I didn’t think Trump’s second act would be that bad. Oh, how wrong I was | Arwa Mahdawi

The day after Donald Trump won the election, everyone in my liberal corner of Philadelphia seemed shell-shocked. At preschool drop-off, a mom burst into tears. At the playground, a gay parent I know told me that they were aggressively downsizing in case they had to flee the country. Meanwhile, I felt oddly sanguine and thought people were being a tad dramatic. I rolled my eyes about Ellen DeGeneres relocating to England. I was optimistic that Trump 2.0, while horrific, wouldn’t actually be the end of US democracy.

This was an unusual attitude for me, because catastrophising is one of my main pastimes. I spent about 10 minutes this morning staring at a red dot that has appeared on my nose, wondering if it meant I was dying. But when Trump won the election, I was already too emotionally drained from a year of watching Joe Biden help turn Gaza into an unliveable hellscape to worry about things getting even worse.

Some people believe that if you think positive thoughts you will manifest them into reality. Unfortunately, this did not work for me. Trump has only been president for a couple of weeks and things are already far worse than I had imagined they could be. I feel genuinely scared in a way I didn’t expect to. Trump and his partner-in-crime, Elon Musk, are in the process of smashing the country to bits with a sledgehammer so they can sell it off for scrap and rebuild it to their liking. Even if you’re privileged enough not to be directly affected by that sledgehammer, you can still feel the reverberations.

Almost nobody in the US has escaped the chaos that Trump and Musk have already unleashed in such an incredibly short time. My wife works in international development and has friends who have already lost their jobs because of Trump dismantling USAid and throwing all its contractors into disarray. I have friends in the education sector who have been scrambling to deal with the panic caused by Trump’s plans to freeze federal loans and grants: students have been freaking out that they might not be able to get financial aid, some daycare centres reliant on federal funding were forced to temporarily shut down, and researchers are worried about their projects losing funding. (From a selfish point of view, I’m worried a project of my own will lose funding.) That freeze has been temporarily blocked but who knows what’s going to happen next?

Meanwhile, people are being rounded up and deported. It’s not as if this is the first time that mass deportations have happened in the US (Obama was known as the “deporter in chief”), but Trump’s raids are designed to cause maximum panic. He has allowed immigration authorities to go into sensitive places such as schools, churches and hospitals. Rumours about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents being spotted near schools are all over social media and parent groups. People are terrified – which, of course, is the point. And it’s not just immigrants who are scared: the raids also seem to be scooping up US citizens, including Native Americans.

Trump has plenty of volunteers lining up to help the deportations. The president seems intent on outlawing all support for Palestinians and has been suggesting kicking out foreign students who protest against Israel’s actions; a number of pro-Israel groups are keen to make that happen. One group called Betar has compiled a list of students and teachers it thinks should be expelled from the US and given this list to the Trump administration. Betar also recently tweeted that it would crash a vigil in New York for Hind Rajab – the five-year-old girl killed with her family as they attempted to flee Israeli forces – to document all attenders and assist Ice in “deportation efforts”. The Biden administration also brutally cracked down on pro-Palestinian speech, of course, but Trump is taking things to a new level. I’m on a green card that needs to be renewed very soon; if I write a column saying Israel is guilty of genocide, might I get deported?

If I do have to flee the US with my wife and kid, then do any Cotswolds-based readers happen to know Ellen? Please tell her I’m sorry for having been mean about her in the past. Please, Ellen, open up your damp mansion to some refugees from Philadelphia.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist