Let’s play an imagination game.
Imagine, if you will, that you’re at Thanksgiving dinner with your Uncle Safflower. As soon as the turkey comes out, he gets fired up and starts saying that it’s disgusting that anyone would choose to eat meat and that people who eat meat are murderers. He says that people who eat meat should be locked up, and that we could save a lot of money by sorting out all these meat-eaters with some 89 cent bullets.
You try to change the subject, but Uncle Safflower has a one-track mind, and everything ultimately comes back to his strident veganism. Within minutes, no one at the table is having a good time, and you realize that, as the person who cooked the turkey, Uncle Safflower hates you. He may not say he hates you specifically, but he sure isn’t quiet about hating people LIKE you along with any other meat-eaters you might associate with.
When you tell Uncle Safflower that he’s being a jerk and hurting everyone’s feelings, he smirks and tells you that facts don’t care about your feelings.
I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you probably wouldn’t be inviting Uncle Safflower back over next month for Christmas dinner. In fact, I bet you would recommend that Uncle Safflower take his deeply held beliefs, fold them five ways, and use them to do a remarkable impression of the Thanksgiving turkey’s preparation process.
You probably see where I’m going with this.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s landslide victory last week, there has been an outpouring of news articles and discussions about people cutting off the Trump supporters in their lives, whether they’re friends, relatives, or even parents and siblings. They’re done. They don’t want to hear it anymore. After nearly a decade of Trump’s inescapable presence in American society, they no longer have the energy to put up with it.
Meanwhile, I’ve been hearing the outrage from the other side. Here are the key talking points:
“You’re going to cut us off over something as stupid as politics?”
“We can agree to disagree.”
“It’s just politics.”
Here’s the thing: we can no longer agree to disagree, and it isn’t just politics. And that sword cuts both ways, whether people like it or not.
There are plenty of things that are “just politics.” Debating whether a 3% sales tax increase is necessary to fund public education is just politics. Discussing whether to remodel an aging government building or construct a new one is just politics. Arguing over whether the county should close convenience centers two days a week to save taxpayer money is just politics.
Removing key rights that grant women bodily autonomy is not just politics. The mass deportation and incarceration of migrants is not just politics. Government-orchestrated persecution of political opponents is not just politics. These are human rights issues that form the backbone of a person’s personal ideology.
If you support Trump, you support the abolition of women’s reproductive rights, the mass deportation of migrants, and the government going after “the enemy within,” which means anyone who doesn’t want to kiss Trump’s ring.
I’m not saying this as an insult to Trump or his supporters. Far from it. These issues and others were the foundation of his campaign platform and they were wildly popular. The majority of Americans seem to love what Trump is selling, and they turned out in droves last week to buy another four years of it.
But if you’re a Trump supporter, you must also know that a not insignificant portion of Americans really, really don’t like Trump and what he stands for. That’s also one of his selling points! “Triggering the Libs” is a popular pastime.
What’s happened now is that for many people, after a decade of Trump’s rhetoric and the small matter of his 2021 attempted coup over an election that he still believes was stolen from him despite the fact that the Democrats apparently forgot how to rig an election in the intervening four years, a lot of people have had enough. His 2024 victory was the straw that broke the camel’s back. They don’t want hear about him anymore, they don’t want to hear anyone gloating about his victory, and they don’t want to have a connection with anyone who shares his moral ideology.
I realize that if your support for Trump has cost you your connection to your friends and family, it can be a painful experience. At the same time, isn’t this what you wanted? You won! Not only that, your side won a decisive victory in what was falsely predicted to be a tight race. This should be a time for celebration.
When we vote for a Presidential candidate, we’re using one of our most important American rights to choose the direction that we believe our country should travel in for the next four years. That’s not a choice to be made flippantly; it’s an awesome responsibility. It’s deeply important.
God knows I’ve lost friends over the years due to this column. I’ve had other friends and loved ones tell me routinely that they fear for my personal safety. But I feel the weight of responsibility when I write this column, and I’m not going to lie about my deeply held personal convictions no matter the personal cost because I believe honesty and integrity are important.
If you’re a vocal Trump supporter and it’s cost you a relationship with a child or a sibling or a parent, don’t despair over the loss. Embrace the consequences knowing that you followed your own personal moral compass to make a choice that you felt was important for the future of the nation, a choice that you felt was bigger than yourself and worth sacrificing relationships over. When faced with a decision between Donald Trump or a son or daughter or grandchild, you chose Trump because you felt it was the only moral choice.
If you don’t feel that way any longer, I’m sorry to say, it’s a bit too late to change your mind.
