Not Panicked / Always Panicked
by Rachel MacNair
I was visiting a large Quaker Meeting for Worship in January 2025, just days into Donald Trump sending a lot of heads reeling with his initial set of executive orders and actions. We Quakers (Friends) are the type of folks especially inclined to be upset about many of those. This was expressed by some who spoke. They were worried. They were freaked out.
So here’s the message I gave:
Back in 1972, when I was 13 and 14 years old, I had a lot of angst over the American war in Vietnam. I worked hard for George McGovern for president, thinking that would help end the war. But Richard Nixon won by a landslide. The war would continue, and I was distraught.
If you had come to me the day after the election and said, “Here’s how we’re going to do it. In less than two years, he’ll resign from office in disgrace.” I would have said, “I enjoy the impishness of the idea. But let’s do be realistic.”
Friends laughed a bit at this point, knowing that’s exactly what happened. I went on to say that ever since then I haven’t worried about the trajectory of events. I’ve observed that things go off the trajectory so often. I intended to maintain my faith that over the course of time, kindness is stronger than cruelty.
I think the Trump administration is far more likely than most to come up with surprising events. It’s practically designed for it. “Being realistic” doesn’t preclude as much as it used to.
Biden
Part of why I wasn’t as freaked out as other Friends is that I had a lower opinion of the Obama-Biden-Harris set of actions. I was horrified about the re-imposition of money pushing abortion internationally. I knew several thousand babies would be killed because of that funding, along with a long list of other things those administrations did or would do to promote abortion.
But when many of my fellow Quakers understood Harris to be the “lesser evil” between the two, I think many were succumbing to our system’s fixation on discerning which of two candidates is less bad. That lends itself to minimizing what’s wrong with the one you decided on. In the case of Biden, I un-minimize a bit:
- Modernization of nuclear weapons continued, when instead eventual elimination should be the focus.
- Obama used weaponized drones in Afghanistan, bombing wedding parties, terrifying children, and giving the civilian population a constant sense of danger. See Pro-Life Means Anti-Drone in The American Conservative.
There was also ample corruption in the Afghan government that further eroded the population’s trust in it. By the time of the U.S. withdrawal, the situation had essentially been set up to be a disaster. Afghan soldiers abandoned their weapons and the Taliban re-took the country.
While the drones were striking, we pointed out that the strategy was not only astonishingly cruel but markedly stupid. The fairly predictable end result shows that. The Taliban and the corrupt officials are mainly to blame, but those were a given, and they weren’t dealt with well.
- We can blame Russia for the war in Ukraine; there would be no war if they stopped. But the Obama administration had a tepid response when Russia invaded Crimea back in 2014, at a time when non-military options for a stronger response were known to the administration. Biden’s belligerency at some times mixed with insufficient opposition at other times was a major bungling. Harris made clear she wouldn’t have changed how she approached it.
- We can blame Hamas for its horrific October 7 attack. We can blame the current Israeli government for its long-standing policies that hurt Palestinians and its response that killed thousands of children and others. But the U.S. sending weapons to Israel and otherwise tolerating the war has been dealing badly with a bad situation. Peace activists have spent the last year asserting our outrage at this.
In February 2020, Rachel adds a stone to the growing peace mosaic on the Gaza Strip wall, which can be seen at one spot by the people stuck inside, showing them support for their plight.
Most peace activists will agree with my bullet-point assessment above. But they tend to forget about all that when election time rolls around. We can’t contemplate evil so much when we’re trying to make the case that one candidate is lesser about it.
Trump
Trump is deliberately “flooding the zone” with highly objectionable policies in rapid-fire succession. As a consistent-lifer, with the criterion of which ones might get people killed, I’d currently give these ones the highest priority:
- The cut-off of humanitarian aid in U.S.A.I.D. will result in many dozen deaths at least even if the aid gets restored soon. For example, already paid-for medicines treating HIV – they can prevent pregnant women from giving the disease to their preborn children. But without it, a large portion of the children die before turning two. This is covered in The New York Times opinion piece: As Fellow Pro-Lifers, We Are Begging Marco Rubio to Save Foreign Aid.
- Immigration policy was especially cruel in the first Trump administration and bids fair to be again. Some of the cruelty will stick, and some will be inflicted and then walked back, perhaps to be inflicted again.
- Medicaid and SNAP (food assistance) are both essential services. Proposed massive cuts – especially when the purpose of the cuts is to fund more military, greater cruelty to immigrants, and tax cuts for the rich – can foreseeably be predicted to increase abortions. It will also lead to the deaths of unborn children and other people through inadequate medicine and food. See our post Social Programs to Help the Poor are Pro-life.
- There’s already been a lot of bungling on foreign policy which could be pernicious if wars result or are exacerbated. The February 28 Oval Office public shouting match between Trump, Vance, and Zelenskyy springs to mind, and that was just part of Trump using the talking points of an aggressor and war criminal. I also think of talk about clearing out Gaza for a real-estate deal, and of starting up fresh new belligerency with Panama and Greenland and Canada that weren’t even on our radar before. All these situations are volatile, so by giving specifics this paragraph will be the most quickly outdated one of this post. We can count on Trump to come up with new ones and don’t know how long he’ll stick with these.
The one area where Trump is the lesser evil is on abortion, and as I’ve explained before, I fear there will be all kinds of damage there, too. His heart isn’t really in it. He works on it for transactional reasons, and when the transactions change, so will he. This can be seen by abortion opposition being badly watered down in the Republican platform last year.
Consistent lifers who work with our fellow peace activists all the time know full well that he makes being persuasive harder.
graphic from our member group Rehumanize International
Conclusion
My feelings are that the Trump administration, while having some good points, is mainly stomach-churning. But also that the Harris administration would have been stomach-churning. We can’t get out of stomach-churning by looking at who gets elected in an only-two-options system.
But who knows what will happen? As I said before, Nixon resigning wasn’t on the table early on. Also, he did get some good things done – the Environmental Protection Agency, opening to China, etc.
Trump has said he’d like to cut the military budget in half. I don’t believe that’s a serious proposal, but I’ve never in all my life heard a U.S. President say that before. And he’d like to be the grand person who gets denuclearization talks going with Russia and China. Again, that may be part of a narcissistic delusion. But I’m not about to rain on his parade if he tries.
As I learned back in my teens, trying to predict the future by looking at current trajectories turns out to not be all that realistic.
Predicting that this president will do some admirably good things and some stunningly terrible things is a safe prediction, so long as we don’t specify which good and bad things. It’s been true of pretty much every president the U.S. has ever had.
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For more of our posts on voting and politics, see:
Trump Sabotaging the Pro-Life Movement
Political Homelessness is Better than a Wrong Political Home
Pro-Life Voting Strategy: A Problem without an Answer
How Consistent-life Advocacy Would Benefit from Ranked-Choice Voting
The Deserving and Undeserving Poor vs. the Worthy and Unworthy of Life: How Both Major Political Parties Pick and Choose Who They Help and Whom They Kill
Dorothy Day and the Consistent Life Ethic: Rejecting Conventional Political Paradigms
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For updated information on an aspect of elections we can get behind, see our project website:
I agree with everything in these bullet points about the stomach-churning aspects of both administrations, and I’ve often made similar critiques of “lesser evil” thinking that keeps us stuck with two stomach-churning political parties that get away with all kinds of stomach-churning things on the argument that they’re less bad than the other – often even refraining from putting checks on each other in order to serve their partisan narratives of how much worse the other side is.
That said, I also see something qualitatively different about Trump from all previous US presidents, whatever their party. Part of it is his being uniquely unqualified for public office among those who have held the office. More dangerous still is his blatant unscrupulousness and apparent lack of any moral compass other than personal loyalty or disloyalty to him and distributing rewards and punishments accordingly.
I have said same thing of Kamala Harris (who I did not vote for as my first choice, being fortunate to live in one of the two states using ranked choice voting) that I once heard someone say about Hillary Clinton: she’s wrong about almost everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters. I’m not entirely comfortable with how close that sounds to “lesser evil” thinking, but this is something I could say about ALL past presidents and other elected officials and probably a majority of past presidential candidates except for a few fringe ones.
I’m afraid that JD Vance got it right about Trump the first time, that he is indeed aspiring to be America’s Hitler. That’s the historical moment that we are now in, and there is a level of danger in this beyond the usual Democratic and Republican stomach-churning policies. And yes, we need enough people able to recognize the seriousness of the danger of the present moment without simply panicking. Lord help us.