When Donald Trump won in 2016, I was ten years old. I don’t remember much about the day after he won besides my immense sadness. Early Wednesday morning, at about 3 a.m. — when it became clear that Trump would win Pennsylvania and close Vice President Harris’ path to victory — my reaction was the same. Today, tomorrow, and every single day until Trump no longer holds office, it is every Princetonian’s moral imperative to prevent his administration from harming the institutions he wields and the people that they affect.
The coming Trump administration threatens the American way of life. The ardent civil servants that prevented the implementation of Trump’s worst inclinations during his first administration are gone or will be fired promptly upon his inauguration. Project 2025 has vetted tens of thousands of potential future bureaucrats willing to rubber-stamp his every whim. John McEntee, who helped pen Project 2025, has joked about the repeal of the 19th amendment, which granted women the right to vote.
While Trump’s campaign has tried to distance itself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, conservatives surrounding him have taken the mask off since Trump’s victory, admitting that instituting the plan — promising to ban abortion and pornography, execute mass deportations, censor classroom discussions, roll back trans rights, and so much more — was the goal all along.
The Senate is now stacked with Trump hard-liners in a majority of at least 52 seats, and the situation in the House of Representatives for Democrats seems dire.
As a community, Princetonians have long been electorally apathetic, most recently in the 2018 midterm elections when a Vote100 report indicated that Princeton students voted at a rate five percentage points lower than the national average. In 2020, 75.4 percent of the eligible student body turned out to vote, the same year that the rest of the nation experienced record high turnout rates.
The stakes of this election required the same, if not more, electoral enthusiasm from our community in order to beat back the fascist threat of former President Trump. Although the time for voting has now passed, there is still very important collective action to be done.
Students and young people across the world have been bulwarks against fascism in the past; as Princetonians, we have a unique power in what we say and do in the aftermath of the election because of the age and perceived prestige of our University.
At the center of Hong Kong’s 2019 pro-democracy protests were student unions protesting against a bill allowing for extradition to the Chinese mainland. In 2022, student protests in Santiago over sexual violence expanded into criticisms of the government for the country’s lack of constitutional democratic protections that has shaped politics on the left and right in the country.
It would be unrealistic to say that every pro-democracy effort by young people will lead to change; after all, both Hong Kong and Chile’s student protests have not yet led to substantive updates in policy. But even though no pro-democracy movement has progressed without setbacks or failures, student protest has been a powerful and necessary force in many countries. In France, young people drove the turnout to help defeat Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally. Our own advocacy should be informed by this truth.
Student activism worldwide should inspire Princetonians to take action to protect our democracy now. Within our campus community in the past, activism has included teach-ins, speaking with media (local and national), and holding demonstrations. The University has a reputation for leadership in thought, action, and civic service. The actions that we take here have ramifications far beyond campus, which is why Princetonians cannot afford to remain on the sidelines in the meantime.
I myself protested anti-trans laws in Nebraska in 2023 – our group organized hundreds of students across the state to walk out of school in protest of LB574, Nebraska’s combination abortion and gender affirming care ban, and then again to protest LB575, a bill that would ban transgender students from playing sports and using the restroom of the gender that they identify with.
While only one of these efforts was successful, I learned that as an individual I have agency from these experiences. We all have agency: we have the ability to affect change where it is most needed, which is why Princetonians must act.
When we act, though, it must be as a community. People inside and outside the Harris-Walz campaign are already coming up with excuses for why they lost the election: perhaps they think that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro should have been picked for the Vice Presidential nominee slot over Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz; maybe they disagree with how the Harris campaign executed its closing message; some may think that she ran her campaign too far to one side (too liberal or too moderate) of the so-called “spectrum.”
At this point, petty debates inside the Democratic party do nothing to promote the unity and support required to protect the members of our community that will be most endangered by a Trump administration. There is time to pontificate over why Harris lost later; right now, we need to do our best to support our most vulnerable populations. Infighting amongst the ranks on the left when the body of the Harris-Walz campaign is still warm does nothing but tear apart coalitions and helps nobody but Donald Trump, who is fueled by division.
The way that we — as a campus, as a state, as a country — get through the next four years is community. What matters for the next election cycle is building power and creating a broad coalition on the left focused on uplifting the working class, ending the climate crisis, supporting marginalized peoples, and defeating the fascist tendencies of the right. As a community, we must seize on this moment to remain true to our ideals and reaffirm our commitment as a university in the nation’s service.
Charlie Yale is a first-year contributing Opinion writer from Omaha, Neb.
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