To the Editor: With Trump’s Election, Our Classmates Are Terrified for a Reason

In an op-ed earlier this week, the Harvard Republican Club’s then-president, Michael Oved ’25, dismissed his peers who felt President-elect Donald Trump’s reelection was terrifying and called on them to “engage” with Republican ideas “on a meaningful level.” But this engagement is difficult given the reality of the incoming administration.

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — a decision Trump himself has said was “only made possible” by his presidency — women have lost access to life-saving care and, in states with strict Republican bans, maternal mortality is rising. A Fox News host who, while serving as the publisher of a conservative journal at Princeton University, ran a piece arguing that someone blackout drunk can’t be raped because “there was no duress” and has now been credibly accused of sexual assault could well lead the Department of Defense, overseeing a military with pervasive sexual assault issues. Calling this administration’s supporters “misogynistic” is far from hyperbolic, as Oved implies.

Trump’s new pick for border czar once said immigrant families can be “deported together” en masse. In his previous term, Trump attempted to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a policy temporarily protecting immigrants who arrived in the country as minors from deportation. During the campaign, advisors promised a bigger redo. The threat of “social alienation” is not directed at Republicans — as Oved’s op-ed implies. It is facing our immigrant peers.

Trump’s allies in Congress have proved themselves no better, using this session’s last legislative moments to turn Trump’s massive campaign against trans Americans into real, but pointless, pain for a future trans congresswoman.

Maybe lower taxes and Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency are worth all of this. We all make tradeoffs when we vote for a candidate. But our classmates have no obligation to debate if their rights are a worthy compromise. Civility becomes ever more difficult when people are directly at risk and the stakes have been made so personal and dehumanizing.

Many of our now vulnerable classmates are living in fear that Trump’s next victims might not be a distant Haitian community in Ohio, but their LGBTQ+ friends or a cousin with a complicated pregnancy. And they will look at those on campus who gleefully cheer their impending hardship not just with anger, but terror.

I’d honestly be terrified too. And it’s hard to listen when you’re terrified.

—Chukwudi “Chudy” M. Ilozue ’24-’25 is a senior fellow with the Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics