What Abuse Survivors Can Teach Us About Trump 2.0

When Nina first met her ex, she thought she had found her perfect match. She and her partner were both queer and building careers in creative industries, and those shared interests fueled a powerful bond in the early days of their relationship. But over time, he resented the way Nina’s writing career took off while his own music career stalled out. She noticed that he always seemed to need to prove he was more queer than she was. Once the pandemic confined the two of them to their tiny Brooklyn apartment, it became harder and harder for Nina to ignore the truth: Her partner was abusive, and every day she stayed with him, she felt less and less safe.

On January 6, 2021, right after he’d quit his job, he told her that in just a few weeks, she’d no longer have anywhere to go to escape his wrath. “It was supposed to be a joke, because he was ‘feminist,’” Nina said. “But it wasn’t a joke, it was a statement of fact.” After years of emotional and sexual abuse, physical violence felt imminent—and Nina decided her only choice was leaving.

As soon as he left the apartment, Nina grabbed her things and fled to a friend’s house, where she spent the rest of the day crying while her phone blew up with texts and phone calls from her abuser demanding that she come back to him. A few hundred miles away in D.C., an angry mob was ransacking the Capitol, inciting an insurrection on behalf of President Trump. For Nina, the timing felt fitting. Though her ex was politically liberal, there were obvious parallels between him and President Trump. “He liked having an audience, he liked holding forth on things, and when he was sure he was right he was very sure he was right,” Nina recalled.  And, of course, they both refused to accept rejection: While Trump was rallying supporters to stampede Capitol Hill, Nina’s abuser was pulling every trick he could think of to win her back, including getting his mother to call her. At one point, he even tried to lean on her sympathy: “I can’t believe you’d do this to me during a national crisis,” she remembers him texting. 

Nina is hardly alone in drawing that connection (even back in 2016, an op-ed declaring that “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America” went mega-viral). Trump has moved through the world like an abuser since the moment he began running for office. He bragged about sexually assaulting women in the Access Hollywood tape, infamously claiming, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” Multiple women have accused him of sexual assault, including his late ex-wife and E. Jean Carroll, whose allegations were found credible by a jury. And while in office, he repeatedly targeted trans and queer people, undocumented immigrants, and women—the groups who are most at risk of experiencing sexual abuse and domestic violence.

Across the board, the survivors to whom I spoke were uniformly unhappy about Trump’s reelection. “It sucked, not much more to say,” offered Nina. “I was entirely disheartened,” said Jess Torres, a survivor who is featured in the documentary Survivor Made, which profiles the survivor-support organization FreeFrom.

But, Torres added, they weren’t really surprised by Trump’s return to power: Throughout their life, they’ve seen the way  abusers are frequently rewarded with more power. And that experience has made Torres, Nina, and other survivors uniquely positioned to tap the resilience and support networks that helped them endure their abusers to get through the next four years.

Ely Valdivia, another survivor whose story is featured in Survivor Made, was already prepping herself before the election results were announced. On Election Night, she made plans to have dinner with her loved ones, disconnect from her devices, and remind herself that whoever won the election, she could still have the joy and safety she felt that night. “True safety doesn’t come from institutions and people in power, it comes from within me and my community.”

That sentiment can feel foreign to people who have spent their lives relying on politicians, police, and the legal system for protection. For many folks, the thought of Trump perverting the hallowed institutions of government to suit his own whims, and the whims of other alleged abusers like Elon Musk, feels apocalyptic. But for survivors like Torres, it’s just another ordinary day. As a victim of trafficking, they were repeatedly incarcerated as a “child prostitute;” when they reached out to the police for protection from a murderous abuser, they were called a “spicy Latina” and arrested for using violence against their abuser in self defense. For Torres, it’s obvious that—despite society’s ostensible desire to protect the vulnerable—“survivors are criminalized for being victimized.” As Trump prepares to reenter the White House, that fundamental truth is simply more visible.

Over the next four years, many people who once found safety in the DOJ, the courts, and other government agencies will need to start turning to alternate sources for support—many of which, like self-managed abortion networks and survivor support organizations, have already been preparing for this moment. Sonya Passi, the CEO and Founder of FreeFrom, suggested using the time between now and January 20th to plan for the worst case scenario—whether that’s needing an abortion in a state where it’s illegal, losing access to gender confirming healthcare, finding your immigration status at risk, or something else—and make sure you’re already prepared. In abuse prevention and response spaces, this kind of strategizing for harm mitigation is referred to as safety planning. And as Passi reminded me during our call, “it’s something that, as survivors, we are trained to do.”

Several of the survivors with whom I spoke recalled how their own abusers would attempt to wear them out with a barrage of assaults, forcing them into compliance through sheer exhaustion. As Trump gears up for his second term, he’s already unleashed this process on the American public, lining up outrageous appointee after outrageous appointee (many of whom have been accused of sexual misconduct), apparently convinced that if he floods the field with enough out there cabinet picks, he’ll shift the boundaries for acceptable government appointee enough to get at least some of them through. 

While fighting those appointments will be incredibly important work, we must remember that those fights are over a month away—and it’s crucial to steel ourselves for the nonstop barrage, and conserve our energy for the moments when we’ll really need it. For journalist Elly Belle, that looked like finding ways to avoid their abuser whenever possible. While they were still living with their abuser, they “made a habit of locking myself in my room or the bathroom, checking to see when he was home and when he wasn’t, trying to figure out his Google calendar to know when he was going to be out.” In the context of Trump, they noted, “It’s not just the home you live in, it’s the entire world you live in.” Taking space from the news and checking out when you need to isn’t being irresponsible or uninformed, it’s a literal survival tactic. Belle also recommended preserving your mental space by being “hypervigilant in keeping records of reality.”

People like Trump “try to make up their own narrative, because that’s what abusers always do.” Already, the Trump administration is trying to shift the narrative on topics like vaccines, trans rights, and many other topics. Rejecting these rewrites of both history and the present moment are an important way to hold on to your space of your own in a moment when the entire world feels unsafe.

Over and over, the advice I heard from survivors was to seek out support—and build community with like-minded people if you don’t already have it. As Torres reminded me, “We keep us safe” is not just a queer catchphrase, it’s a commitment that marginalized people and survivors have made to one another during terrifying moments when the government has been an assailant rather than a source of protection, like the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s. “The closer we can get to community right now, the more we can break down walls and each other, the more we can extend ourselves and show up for each other,” Passi said. “That’s our safety plan. Quite frankly it’s not a muscle that a lot of us have used, but we need to now.” 

Many of the survivors were remarkably sanguine in the face of Trump’s reelection. It wasn’t that they were naïve about how bad the next four years are likely to be, but instead, having survived abuse in their personal lives, they felt equipped to weather it on the national stage. Nina told me that in the lead-up to November 5, she was having nightmares about being trapped in her old apartment with her abusive ex. “Since the election happened, I’ve stopped having those dreams,” she said. “The thing I was afraid of is here, so I might as well get to work.”