Runaway Train

By Jessica Shepherd

What’s the saying? If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

Since the election, I’ve walked around in an angry funk. At first, I kept asking, “Why would any woman vote for him?” Men, sure, I get that. But we women carried this election in our palms.  It’s like we kicked out an abusive partner four years ago only to let him back in. We may as well hold the door for him while he parades through, along with his posse of lusty cowboys and the law on his side. That explains the smug smile on his face.

There are so many ways this will go badly. Already, the culturally diverse feel politically spat upon, and those who bend the gender rules are being shoved back into the closet. Young girls and women, like my granddaughters, received the message that they “belong in the bedroom and in the kitchen, in that order.” And consider the tone we’ve set for the young boys and men in this country with, “Your body, my choice.” I’m so glad I’m not a 16-year-old girl right now. What’s next? A woman’s right to vote?

“You’re catastrophizing,” my husband Hal told me after I’d wrung my hands over the next headline and then the next.

“It’s not catastrophizing when you connect the dots and see what a trainwreck this is.”

Unlike his first presidency, Trump has hit full throttle in preparation for “day one.” Each cabinet pick appears intended to shock and alarm. Chosen not to lead but to dismantle. Project 2025’s white supremacist takeover. The biggest train heist in US history.

I envision him, wearing a train conductor’s hat for the photo shoot, eager to snatch control of the highspeed train that makes up the United States Government. Right now, that train, comprised of 438 agencies and sub-agencies, runs more or less on time and reaches more or less everyone with goods and services. We can enjoy fresh strawberries from California, pineapples from Puerto Rico, and coffee from Brazil. And the majority of us have access to skilled medical care covered by insurance. When we grow old, we can anticipate a small income from Social Security to smooth the way, having paid in all our working lives to secure a bit of blue sky. What’s the likely return on that investment now?

With the last four years to prepare, Trump has pretty well disabled the brakes and removed any guardrails. Flag in hand, he’s waving the train to a shuddering stop where whole carloads of people will be shoved off: University professors, librarians, journalists. Anyone thought to impede or question the new regime. Trump will pump his fist to a nonexistent crowd and stumble aboard, setting the course for retribution, ethnic cleansing, and a field day of profiteering. On cue, one of his cowboys will throw the switch, redirecting the train away from its long-established route and onto a shaky new set of rails.

As the train picks up speed, Elon Musk will sprint forward to torch whole swaths of agencies, along with their missions and networks. Anything to fill the maw of the corporate machine powering the train.

At best, Trump and his sycophants will root around in this tender Democracy of ours without causing irreparable harm before we vote him impotent in two years’ time.

At worst, Trump will bankrupt the United States and throw democracy to the rocks. He has a long, disreputable history of bankrupting businesses, so he’s well qualified. Now he’s paired himself with Musk, who acquires businesses at lowball prices, fires whole departments of vetted, trained staff, and squeezes until he reshapes them into something so spare, they can’t help but be profitable. This approach disregards the human misery it creates. You and I are the cogs in the machine: teachers, health care providers, grocery store clerks. Easily replaceable. That’s been Trump’s bull-in-the-china-shop approach all along. Now, alongside Musk, well, what a dream team.

The US government is an intricate machine that has been under construction for 248 years. It doesn’t run perfectly, and no doubt there are inefficiencies, but it constitutes our life raft. Trump plans to completely restructure the mechanisms that make up that machine and the democracy it supports.  By July 4^th, 2026, the 250-year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, our new social order is set to be in place. Trump calls it “The Manhattan Project of our time.”

Hal and I are vulnerable on a personal level. Our business, our kids’ careers, our work colleagues, most of our friends, and the universities and libraries that feel like home to us are part of that government bureaucracy in the glare of the train’s headlights. We have everything to lose.

After I’ve spent hours hunched over my phone, doom-scrolling, Hal intervenes, and we head to the gym for a workout. Thirty minutes on the treadmill reading David Michie’s Enlightenment to Go does wonders. Heading home, we drive across the Beluga wetlands just after sunset. The sky is full on gold, and the slough reflects the glow. A pair of late-season swans dabble close to shore, silhouetted in the gilded light. My heart opens, and I say, “Here’s something they can’t take away from us.”

As someone who sees the world through a food security lens, I’m only now starting to grasp the full significance of what the GOP is setting into motion. Everything from fragile wetlands to tenuous food systems will succumb. Here in Alaska, regulations that safeguard salmon streams? Gone. Government subsidies that cover 50% of air freight costs for food to the Native villages? Gone.

For anyone who voted for Trump because eggs are now seven dollars a dozen, I have some bad news. If he delivers on his promise to round up and cage 20 million undocumented people, the shortage of farm workers, meat packers, and food processors will throw our food system into a freefall that will make Covid shortages seem quaint.

Per the NYC Food Policy Center,

Roughly 50 to 70 percent of farmworkers across the nation are undocumented, working in various food sectors including production, crop harvesting, meatpacking, dairy farming, and food processing. These laborers often take on physically demanding and low-paying jobs that many American-born workers are unwilling to do, making them essential to a functioning food system.

Moreover, Trump’s using bad math, again. According to the Center for Migration Studies, the undocumented population in the United States is 11.7 million, not 20. Will Trump make up the difference by encouraging neighbors to report on anyone, in person or online, who fits the “woke” profile? After all, consider who runs those internet platforms.

And let’s not forget tariffs. We could be paying 20% more for those strawberries and pineapples and 60% more for gym shoes from China. Seven dollars for a dozen eggs might look like a good deal in a few years.

I serve on the Homer Community Food Pantry Board, so of course, I worry about food insecurity, not just for the 170 or so families who come through the doors each week but for food pantries all across the country. We already fail to meet the basic needs of the food insecure in this country. We have no way to cope with the homelessness and hopelessness this trainwreck portends.

As of this writing, no announcement has been made as to who will oversee the United States Department of Agriculture, the stalwart agency of food security in this country. The Farm Bill, which expired in September and has been ignored by Congress until after the election, doesn’t just help farmers and ranchers manage their lands. It addresses the needs of the 47 million people in this country who face chronic food insecurity through programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Here in Alaska, we know these programs are already underfunded and understaffed, with moms waiting three or four months to have their claims processed. I see them in line every week the weight of the world on their shoulders.

Once again, Hal lured me away, and we took the dogs for a ski up the road at McNeal Canyon School. The snow was good for mid-November, and the kick-glide of skiing amid spruce trees was a release. We laughed at the dogs who leapt for joy and ran up the trail, kicking up puffs of snow. “We still have this.” I reminded myself.

How do we find our footing without getting sucked into the same mud of hatefulness that makes up Trump’s swamp? Hate is so easy to cultivate. So self-validating. In contrast, compassion requires mindful work and often entails self-sacrifice. If we manage to salvage democracy, it will be through cooperation, not division.

On Friday afternoon, I collected my granddaughter from school. She’s ten and moved here this summer from Tucson. She’s experiencing snow for the first time, and she’s enamored. Bundled in pink snow pants, a jacket, and oversized mittens, she built a Barbie Doll-sized snowman during the first light snow of the winter. Now, with a few more inches on the ground, she’s all about sledding down the hill in our back yard, or sliding across the icy road in rubber boots while I gingerly pick my way. I recall my own childhood discoveries and how in-the-moment I was then. I need that now.

I need to focus on those things the next administration can’t take away from us. The pleasure of Hal’s company on our evening dog walks. The agreeable release of exercise. The charm of swans against a burnished sky. And Granddaughters who show me a better world with their bright minds and sweetness of being.

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Sources and Further Reading:

I’m 16. On Nov. 6^th the Girls Cried, and the Boys Played Minecraft.

Naomi Beinart - Opinion Guest Essay NYT Nov. 16, 2024

On the morning after the election, I walked up the staircase of my school. A preteen was crying into the shoulders of her braces-clad peer. Her friend was rubbing circles on her back.

I continued up the stairs to the lounge, where upperclassmen linger before classes. There I saw two tables: One was filled with my girlfriends, many of them with hollows under their eyes. There was a blanket of despair over the young women in the room. I looked over to the other table of teenage boys and saw Minecraft on their computers. While we were gasping for a breath, it seemed they were breathing freely.

We girls woke up to a country that would rather elect a man found liable for sexual abuse than a woman. Where the kind of man my mother instructs me to cross the street to avoid will be addressed as Mr. President. Where the body I haven’t fully grown into may no longer be under my control. The boys, it seemed to me, just woke up on a Wednesday.

What made my skin burn most wasn’t that over 75 million people voted for Donald Trump. It was that this election didn’t seem to measurably change anything for the boys around me, whether their parents supported Mr. Trump or not. Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. ​​We don’t even share the same future.

I am scared that the Trump administration will take away or restrict birth control and Plan B — the same way they did abortion. I am scared that the boys I know will see in a triumphant, boastful Mr. Trump the epitome of a manly man and model themselves after him. I was 8 years old the first time he was elected. Now I am 16. I am still unable to vote, but I am so much more aware of what I have to lose.

I have seen the ways in which many of the boys in my generation can be different from their fathers. The #MeToo movement went mainstream when they were still wearing Superman pajamas. On Tuesdays in health class, they learn about the dangers of inebriated consent. They don’t pretend to gag when a girl mentions her period or a tampon falls out of her backpack. They don’t find sexist jokes all that funny and don’t often make them in public.

I’ve heard they even use new language in the locker room about getting rejected by a girl, one where no means no and don’t try again. I love and care for many of these boys and have always felt they were on my side. I’m grateful to my school for taking gender equality as seriously as it does trigonometry.

But most of the guys I saw that Wednesday appeared nonchalant. A smiling student shook his friend’s hand and said sarcastically, “Good election” in the same hallway where I saw a female teacher clutching a damp tissue.

…

In a terrible way, I’ve never felt more part of a sisterhood or more certain that pain is shared within that family. I wish the consequences of this moment for young women punctured the apparent indifference of so many men and boys I saw that day. I wish they could breathe in what the women and girls I know have been inhaling since Nov. 5.

What I Truly Expect if an Unconstrained Trump Retakes Power

Michelle Goldberg - NYT Opinion - Nov 1, 2024:

Lately, I’ve seen conservatives taunting liberals online by asking why, if we really think America could be on the verge of fascism, our bags aren’t packed.

…

They’ve goaded me to think through what I truly expect to happen if an unconstrained Donald Trump retakes power, and what it would mean to raise children in a country sick enough to give it to him.

My single biggest fear about a Trump restoration is that he keeps his promise to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As The New York Times has reported, that would mean sending ICE to carry out “workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once,” and warehousing them in a network of newly built prison camps.

…

And it won’t be only the powerful who need fear attacks by the MAGA state. Just look at those who’ve found themselves in the cross hairs of America First Legal, an organization headed by the former Trump aide Stephen Miller, which The New York Times called “a policy harbinger for a second Trump term.” It has sued charities that help women pay for abortions, Maryland schools that “expose children to radical gender ideology,” and “woke” corporations — including the N.F.L. — trying to increase diversity. In a second Trump term, Miller and his allies will be able to deploy the power of agencies including the Justice Department, the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against their foes.

Often, of course, they won’t have to; we’re already seeing troubling signs that some plutocrats are obeying in advance.

…

Johnny McEntee, who started as a Trump bag carrier, had by the end of Trump’s presidency become so powerful that some referred to him as the “deputy president.” As The Atlantic reported, he turned the Presidential Personnel Office, an agency in charge of hiring and firing political appointees, “into an internal police force, obsessively monitoring administration officials for any sign of dissent, purging those who were deemed insufficiently devoted to Trump and frightening others into silence.”

Now a leader of Project 2025, McEntee will most likely have a major role in staffing a new Trump White House. He recently called— with the kidding-not-kidding sneer common to MAGA — for scrapping the 19th Amendment, the one giving women the right to vote.

How Trump’s Promises of Mass Deportations Could Impact the Food System.

Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center - Alexina Cather

Immigrant Labor: The Backbone of American Agriculture

The food system in America relies heavily on immigrant labor. Roughly 50 to 70 percent of farmworkers across the nation are undocumented, working in various food sectors including production, crop harvesting, meatpacking, dairy farming, and food processing. These laborers often take on physically demanding and low-paying jobs that many American-born workers are unwilling to do, making them essential to a functioning food system.

Trump’s stance on immigration—coupled with his plans to enforce mass deportations—threatens to dramatically reduce the number of workers available across the food system. In his recent campaign, Trump vowed to crack down on illegal immigration and increase deportations, which, if carried out, threatens to decimate the agricultural workforce. For an industry already struggling with labor shortages, the loss of hundreds of thousands of workers could have catastrophic consequences for food production.

Food production is reliant on Immigrant labor at nearly every stage, from planting and harvesting to packaging and distribution. Without immigrant workers, farmers would struggle to maintain current production levels.

Rising Food Prices and Inflation

With fewer workers in the fields and processing plants, the cost of producing food will inevitably increase. … For instance, fresh fruits and vegetables, which are often labor-intensive to grow and harvest, could see significant price hikes. Similarly, meat prices could rise if the deportation of immigrant workers leads to a slowdown in processing facilities… A surge in food prices could contribute to inflation, stressing household budgets across the nation, and particularly hurting families in areas with high food insecurity.

Potential for Increased Automation

One potential outcome of Trump’s mass deportations could be an accelerated drive toward automation in the agriculture and food processing sectors. Many farmers and agricultural companies are investing in new technologies, including automated harvesters, drone-assisted crop management, and robotics, to reduce their dependence on human labor.

Broader Economic and Social Consequences

The mass deportation of undocumented workers would also have a far-reaching impact on rural communities across the United States. In farming regions where agriculture is a major employer, deporting immigrant workers could destabilize the economy, reduce tax revenues, and increase pressure on public services. As farms and food processing plants shut down or scale back, widespread economic hardship in these areas could lead to job losses and potential population decline.

The Call for Immigration Reform

For many in the agricultural sector, the solution is not mass deportations but comprehensive immigration reform. Many farm organizations and labor unions have lobbied for a path to citizenship or legal work status for undocumented workers who are already in the United States and contribute to the functioning of the agricultural industry. Proposals such as expanding the H-2A visa program, which provides temporary legal immigration status to foreign agricultural workers, have gained traction as potential solutions to the looming labor shortage. However, these programs are often criticized for being cumbersome, excessively bureaucratic, and

Insufficient to meet the full needs of the industry

Without reform, however, the food system in America could be left in a precarious situation, with labor shortages leading to reduced production, higher prices, and greater food insecurity for vulnerable populations.

An Uncertain Future for the Food System

Ultimately, Trump’s policies could cause a destabilized food supply, increased economic inequality, and greater food insecurity for many Americans. To avoid these outcomes, it will be critical for lawmakers to take swift action to address immigration reform in a way that meets the needs of both the agricultural industry and the broader economy. Until that happens, the future of the food system remains uncertain, with millions of American families potentially feeling the brunt of the president’s immigration policies at the grocery store.