What Do You Do When You Become Trump's Target?

A year ago, I had a job I loved and was busy raising my three young kids. Not on my bingo card? Running for Congress.

Then my nonprofit was targeted by MAGA conspiracy theorists. So one night, I sat my 10-year-old down at our kitchen table, and explained what to do if federal agents showed up at our door.

Who to call. What to say. How to stay calm.

Even when you try your best to shield your kid from the weight of your fears, a conversation like that changes you. My son deserves to be a kid, not have to be aware that our President is weaponizing the Department of Justice to come after his political foes.

And today, that conversation feels so small against the horrors of watching masked thugs sent by Trump to terrorize our towns, abduct children on their way to and from school, and murder innocent people.

Our kitchen table conversations have only grown heavier.

For most of my adult life, I believed in our government. Not blindly, but earnestly. I grew up in a family where money was always tight: My mom raised four kids in an old railroad town in central Pennsylvania on waitressing tips and grit. When I became the first in my immediate family to go to college, I felt a responsibility to use that chance for something bigger than myself. That’s how I ended up in public service: working in the Obama White House, helping pass the Affordable Care Act, spending years pushing for immigrant rights, and eventually helping build a clean energy nonprofit focused on one simple goal — lowering families’ utility bills by expanding access to affordable clean energy.

I understood politics could be rough — driven by competing interests, intense pressure, and the constant pull of power. But I believed that if you followed the law and focused on serving people, the guardrails would hold.

That belief didn’t survive 2025.

Early last year, the Trump administration targeted the clean energy organization I’d spent years building with my team. We weren’t doing something radical — just making it easier for Americans to afford to install solar panels and heat pumps powered by clean electricity. We grew from a scrappy startup to a team of 140 people, celebrated as one of America’s most innovative nonprofits.

Then, in early 2025, the Trump administration unlawfully froze our bank accounts, invoking a nonsense theory that even a federal judge ruled “vague and unsubstantiated”: that nonprofits implementing the Investment Reduction Act were using climate funding to buy gold bars. I had been personally named on the Senate floor as part of that MAGA conspiracy theory. My crime? Working in the Obama White House more than a decade earlier. Suddenly, I wasn’t just a mom and public servant. I was a target — a powerful bully’s scapegoat.

This was intimidation, dressed up as oversight.

I’ve lost political fights before, but this one didn’t stay in Washington. It followed me home. It forced me to think not just about my work, but about my kids and husband — about what happens when power stops being constrained by law or accountability, and starts being used to punish.

That was the moment something crystallized for me: I realized that when institutions are bent to serve personal gain, even vendettas, instead of the public, silence isn’t neutrality. It’s permission.

Once you see that phenomenon clearly, you start seeing it everywhere — including in the systems that are supposed to protect ordinary families. A few weeks ago, I was in the ER with my youngest after she bit her tongue. As I filled out intake forms, I caught myself doing what so many parents do — calculating costs before care. And I thought about Congress letting Obamacare subsidies expire: Denying their opponents a win was worth making healthcare more expensive for millions of families. They knew what it would mean. They just decided the pain was worth it, at least for them.

Too many leaders are insulated from the harm their decisions cause. They treat public office as a shield instead of a responsibility. They respond to frustration with slogans instead of solutions — and when people push back, they use intimidation rather than offering anything that can fix a broken status quo.

I’d always thought of running for office as someone else’s job.

Moments like these force a choice. You can convince yourself that this is how things work now — that someone else will fix it, that staying quiet is easier, that stepping forward is optional. Or you can accept what parenthood teaches you again and again: When something is broken and you have the ability to help fix it, stepping up isn’t heroic. It’s necessary.

I’d always thought of running for office as someone else’s job — a problem for somebody with deeper pockets, a bigger ego, or an appetite for attention. I was building a clean energy nonprofit because I care deeply about the world my kids will inherit. But as Trump’s attacks have grown increasingly extreme, cruel, and violent, it’s become clear that the greatest threat to their future is this Administration itself.

One day, my kids will ask me what I did in this moment, and I need to be able to show them that I stood up to bullies — that I’m running for Congress to fight back and to fix the broken status quo that made Trump’s politics of pain possible.

I’m running because I’ve realized that governing can’t be “someone else’s job” anymore. I won’t stand by and watch as people with power gamble with the world we’re leaving for our children. I’m running for Congress for my kids — and for every other working family around me here in New Jersey — because this moment demands leaders who will stand up and get things done, not pursue political vendettas and self-enrichment, no matter who it hurts.