Trump Won (For Real, This Time!)

By Meital Fried 

“Good morning,” AP English Literature teacher Meg Doyle greeted her class of seniors the morning of November 6, 2024. “Just kidding. It’s a terrible morning.” It was just thirteen hours since polls had closed the previous night, and seven hours since the Associated Press had called the United States Presidential election. Donald Trump — 78-year-old billionaire, convicted felon, television personality, Republican nominee, and former president — had won. For real, this time. And while 49.97% of the electorate was out celebrating that morning, it was safe for Meg to assume, in a predominantly liberal space like Lab, that many of her students felt how she did. 

“I almost felt numb [when I found out],” explained Alianna Thompson, a first-time voter and senior at Lab. “Every day I think, what’s gonna happen when he gets into office? What are the effects that it’s going to have on me, my family?” 

A registered Independent, Alianna voted for Trump’s primary opponent, the Democratic nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris’s campaign was the shortest in the nation’s history, beginning only 107 days before Election Day, when President Joe Biden ended his candidacy. Biden’s resignation, and subsequent Harris endorsement, came at a time when the Democratic party was losing faith in his leadership, especially after a particularly poor debate performance in June. Invigorating The Left with hope, Harris’s candidacy defied all mainstream expectations except one — that she’d lose. 

Donald Trump, to his credit, also surpassed predictions. As a woman of Black and South Asian descent, Harris’s candidacy checked off an array of firsts and seconds for major party presidential nominations (second woman, second Black person, first Black woman, first Asian American, etc.). Trump had his own series of records up his sleeve: first president to incite an insurrection attempt, first president to be impeached twice, and first president to be convicted of a felony (let alone 34 of them). So how did he convince 76 million people to vote for him?

“I think I underestimated the level of dissatisfaction with the economy,” says Pat Sprinkle, who teaches AP Government and AP US History, and serves as Lab’s resident political junkie. “Voters were mad about inflation. They were mad with President Biden. They wanted a change candidate. It was very hard for Vice President Harris to call herself a change candidate, when she’s the current Vice President of the United States.”

Trump’s campaign focused on improving the economy through tax cuts, which he plans to finance through tariffs on imports and deporting undocumented immigrants. Yet, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Trump’s economic plan would actually increase inflation by anywhere from 4.1% to 7.4%. The same institute also calculated that Trump’s plan for tariffs would cost the average American household $2,600 a year. 

Economic policy was far from the only issue debated in the election — abortion, immigration, the war in Gaza, and gender-affirming healthcare were just a few of the topics swirling in the public discourse. 

As faculty advisor of the Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA), Meg has seen the direct impact of these issues on Lab students: “I’ve found myself in the position of working with some seniors whose college decisions, for example, would be impacted by the presidential election in that if they need access to gender affirming care,” she explained to me, “if they need access to hormones, if they need to be in a state that advocates for and supports their rights and respects their identities.” These fears are not necessarily misplaced. On his campaign website, Trump boasts of his plans for limiting gender-affirming care particularly for minors, prosecuting healthcare providers who assist in medical gender transitions, and introducing mandatory education about “the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers, and celebrating rather than erasing the things that make men and women different and unique.”

Meg acknowledged how powerless it can feel, for the seniors who aren’t old enough to vote, to see these choices they didn’t make change their lives: “There was this feeling of detachment, because at once you couldn’t decide, and also, so much is now decided for you about your future.”

“The day after the election was tough for a lot of students, jubilant for others,” Mr. Sprinkle said. Whatever your political beliefs, Mr. Sprinkle hopes to foster critical thinking and electoral engagement: “It’s not my job to teach you who to vote for, what to think. I’m trying to teach you how to think.”

Mr. Sprinkle often encourages the upperclassmen he teaches to register to vote. In fact, Alianna was only able to vote because she’d been pre-registered as a junior in his AP US History class. For Alianna, voting was inspiring, no matter how disheartened she was by the results. “I felt so excited, I felt so happy,” she recalls. “I realized that I wasn’t just voting for myself, but for my dad as well. He’s an immigrant, so he can't vote because he hasn't gotten citizenship yet, but he always stressed the importance of voting and participating in our democracy.” As she left the polls, she grabbed two ‘I Voted’ stickers — one for her, one for her dad. 

Her personal connection to topics of immigration made it especially off-putting to hear the way immigrants were discussed in the wake of Trump’s victory. Trump and his allies have been clear about their disdain for what they call the “Migrant Invasion,” with the President-Elect promising in late November to use the United States military to assist in mass-deportations. 

“The first thing I heard when I walked into school [the day after the election] was, ‘Oh, someone’s gonna get deported,’” she says. She was initially disturbed, but “I thought, these are the kinds of conversations that are gonna happen today in school. This is the effect of what happened last night.” Still, she understood that these jokes were a coping mechanism, coming from a place of genuine fear. “By third period I was thinking, I might as well enjoy the jokes.”

2024-2025 Edition 1