Fed Up And Fleeing: Meet The Women Leaving Trump’s America

When Donald Trump was elected US President in 2016, concerns about him were often met with urgings to ‘wait and see’. ‘It won’t be as bad as you think,’ we were told; ‘He’ll shape up once he’s in office.’

Almost four years of gaslighting, racist rhetoric and the rolling back of rights for minorities, women and immigrants later, it has been far worse than many feared. And now, with the prospect of potentially four more years of division, many Americans are laying the groundwork to get out; during the first, depressingly diabolical presidential debate, Google recorded a huge surge in the search term: ‘How to move to Canada.’

‘It is not sustainable to live under the relentless stress that we have lived under for four more years,’ says Dina Fierro, a 42-year-old executive with an international beauty brand and a native New Yorker. ‘And there has been so much damage done to the country already, I shudder to think what four more years would do. I don’t know if America is redeemable,’ she says. Though she hasn’t yet signed up to a transfer abroad, to Canada or potentially Europe, ‘It is on the table, and I’ve had discussions with my boss,’ she says.

Others are not prepared to wait and see what the election brings. Lisa Simpson, 43, a graphic designer, is moving from Denver to Costa Rica in January, come what may. ‘We were letting November dictate our plans for our lives, and I felt overwhelmed and out of control. Once we stopped letting the election affect our decision, it was very freeing,’ she says. ‘Even if Biden wins, it will take a long time for this country to heal.’ They plan to spend a year, initially, in Costa Rica, in the hope of returning to a more politically peaceful, less Covid-ravaged US. Lisa will continue to work remotely, while her husband, Luke, will oversee the remote schooling of their sons, aged seven and three, who were the deciding factor in their decision. ‘Do I want to bring them up in a country that is going backwards? Where I’m terrified about the overt racism and the guns in schools? I fear that, with another four years of Trump, the country will become even more violent and lawless.’ Long before she’s even begun packing, she says, ‘I already feel a lot more positive about the future.’

Many with options to live elsewhere are contemplating taking them too. Rachel Joynes, 37, is a creative director in LA and, thanks to her British parentage, has dual nationality. If Trump is re-elected, she plans to head to the UK and France, where her mum lives. ‘I don’t suffer the worst of what this administration metes out to people, but the pain of being gaslit, 24/7, is real,’ she says. ‘I do feel a pull to stay and make it better in whatever way I can. But it comes down to what sort of society I want to be part of,’ she says. ‘It’s not just about the Trump presidency, it’s the mirror it has held up to this society – the capitalism, the way we treat the environment, the way we treat subordinates.’ Many, she believes, ‘don’t want to acknowledge how bad it really is’.

For those with only foreign citizenship, meanwhile, it’s a particularly difficult time. ‘I’ve lived here for 14 years, and I always felt that, if something happened, I could get home the same day – the distance wasn’t insurmountable,’ says British-born, New York- based brand strategist Gemma Craven, 44, who hasn’t seen her family all year; since March, the US border with the UK and Europe has been closed to non-citizens. ‘I feel trapped,’ she says – trapped in a country that she sees as ‘rapidly rolling back rights and hurtling towards a Handmaid’s Tale scenario’. ‘It’s no longer the country I moved to 14 years ago,’ she says. ‘I never thought I’d ever want to leave, but now I’m putting measures in place to get out quickly if I need to.’