Along the way to winning the election, Trump and his allies reduced so many of us to objects, to evildoers, to garbage, to the enemy. What if Trump’s election is a horrific manifestation of a nation cutting off its nose to spite its face? “Our power and our potential actually goes beyond the ballot box,” says Khury Petersen-Smith, co-director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name.