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LIFTING FROM THE BOTTOM: HOW TO SURVIVE DONALD TRUMP’S AMERICA  
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Liz Theoharis and Shailly Gupta Barnes
November 24, 2024
TomDispatch [[link removed]]

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_ In this sick reality of ours, poverty is clearly anything but a
marginal experience — and yet, as in the last election, it’s
repeatedly minimalized and dismissed in our nation’s politics. _

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_“If they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen
when it is dry?” (Luke 23:31)_

Before November 5th, millions of us were already struggling with
poverty, extreme storms, immigration nightmares, anti-trans bills,
criminalized reproductive health, the demolition of homeless
encampments, the silencing of freedom of speech on campuses… and, of
course, the list only goes on and on. Since Donald Trump and J.D.
Vance were elected, more of us find ourselves in a state of fear and
trembling, given the reports of transgender people
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in broad daylight, misogynist social media posts
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“your body, my choice,” Black college students receiving notes
about returning to enslavement
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and the unhoused beaten and battered
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In the wake of the election results, there has also been a flurry of
activity in anticipation of the extremist policies Donald Trump and
crew are likely to put in place to more deeply harm the nation’s
most vulnerable: mass Zoom meetings [[link removed]] with
MoveOn, the Working Families Party, Indivisible, and more; interfaith
prayer services
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healing and justice organized by various denominations and ecumenical
groups; local actions pulled together by the Women’s March
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meetings with the hashtag #weareworthfightingfor
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inauguration day and beyond.

Although some were surprised by the election outcome, there were
others who saw it coming and offered comfort and solidarity to their
communities even before the results were in. On the eve of election
night, a public elementary school in West Harlem, New York, sent this
message to its families:

“We know emotions are running high. Today, and last week at school,
many conversations in PreK through 5th grade were had and heard
regarding how voting happens… worry from some students about whether
they will be safe after tomorrow… We assured all children that our
school, no matter what, will always be a safe place for them and their
families… It is so hard feeling that this election and its outcomes
could have such a huge impact on any person based on their status,
race, gender identity, sexuality, religion, country of origin and so
many other identities which make our school so beautifully
diverse…It is not easy being a parent/caregiver on a good day, let
alone when it feels like times are so turbulent and uncertain and
even, scary.  We are here for you, parents, caregivers, and we are in
this together. No matter what!”

That message came from a Title 1 school, nearly 60% of whose students
qualify for free school meals. If Trump keeps up with his promise to
close
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Department of Education, tens of thousands of public schools across
the country, like the one in West Harlem, could lose critical funding
and programs that sustain tens of millions of students and their
families — that is, if public education isn’t completely
privatized in some grim fashion.

Of course, not all communities approached Trump’s election with such
trepidation. On November 6th, the Bloomberg Billionaire Index reported
that the 10 richest men in the world added $64 billion to their own
wealth
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Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 election. Since then,
the stock market
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had some of its best days in recent history.

AN IMPOVERISHED DEMOCRACY

After inciting
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at the Capitol, being indicted
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state and federal court, convicted
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34 felony counts, and using racist, sexist, and hateful rhetoric
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Donald Trump has gone down in history as the only convicted felon to
become an American president, receiving
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than 74 million votes and securing 312 electoral college votes.
Although an undisputed victory, the outcome relied heavily on a
weakened democracy and a polarized economy, drawing on discontent and
disarray to regain political power.

Indeed, although Donald Trump has the distinct “honor” of being
the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years, he has done
so after more than a decade of assaults on voting rights, unleashed in
2013 when the Supreme Court gutted
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Voting Rights Act. Over the next 10 years, nearly 100 laws
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passed in 29 states that restrict voting access, from omnibus bills to
polling location closures, limits on mail-in and absentee voting,
harsh ID requirements (including eliminating student ID cards as a
valid form of identification), and more. Since 2020, at least 30
states have enacted 78 restrictive laws
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63 of which were in effect in dozens of states during this election.
And in 2024 alone, nine states enacted 18 restrictive voting laws
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alongside purges of thousands of voters in the days leading up to
November 5th.

In addition to such prolonged attacks on the right to vote, widespread
poverty and economic precarity have become defining characteristics of
our impoverished democracy: more than two of every five of us are poor
or low-income, and three in five
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living paycheck-to-paycheck without affordable healthcare, decent
homes, or quality education.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2024 report _Poverty in the
United States: 2023_
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41% of this country’s population has a household income either under
the poverty threshold or just above it, precariously living one
emergency away from financial ruin. That translates into
approximately 137 million people
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are struggling every day to make it through without falling even
further behind. Those tens of millions of people
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disproportionate percentage of people of color, including 56.5% of
Black people (23.4 million), 61.4% of Latino people (40.2 million),
55.8% of Indigenous people (1.4 million), and 38% of Asian people (8.5
million). They also include nearly one-third of white people, 60
million, and nearly half (49%) of all children in the United States.
Such rates are slightly higher for women (42.6%) than for men (39.8%),
including 44.6% for elderly women.

When tallied up, these numbers mirror pre-pandemic conditions in 2018
and 2019, during which poverty and low-income rates stood at about
40%, impacting 140 million people in every county, state, and region
of the country.

In other words, in this sick reality of ours, poverty is clearly
anything but a marginal experience — and yet, as in the last
election, it’s repeatedly minimalized and dismissed in our
nation’s politics. In the process, the daily lives of nearly
one-third of the electorate are discounted, because among that vast
impoverished population, there are approximately 80 million eligible
voters
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by political strategists as among the most significant
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of voters to win over.

Case in point: In 2020 and 2021, there was a significant dip
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the overall number of people who were poor or low-income. Covid
pandemic programs that offered financial help also expanded access to
health care, food stamps, free school meals, and unemployment
insurance, while monthly support from the Child Tax Credit lifted
over _20 million people
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of poverty and insecurity while increasing protection from evictions
and foreclosures. Such programs made millions of people more
economically secure than they had been in years.

Nonetheless, instead of extending and improving them and potentially
gaining the trust of millions of poor and low-income voters, all of
these anti-poverty policies were ended by early 2023
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2024, not only had the gains against poverty been swiftly erased,
but more than 25 million people
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been kicked off Medicaid, including millions in battleground states
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Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In that same time period
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the Biden administration approved an $895 billion budget for war and
another $95 billion in additional aid to Ukraine and Israel.

Rather than speaking to such economic crises or pledging to address
such pervasive insecurity, over the course of the election season, the
Democrats emphasized a rising GDP
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strong job market
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and important infrastructure investments
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in recent years — macro-economic issues that had little effect on
the material well-being of the majority of Americans, especially those
struggling with the rising cost of living. For instance, pre-election
polling
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Latino voters showed that three-quarters (78%) of them had experienced
an increase in food and basic living expenses; two-thirds (68%)
emphasized the high costs of rent and housing; and nearly three in
five (57%) said that their wages weren’t high enough to meet their
cost of living and/or they had to take second jobs to make ends meet.

When you consider the grim final results of election 2024, such
realities — and the decision of the Democrats to functionally
disregard poor and low-income voters — should be taken into account.

WHEN THE WOOD IS GREEN/WHEN THE WOOD IS DRY

With just over 74 million votes (to Harris’s 71 million), among a
voting-eligible population of more than 230 million, Trump actually
received only one-third of the possible votes in this election. Nearly
85 million eligible voters simply chose not to turn out. In reality,
he won’t enter office with a popular mandate.

However, buoyed by a Republican-controlled Senate and House of
Representatives, his second term brings with it a profound sense of
dread, based on a heightened awareness of the policies that Trump 2.0
is likely to carry forward (laid bare in the Heritage Foundation’s
nearly 900-page pre-election Project 2025 mandate
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social-welfare programs, housing programs, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+
families, and public education, millions of people could be thrown
into crisis, with alarmingly fewer ways to resist or express dissent,
especially given Trump’s long-time willingness
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use military force to quell protest. With the passage of the
“non-profit killer bill
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in the House of Representatives (before Trump even takes office), the
infrastructure of resistance is also under threat. Add to all this:
Trump has already started talking about overhauling
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Medicaid and food-stamp programs that benefit at least 70 million poor
and low-income people to offset the costs of extending tax cuts to
billionaires and corporations. 

All of this brings us to the Bible.

Poverty was both severe and all too common in Jesus’s day. Ninety
percent of the population
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the Roman empire was believed to have been poor, with a class of
expendable low-wage workers (to which some historians suggest Jesus
belonged) so poor that many only lived remarkably brief lives in utter
precarity. Shifts in farming and fishing had catapulted some people
into great new wealth but left the vast majority struggling for basics
like food and housing. Many of the impoverished subjects of the Roman
Empire joined political and religious renewal movements, which took
various forms and used various tactics to resist these and other
injustices.

Some readers may be familiar with the decadence and violence of the
Roman Emperor Nero. Popularly known as the anti-Christ
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power after Jesus walked the earth, but as is clear from his nickname,
had a grave impact on many of Jesus’s followers. Nero was, of
course, the one who was accused of “fiddling while Rome is
burning” — holding lavish banquets, using and abusing (even
possibly raping) some of his poor subjects, persecuting Christians,
and bringing about the decline and eventual fall of the Roman empire
through his authoritarian rule and decadent overspending.

As detailed in Luke’s Gospel, during the last week of his life,
Jesus turned to the people of Jerusalem and wept. He described the
profound suffering they had been enduring and instructed them to brace
themselves for the suffering still to come, saying, “For if they do
these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is
dry?” This line foreshadows Jesus’s death on the cross (an
execution reserved for those who dared to challenge the Roman Empire
and its emperors), the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, and the
persecution of his poor followers who continued to practice mutual
solidarity, even after that crucifixion.

Writing decades later, the author of Luke’s gospel may have been
offering a warning about emperors like Nero that would foreshadow
later times. Luke had the benefit of hindsight in the wake of
Jesus’s life and death in which there was not exactly a lot of good
news about the canceling of debts, the release of those enslaved to
unjust structures, or the prosperity of the poor (of the sort Jesus
had called for when he started his public ministry). Rather, those who
dared to stand up to Rome were being persecuted, while so many others
were being overworked and underpaid in a society that was faltering.

Two thousand years later, this sounds all too familiar, doesn’t it?

Looking at Donald Trump’s new appointments and his (and his
cronies’) plans for “making America great again,” you really
have to wonder: if the poor and our democracy were suffering before
Trump was reelected, what will happen now? If, amid relative
abundance, the poor were already being abandoned, what will indeed
occur when those with the power to distribute that abundance, and
protect our air, water, and land, openly disdain the “least of
these,” who are most of us, and instead favor the wealthy and
powerful?

Donald Trump may liken
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to Jesus in his media appearances and election rallies, but his words
and actions actually resemble those of Nero and other Roman emperors.
With claims
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“I alone can fix your problems” and bread-and-circus rallies
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pre-election one he held at Madison Square Garden, perhaps a more
accurate parallel with the incoming administration may, in fact, be
Nero and _his_ cronies who stood against Jesus and his mission to
end poverty.

If so, then for those committed to the biblical call for a safe and
abundant life for all, such times demand that we focus on building the
strength and power of the people. During the fall of the Roman Empire,
poor and dispossessed communities banded together to build a movement
where everyone would be accepted and all needs would be met. Don’t
you hear echoes of that in the words and actions of that school in
West Harlem, so deeply concerned about its families, and the community
actions proclaiming that “we are worth fighting for”?

Such communities of yesteryear knew a truth that is all the more
important today: lives and livelihoods will be saved, if at all, from
below, rather than on high. As we approach a new year and the
inauguration of Donald Trump (on Martin Luther King Day, no less), let
us take to heart a favorite slogan of the authors: “When we lift
from the bottom, everybody rises.” _This_ is the only way forward.

_LIZ THEOHARIS, a TomDispatch regular
[[link removed]], is a theologian,
ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Co-chair of the Poor
People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival
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Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice
[[link removed]] at Union Theological Seminary in New
York City, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really
Said About the Poor
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Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People's Campaign
[[link removed]].
Follow her on X at @liztheo [[link removed]]._

_SHAILLY GUPTA BARNES is the Policy Director of the Kairos Center
for Rights, Religions and Social Justice
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National Call for Moral Revival
[[link removed]]. She has a background in law,
economics, and human rights and has spent nearly 20 years working with
and for poor and dispossessed communities._

_Tom Engelhardt launched TomDispatch in October 2001 as an informal
listserv offering commentary and collected articles from the global
media to a select group of friends and colleagues. In November 2002,
it gained its name and, as a project of the Nation Institute (now the
Type Media Center), became a web-based publication aimed at providing
“a regular antidote to the mainstream media.”_

_In the 18 years since, TomDispatch has regularly published three
original articles weekly on subjects ranging from the American way of
war and this country’s “forever wars” to economic inequality to
the climate crisis. It has served as a syndicated source for websites
ranging from Alternet and Common Dreams to the Nation magazine
and Salon. Republished in newspapers, magazines, and scores of
websites worldwide over the years._

* U.S. Poverty
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* Roman emperors
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* Christianity
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* resistance
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