I know I’m just some guy, but if you’re a vegan in the US, I really can’t underscore enough how catastrophic a Trump presidency would be for animal welfare. I imagine the demographic of vegans who are also voting Trump is near-zero, but I can also imagine the demographic of vegans staying home on election day is not insubstantial.

Trump has a history of deregulating factory farms and is comically misinformed about veganism. One of Trump’s likely cabinet members is an insane carnist who eats bear corpses. The 2017–2021 Trump administration’s environmental policy was (and continues to be) disastrous and likely led to the unnecessary suffering of billions of sentient animals – including the rolling back of the EPA’s powers through SCOTUS appointments, heavily deregulating the fossil fuel industry, loosening restrictions on imported “trophies” of endangered animals, removing funding for the protection of endangered species, pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Accords, being a superspreader for FUD about important sources of renewable energy, deregulating animal agriculture, allowing the logging industry to run wild on protected forests, and I could go on.

Will a Harris–Walz administration fix animal agriculture? No. Is it likely it would at least try to make it slightly better? I would say so. Is it absolutely, 100%, beyond a shadow of a doubt going to be better/substantially less bad than a Trump–Vance administration? Yes. Not only that, but a 2025–2029 Trump administration would have much, much fewer checks on their destruction of the environment and of regulations against the abuse of animals than their first administration thanks to their prior dismantling of checks and balances.

Please, on November 5th or if your state is still doing early voting, get out there and keep that cruel bastard out of office, and vote downballot too for politicians who are going to be less hostile to animal welfare than Republicans. Human welfare is animal welfare, and that will be in better (not perfect or even nearly perfect) hands with a Harris administration. But moreover, a Trump presidency would be disastrous for non-human animal welfare both through the deregulation of agriculture and through immense damage to the natural environment. Veganism is the reduction of animal exploitation and cruelty by all means practicable, and that makes it our responsibility as vegans to get out the vote and shut this shit down. Trump has already shown us what he would do once, and we can’t let him do that again. It’s for the animals, and it’s for your fellow human.

Edit: a list of just some of the environmental regulations rolled back.