Trump made them furious, so they organized

Carolyn Gibbs puts on the striped pants first, then the striped jacket. The hat is the final touch. That’s if it’s an Uncle Sam day. For Statue of Liberty, it’s a mint green dress, a foam halo and a political sign, usually, standing in as the torch.

Before Donald Trump became president, Gibbs, 59, rarely dressed up for Halloween, only occasionally for a costume party.

But for the better part of four years, she has shown up to rallies in shopping centers of suburban Pittsburgh in elaborate costumes, ready for the role of playful protester.

“I’m willing to make a fool of myself for democracy,” is how she often puts it.

Yet for all her playfulness — and it is boundless — Gibbs is driven by a sense of anger and residual shock. How could so many of her neighbors in western Pennsylvania vote for a man she saw as a threat? She still finds herself stuck on the question.

“I had begun to think we were including and serving everybody in this country,” Gibbs said. “But that’s totally not true anymore.”

For the past four years, Gibbs and half a dozen women ( along with one man) have poured countless hours into Progress PA, a political group they created to get Democratic candidates elected in western Pennsylvania, a part of the state that helped fuel Trump’s victory last time. But their work is less about their enthusiasm for former vice president Joe Biden than their revulsion at the current occupant of the White House.

Before the Trump era, these women were hardly radical. Many have voted for Republicans, including George W. Bush.

“I had never had this kind of burning unquestioning desire to do something myself,” Stacey Vernallis, 60, said, of her political life before 2016.

She described waking up the morning after the 2016 election with five different pits in her stomach. She imagined her children losing their health care and her youngest stepson, adopted from Nepal, facing heightened discrimination.

So she made plans to join the Women’s March in Washington, D. C., which drew an estimated half a million people to the capital the day after Trump’s inauguration. When Vernallis returned to Pittsburgh, she started her own political action committee, Progress PA. “This was just: We have to do it. We need everyone we can get,” she said.

Soon, members of the group were protesting weekly in front of the offices of Sen. Pat Toomey and then- Congressman Keith Rothfus, both Republicans. They then knocked on thousands of doors to help get Conor Lamb elected to Congress.

“This is an enormous shift that is quite powerfully upending politics in the statehouse, Congress and perhaps in a national election,” said Lara Putnam, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has written extensively about activism in the suburbs.

“In the wake of Trump’s win, people who had been tangentially involved woke up and said ‘ This is not the world I signed up for,’” she added.

Now the resistance, as groups like Progress PA are happily called, is coming up on its more direct and important chance to resist: voting Trump out of office, and encouraging others to do the same.

“There has never been a year more important to the nation,” said Mary Anne Van Develde, 65, a former television news producer.