Growing Up in Donald Trump’s America

After a grueling election cycle, Donald Trump has officially been re-elected as the 47th president of the United States. In the lead up to Election Day, ELLE spoke to handful of young female voters about what it was like to come of age during his first administration. Revisit the piece, below:

This year’s youngest eligible voters were just 10 years old when former president Donald Trump won the 2016 election, reinventing politics as we know it today. From the ensuing Women’s March to the Muslim travel ban to family separations at the southern border, from the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the movement for racial justice after the death of George Floyd, a dramatic series of events have shaped this generation’s political psyche.

Since 2017, data has shown that young women are moving further to the left than past generations on issues like abortion in particular. While young women are not a monolith, this shift began in the Trump era. So, what was it like growing up during Trump’s first term in office and the years that followed? ELLE.com checked in with women across the country and the political spectrum to find out. Below, they share the moments that shaped their vantage point, ahead of an election where young voters could play a decisive role.

Maekyla Massey, 19

From Baldwin, New York, Massey now lives in New York City, where she’s a student at Columbia University. She was 11 years old during the 2016 election.

“I was in fourth grade when Trump was elected. I remember the student council was comprised of a lot of girls. We were so excited about Hillary Clinton. Of course, we knew nothing about politics then, but what was so alluring to us was the prospect of having a female president in the White House. When she was defeated by Trump in 2016, we felt defeated alongside her.

“At school, there were a lot of Spanish students who were scared they were going to get deported, even though they were born here. I remember that vividly. A lot of people were scared about the wall and all of the rhetoric that Trump would spew about immigration.

“I think what shaped my worldview was how politics was seen as taboo during Trump’s presidency. When I was in elementary school, during the first year of Trump’s term, we were just told not to talk about it. If we tried to ask questions, even in social studies classes, we were discouraged from doing so. Then during Biden’s presidency—I’m sure this has to do with me entering high school—we talked a lot about it. We could talk openly about politics without any feelings of shame.”

Madalyn Propst, 18

Propst, a youth advisor for the Florida Democratic Party and a student at Florida State University, lives in Tallahassee, Florida. She’s originally from Orlando and was 10 years old during the 2016 election.

“I first became interested in politics right before the 2016 election, because I had family members who were in the Pulse nightclub shooting. I wasn’t old enough to understand what was really going on, but I knew that there was one candidate who was willing to put anti-gun legislation out to protect people, and there was one who wasn’t. That’s all I knew about politics—it seemed like one party wanted people to die and the other didn’t.

“Trump’s entire term—and my childhood, to a large extent—is marked by an uncertainty and a fear about gun violence. My mother was a public high school teacher in Orlando. I remember very distinctly sitting in my middle school classroom and hearing that there had been another mass shooting in Florida. The first thing I could think about was copycat killers, and if they would go to my mother’s school. Then exactly a year later, there was a BB gun that looked incredibly real, and about five students were held hostage in a bathroom for about six hours, and my mother was in the building. Knowing there was nothing I could do about it, and it was a result of poor legislation, is a hallmark of his entire term in office.”

A moment of silence during a vigil for the victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida.

Riley Reed, 24

Reed is a youth advocate living in Washington, D.C. She’s from Waukesha, Wisconsin, and was 16 years old during the 2016 election.

“I got really involved in politics during the 2016 election. My high school was really, really pro-Trump. Really, really pro-Second Amendment. As a queer organizer, [it was] not the most fun place to grow up. I remember the day of the 2016 election, people were decked out in Trump gear. It was like Trump-Pence shirts, buttons, hats, signs were put up. I wore blue that day, because I honestly felt like if I wore a Hillary Clinton shirt, I’d get harassed or yelled at.

“After seeing him get elected, it definitely shook my faith in politics a lot, but it also woke me up and made me become more involved. Fast-forward to 2018, when gun violence prevention took over my life, I started doing a lot of work with March For Our Lives and Team ENOUGH. I organized my high school walkout in 2018. We were able to get several hundred students in what was a very pro-Second Amendment area [to walk out to protest gun violence]. That gave me hope that we can change something.”

A 2018 protest against gun violence in Washington, D.C.

Katherine Mickelson, 20

Originally from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Mickelson now lives in Waco, Texas, where she attends Baylor University. She was 11 years old during the 2016 election.

“The 2016 election was when I was in sixth grade. I remember one girl said if Trump was elected, her family was moving to Canada. I remember the rhetoric going around that if you were a woman, you had to vote for Hillary Clinton. Even at that age, I already kind of knew I didn’t align politically with Hillary Clinton, based on my family values and how my parents were voting. It was daunting to realize that was the world we were growing up in, where neither leader was going to be my first pick.

“In eighth grade, toward the middle of Trump’s presidency, I had some friends who decided they were no longer going to be friends with me, because I didn’t have the same political views as them. I think that idea and those conversations have really created this division within my generation. I believe that no matter what your beliefs and your views are, you can still maintain a friendship.

“With the Black Lives Matter movement, some friends were upset with me for not posting a black square on my Instagram—that was a trend that was going around, and it was like, everyone needs to post this. I didn’t, and I got several mean texts from people who I thought were my friends. It was already an isolating time not being in school and having the restrictions on extracurricular activities, and to have people decide that they didn’t want to be friends over a political issue was really sad.”

Michele Ming, 27

Ming lives in New York City and is originally from Houston, Texas. She’s a political director with the immigrant rights group United We Dream. She was 19 years old during the 2016 election.

“I turned 18 in 2015, and my parents got their citizenship in 2015, so [2016] was our first election together. That made it all the more important. From the first speech that Trump gave when he announced his candidacy, where he talked about immigrants in such a disparaging way, it was really eye-opening. This was opening the door for new xenophobic rhetoric to come into the political discourse in a way that I had never experienced before. When he came to office and immediately announced the Muslim travel ban, it was a confirmation of the fears that me and my family and a lot of our friends had. He’s not only just saying these things, but he’s going to act on every single thing that he said.”

Former President Donald Trump

Aida Sall, 19

A New Jersey native, Sall now lives in New York City and was 11 years old during the 2016 election.

“My freshman year [of high school] was 2020, so of course, a lot happened—the pandemic and the death of George Floyd. I saw the way people were emboldened to have these wild beliefs that were supported by the president. And as a Black woman, I did not feel safe. The rise of police brutality and [the death of] George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery—I spoke out against that. I felt like I had to, even though I was 14 at the time.

“I experienced a lot of racism in school. One time, we were discussing slavery, and a teacher suggested that we now have the benefit of hindsight. And maybe slave owners didn’t know slavery was bad. Things like that.

“Having Donald Trump be the first president that I really was aware of and really exposed to, the level of inflammatory rhetoric really skewed the political scene. Instead of debating solutions to address certain issues, it was debating whether or not they should be addressed at all, or if people should have the right to have them addressed.”

A protest in June 2020 after George Floyd’s murder.

Preeti Kulkarni, 19

Kulkarni, a student at George Washington University, lives in Washington, D.C., and is from Gaithersburg, Maryland. She was 11 years old during the 2016 election.

“My first real introduction to politics was the Parkland shooting. I was in sixth grade when that happened. I organized a walkout at my school, and I got into politics through the lens of gun control advocacy, and then I got into the wider Democratic space. In high school, I worked for a gubernatorial campaign. As I started getting more and more involved in politics, I saw this polarization, especially during the 2020 election. It illuminated how we really need to invest in connecting with people who are on the other side of the political spectrum. We need to broaden our political messaging and broaden our conception of who should be involved in our political community.

“January 6 was easily one of the biggest political turning points in my journey. Seeing that blatant attack on our democracy and seeing the discrepancy in response—how the indictments went, how that process played out in real-time—really influenced my view about politics. It honestly made me a little apathetic for a point, but it also illuminated this concern of protecting our institutions first. Politics is one thing; safeguarding the democratic principles that make this political process possible is another thing entirely. That wasn’t really separated in my mind until that happened.”

Trump supporters near the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Isabelle Brumley, 19

Brumley lives in Lubbock, Texas, where she attends Texas Tech University. She was 11 years old during the 2016 election.

“During the George Floyd incident, I was in ninth grade. My dad is a police officer, and he was having to work one of the protests here in Lubbock. I saw videos all over Instagram of people I knew screaming the most hateful, awful things at my dad. I was only 14 or 15, and I ran to the living room, sobbing at my mom. I was like, these people don’t even know him, and they just hate him because of his occupation. Before that, I had been conservative just because my family was, but that was when I really started to care, started to look into things on my own.

“Nobody expects conservative people to speak up, and so people just kind of assume that everybody’s liberal—and you must agree with them, or you’re wrong and terrible. I think a lot of people, especially if they want a positive social media image, are afraid to say anything against what other celebrities or influencers are saying, because there’s a fear of not being accepted.

“My sophomore year, I made the varsity tennis team, and this girl who was a senior, who gave me a ride to practice, was really liberal. I had reposted this post on my Instagram Story that was about, as Christians, how to love people without supporting their sinful lifestyles. And she slid up on my Story and was calling me racist and homophobic and several things that didn’t relate to the post I had made. I tried to explain, as Christians, this is what we believe. She had no desire to listen to me, but it really ostracized me from the team. I was left out of group chats. I was not invited to team dinners. She just didn’t want anything to do with me.”

Lucy Ivey, 20

Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Ivey lives in Provo, Utah, where she attends Brigham Young University. She started Our Era magazine and was 12 years old during the 2016 election.

“I do remember hearing about how Trump was accused of sexual misconduct several different times. [Editor’s note: Trump has since been found liable for sexual abuse.] The fact that he was able to still run for president, having done those things, was scary. I was a 12-year-old girl. Understanding this happens to women all the time, and that someone who has done that to women can run for president, was incredibly terrifying.

“COVID was crazy. I lived across the street from a hospital growing up, so I’d look out my bedroom window, and there was like a morgue in the front yard of the hospital. I needed a platform for me to be able to talk to other people about how COVID was affecting them.

“Young people are at the forefront of most movements, and have been for a very long time, and it’s up to us to continue that. Because of all of the horrible things that happened while Trump was in office…it shaped my understanding that when we have a problem with something, and when something is bothering us, we can make change. We can stick up for what we believe in.”

The Women’s March in January 2017 in Washington, D.C.

Kayla Austin, 21

Austin is a student at Howard University and the founder of My Gun’s Been Moved, a product designed to combat gun violence. Originally from Bollinger, Illinois, she now lives in Washington, D.C., and was 13 years old during the 2016 election.

“During the Trump presidency, it seemed like there was just an attack on anybody who had a diverse background. I feel like at a young age I had to say something or call people out when something racist or insensitive was going on. I had to defend my identity and the people I cared about. Especially during that election, a lot of Trump’s rhetoric empowered racist people to just say whatever they wanted.

“In my middle school one of my classmates said something assuming that Black people were aggressive and like animals. I had to sit next to this person in a class. I told my teacher I was uncomfortable with that, and he was like, ‘You know, sometimes you’re going to be around people that you don’t get along with, he may think differently than you,’ which was not the problem for me. But we did a project on flags of the world, and while we were discussing it, the person I was nervous about drew a Confederate flag and put it in my face and asked me if I knew what that meant.

“That time period made me very interested in social activism, the civil rights movement. I was like, I have to educate myself, those around me. I feel like my middle-school years really did define my views on activism and political engagement.”

Demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

Virginia King, 19

A Dallas native, King attends Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. She’s the president of the Network of Enlightened Women chapter at Texas State University, and she was 11 years old during the 2016 election.

“After I graduated high school, I went to the Turning Point USA Young Women’s Leadership Summit, which is [the conservative organization’s] all-girls conference in the summer. I really loved it. And I posted a couple things on my Instagram Story from it, and then people I knew from high school were cussing me out and blocking me and calling me names. That was a shock to me at first, because I felt like these people were my friends. That made me realize that my beliefs have shifted, not everyone who was my friend before was going to stay my friend. That was hard at first. I definitely felt bad.

“My experiences are a little different from [my parents]. As they were growing up, and for most of their lives, Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and liberals weren’t quite so polarized and weren’t at each other’s necks all the time. So politics just wasn’t such a big deal to them, or the differences and the issues were minor. But growing up under Trump, and with things being more divided, it’s been at the forefront of my mind as I’ve gotten older, and it’s taken up a lot of conversations I’ve had with peers and other students.”

These quotes have been edited lightly and condensed for clarity.

Rachel Janfaza is a journalist covering youth political culture. Most recently, she started ‘The Up and Up,’ a newsletter focused on Gen Z’s political zeitgeist: how young Americans are organizing, mobilizing and participating in civic life and politics – or, how and why they’re not. She also freelances, with bylines in Teen Vogue, Glamour, Elle, and Bustle. Previously, she was an associate writer on the CNN Politics team covering young voters, campaigns, and breaking news.