Trump is back. Parents worldwide hope and fear for children’s futures.
| Johannesburg; Mexico City; Al-Zawayda, Gaza; Tel Aviv, Israel; Moscow; Basel, Switzerland; and Yan’an, China
Every four years, Americans choose who will fill the world’s most powerful office, and this year they’ve selected a leader who touts as one of his greatest foreign policy strengths his unpredictability.
At a time of broad global conflict, with mass human migration, major wars in the Middle East and Europe, and China jockeying to surpass the United States as the world’s global superpower, Donald Trump’s “America First” mantra will bend the arc of the world’s future. Political leaders and foreign diplomats are on alert.
Why We Wrote This
The world always watches the American presidential election. But this year, the stakes feel much higher – especially for parents around the globe who wonder if Donald Trump will make their children’s lives better or worse.
But this week, it is parents around the world who have absorbed the news of Mr. Trump’s victory with particular immediacy. Some feel an American “strongman” could finally cease the instability that has shadowed their children’s prospects. Others feel his erratic approach to global affairs has the potential to upend their dreams.
The Christian Science Monitor talked to mothers and fathers from Mexico to the Middle East about what this election means to them, and their sense of what it portends for their families’ futures.
On Wednesday, Nov. 6, Donald Trump declared victory in the U.S. presidential election, and in a tent camp for migrants in Mexico City, a Venezuelan boy named Yorjan turned 7 years old.
Neither knew of the other’s special day, but Mr. Trump’s victory means their lives are now intertwined. Yorjan and his family are trying to cross the U.S. border, the same one the president-elect has promised to “seal” when he takes office in January.
Yorjan was blissfully unaware of that pledge as he excitedly accepted a wedge of vanilla birthday cake laced with icing squiggles from a volunteer.
Why We Wrote This
The world always watches the American presidential election. But this year, the stakes feel much higher – especially for parents around the globe who wonder if Donald Trump will make their children’s lives better or worse.
But sitting beside him was his mother, Yojani, whose eyes pricked with tears. So much – from the economic collapse that caused them to flee Venezuela to the rats scurrying through their tent – felt out of her control as a mother. And now this. “My fear now is that the [U.S.] president won’t receive us,” she says. “That Trump will send us back to the jungle.”
Every four years, Americans choose who will fill the world’s most powerful office, and this year they’ve selected a leader who touts as one of his greatest foreign policy strengths his unpredictability. At a time of broad global conflict, with mass human migration, major wars in the Middle East and Europe, and China jockeying to surpass the United States as the world’s superpower, Mr. Trump’s “America First” mantra will bend the arc of the world’s future.
Political leaders and foreign diplomats are on alert. But this week, it was parents around the world who absorbed the news of Mr. Trump’s victory with particular immediacy. Some feel that an American “strongman” could finally put an end to the instability that has shadowed their children’s prospects. Others feel his erratic approach to global affairs has the potential to upend their dreams.
“Sometimes you pay for problems that aren’t yours,” says Yojani, whose last name we are withholding for her security.
“I die a hundred times a day”
As the sun dipped below the horizon on American Election Day, casting long shadows over a tent camp in central Gaza, Sawsan Swirky’s heart broke again.
She wasn’t thinking of Mr. Trump or Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, but of Mousa. One year to the day earlier, her 16-year-old son had walked out of the gates of Al Quds Hospital in Gaza City, where the family was sheltering from Israeli airstrikes.
In his hurry to get to safety, Mousa left his beloved rescue cat, Mishmish, at home.
Now, as the bombs fell and the sirens wailed, he couldn’t bear the thought of Mishmish scared and alone, looking for his master in the rubble. So Mousa and his cousin decided to go back to find him.
The bomb struck them on their way. Onlookers carried the severely wounded boy back to the hospital, where he died in front of his mother’s eyes.
Now, she says, “I die a hundred times a day.”
But as she listened to news about the American election results, a single hope pushed its way through her grief: Maybe Mr. Trump could end the war that had so far killed at least 42,000 Palestinians. “I wish he would bring a cease-fire” that would allow Palestinians to return home, she says.
She knew that plenty of people thought it was possible. Mr. Trump had told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he wanted an “end to hostilities” before his Inauguration Day, according to Israeli media.
Far from those backroom negotiations, Ms. Swirky was simply desperate to keep her family alive. She longed to see one of her daughters, who lived on the other side of an Israeli checkpoint. And every day, she feared another of her nine children might die doing something ordinary like collecting water.
Waiting for Mr. Trump’s next move, she revisited her memories of Mousa, the boy who loved okra with beef, had an incredible laugh, and died for the love of an innocent.
In her grief, she hoped only that the next American president would make sure “No parent in the world sees what I have seen.”
“He says he wants to make peace”
Three hundred ninety-six days.
That was how long it had been, on American Election Day, since the last time Idit Ohel had seen her son Alon. That October evening, he sat at the family piano in a village in northern Israel, his fingers gliding across the keyboard as he played a popular Israeli song about longing.
Nothing suggested it was the eve of the family’s greatest nightmare.
But early the next morning, on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas militants stormed the Nova music festival where Alon, 22 years old and an aspiring jazz pianist, had gone with friends. They dragged him by his curly hair, tossing him into a pickup truck with others he had been sheltering with and drove them into Gaza.
Since then, Ms. Ohel’s life has been consumed by a single thought: Alon must live.
And for Alon to live, the war must end.
By American Election Day, her son had become a familiar face to Israelis, his image plastered on posters across the country, along with others taken captive that day, and carried through the streets in mass protests. The Israeli government’s failure to return him and the other hostages wasn’t just a reminder of the country’s most catastrophic intelligence failure, or the war it had sparked. It was also a challenge to a fundamental covenant of Israeli society: Leave no one behind.
Ms. Ohel never had much interest in politics, seeing herself as merely a person “interested in ... doing good in the world,” she says. But now she had no choice but to care, because her child’s life depended on the choices of politicians.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remained steely in his resolve to fight in Gaza until what he calls “total victory.”
But like Ms. Swirky, Ms. Ohel saw hope in Mr. Trump, though it was a faint one. He wasn’t a man who took no for an answer. He projected “aggression and power.”
“He says he wants to make peace here,” she says, her voice soft and exhausted.
Maybe, she thought, that would be enough to finally bring Alon home.
Two mothers, one wish
Marina also knows what it is like to live in the unspeakable space between your child’s life and their death.
In March 2022, her son Volodya abruptly stopped calling.
At the time, he was a junior intelligence officer serving in the Russian army in the Russian-occupied Donbas region of Ukraine. When she stopped hearing from him, Marina, a real estate agent whom we are calling by a pseudonym for her security, first approached the local military office. It didn’t have an answer, so she went to Moscow, and then to Donbas itself.
There, she traveled from town to town with a photo of Volodya, clean-shaven and baby-faced, barely out of his teens, asking every soldier she met if they had seen him.
Each “no” ached, but it also gave her hope that he was out there somewhere, perhaps captured by the Ukrainians, but still breathing.
Then, in early 2024, she received a notification from the army. Volodya’s remains had been identified. He died a hero, she was told. But the platitudes felt hollow.
“This hell is over for me now. But so many other mothers are still going through it,” Marina says.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump pledged repeatedly that as president he would end Marina’s war in “24 hours.” Juliia Kozak wants her war to end too.
The Ukrainian mother was seven months pregnant when Russia invaded her country. She was on vacation at that time, and her flight home was canceled. So she flew to Zurich, where she had a friend who could give her a place to stay.
Today, her daughter, Dana, is growing up like any other Swiss suburban child, in Basel now, splashing around in toddler swim classes and speaking to her mother in a babbling mix of English and Ukrainian.
Ms. Kozak is grateful Dana’s first memories won’t be of hearing air raid sirens and hiding in basements, but she also cannot help but long for the life they do not have. Just before she left Kyiv, she had bought an apartment there, where she imagined she would raise her daughter in comfort, surrounded by friends and family – not as a refugee in a foreign land.
Watching the American election results this week, she felt conflicted. While she likes the Democrats, they were unable to stop the war or help Ukraine win it. Mr. Trump strikes her as “a crazy person,” but his unusual methods might just be her country’s best hope now. He “wants to be a hero ... and if he does stop the [Ukraine] war, then he will be a hero.”
Marina, who this spring held Volodya’s funeral in the same church where she had brought him to be baptized two decades earlier, is silent when asked if the American president-elect can usher in peace.
Finally, she says, “I’ve always believed that everybody needs to sit down at the negotiating table and put a stop to this slaughter. If this Trump can do that, I will support it.”
Peace above all
Indeed, Mr. Trump promised in his victory speeches that he would make the world a more peaceful place. “I’m not going to start a war; I’m going to stop the wars,” he proclaimed.
Those words brought comfort to Li Zhandong. Though he has never lived through war himself, he, too, knows its costs.
Like other Chinese of his generation, the 44-year-old music teacher was raised by relatives who had survived two violent conflicts: the Japanese occupation around World War II and then the Chinese civil war just after it.
His grandfather barely eked out a living from tiny, terraced fields in the drought- and famine-prone hills of China’s northwest Shaanxi province. His parents, meanwhile, grew up in the turbulent aftermath of the 1949 communist revolution, hunger and political unrest hanging low over their childhoods, too.
By contrast, Mr. Li was born at a moment when China was stabilizing and flinging itself open to the world.
That allowed him to study music education at secondary school, a level of learning his parents couldn’t dream of. His own children have done even better. His eldest son is now 20 and a university student in a technical field.
Lately, however, the peace that made all this possible has begun to feel precarious to Mr. Li. Amid growing U.S.-China tensions, the Chinese military was stepping up operations around Taiwan, the self-governing island of 23 million people across the Taiwan Strait that Beijing claims sovereignty over.
A war for Taiwan would ensnare the U.S., too, and so much depended on the American president-elect, a man who often seemed to despise China but also promised geopolitical pragmatism.
“That is the best,” Mr. Li says. If there was one thing he knew intimately, after all, it was how much depended on peace.
A time of rumor
In Mexico City, Yojani spent much of Yorjan’s birthday listening to postelection rumors whistle through the migrant camp at warp speed. People spoke of mass deportations. Of the border closing.
Yojani didn’t know what was true, but she was shaken. In July, she and her husband made the painful choice to leave home so that her children could “have a future,” she says. They made a journey she would never wish on any child – walking hungry through jungles that echoed with the howls of wild animals – to end up here. And now it felt like it was all at risk.
As she spoke, Yorjan reappeared, rosy-cheeked with damp hair, after a shower he cheerfully described as “freeeeezing cold.” He wore a new hoodie, plucked from a table of donated clothes.
He had chosen the red, white, and blue uniform of Captain America.
Special correspondent Taylor Luck contributed to this report.
Editor’s note: A caption in this story, which was originally published Nov. 8, 2024, has been updated to clarify the name of the authorities with whom migrants seeking entry into the U.S. meet.
