After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I made a self-serious, public declaration that I would not be moving back to Canada in protest. I had only left Toronto the year before to work in New York, the epicenter of media, and I wasn’t going to let Trump chase me and my ambitions back home. “The worst thing I could do is let an orange-faced bully, a man who loves to intimidate women and has 15 sexual-assault allegations to his name, drive me out of this country,” I wrote at the time.
When Trump won the presidency for a second time, the situation — my situation — was different. I had just given birth to a baby girl, whose first years of life would now be spent in a country that voted for a man found liable for sexual assault rather than its first woman president. Eight years ago, the subway was filled with ashen faces the morning after the election; now, Trump’s popularity has soared in Manhattan, the supposed bastion of woke coastal elites. I used to tell my mom to relax when she worried about my well-being. I lived far from the MAGA-loving heartland, after all, in a place where I could still legally get an abortion. While I knew not everyone had that sense of safety, as a white woman with dual American citizenship, my rights were still intact. This time around, though, his administration’s cruelty has quickly reached my orbit.
