in creative ways: freedom campaigns, state-level decarceral initiatives, ongoing organizing against pretrial incarceration at state and local levels, challenges to the heightened violent policing practices that will no doubt accompany rising fascism. Also, I think continuing our local efforts to free people and support people inside will be key: I’m thinking of initiatives near me and Kelly, like Chicago Community Jail Support, Organized Communities Against Deportations, Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity, Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration, Love & Protect (the collective I’m part of), the Final 5 Campaign — all efforts to actively challenge the prison–industrial complex right here in Chicago and within Illinois. This infrastructure is in place and it won’t disappear overnight — we will keep doing what we’re doing, in addition to meeting whatever repression is on the horizon.

Hayes: I agree with everything Maya’s saying, and I would add that the work of making the invisibilized violence of the prison system very publicly visible is extremely urgent in this moment. When it comes to eliminationist and annihilatory politics, mechanisms for manufacturing premature death already exist in this country. I know people are thinking about internment and detention camps right now, and those threats are real, but we have a fully functioning system of disposal for people who have been deemed surplus in this country, and people are already conditioned to ignore what happens within the walls of that system. That apparatus is obviously going to be used toward authoritarian ends. An authoritarian government does not need to reinvent the wheel here. The fascistic elements of our society can be weaponized, quite easily, toward increasingly fascistic ends. When we think about what happened early in the pandemic, when prison and jail cells became death chambers for so many people — those losses were tremendous, and should also remind us that jails and prisons are death-making institutions. That’s always true, but it’s especially true in times of acute crisis.

People will surely point to Trump’s felony convictions, and the laws he’s likely to disregard during his presidency, and talk about his hypocrisy, because people love talking about Trump’s hypocrisy, but what we need to get real about, what actually matters to our enemies, is the hierarchy of who lives and dies, and what systems are used to enact that hierarchy.