My Politics Put Your Kids In Danger. Why Aren’t We Still Friends?
The unwelcome return of a Trump supporter to my life
I was dealing with a fraudulent charge on my credit card when I received an email from a former friend I’d lost to Trump.
“Hey, can we talk?”
I wasn’t excited to get the message. Part of me suspected that this wasn’t going to turn out well. A sliver of me hoped that maybe he’d seen the light and something could be salvaged.
You always hope.
There was no inquiry on his part as to how my life was going. He didn’t ask if I was in the middle of something. He didn’t ask if I was healthy. He didn’t ask if my wife and kids were okay. Maybe I’d recently suffered a loss? Maybe I was in a vulnerable and fragile state? Maybe my life was in shambles?
Again, he didn’t ask.
I put aside the stress about the charge, the general irritations of the day, and some lingering concerns I’ve had over a health issue and answered.
I wondered what was going on in his life. Had he realized his support of Trump had cost him friends? Was he embarrassed? Was his life in shambles and he was on the first step of a twelve step program to make amends? Maybe…
“Sure, we can talk.”
My response
I wanted to summarize the state of our relationship as succinctly as possible, so I wrote him this:
My wife sometimes complains that I give people too many second chances. When I was a teacher, administrators used to yell at me for being too lenient with the students.
“They’re going to cheat you if you let them get away with it.”
I used to reply, “If they become so emboldened that they cheat me then I will have evidence of that behavior. But I won’t accuse them of cheating before I’ve gathered any evidence.”
Do I regret “falling out” with Trump supporters?
Absolutely!
I regret their hostility.
I regret the bad choices they make.
I regret that we don’t support each other any more.
But I will not follow them into the hole they’ve dug for themselves.
If they want to be friends again, it’s up to them to come out into the light. It’s not my job to go down there and lead them out.
It can’t be done.
I’ve tried.
They won’t budge until they’re ready to budge.
Call me
He sent me his phone number and I had a sinking feeling.
Nah, I don’t want to call this guy. There have been too many times in my life when people with whom I’ve had disagreements want to “settle it on the phone.”
We weren’t at that level yet. Not by a long shot.
“Email isn’t a good form of communication!” they say.
“Why do you insist on only talking via email? Your choice is causing us problems!”
Right away with the blame game.
Well, email does have its advantages.
There’s no volume for one thing, people can’t shout at you.
You don’t have to open an email.
You can take time to consider a response before you answer.
If what somebody is saying is true, it will come across in an email, likewise if they are sincere.
You can be respectful via email. You can allow somebody the courtesy of giving them time to contemplate what’s being said to them.
If your intent is to bully and badger somebody into compliance with your line of thinking, email isn’t very effective.
“Why do you refuse to talk to me?”
I’d like you to demonstrate that you can be respectful first.
I wasn’t interested in debating my political position, so I declared it upfront:
It’s just a difference of opinion
Trump supporters like to use code language rather than state their true meaning. That was the case here.
My former friend began suggesting that we only “have a difference of opinion.”
Is that true?
And is it true that if I have a different opinion, a Trump supporter can respect that opinion?
Can you really “agree to disagree” on the inherent danger of Trump’s behavior? He’s a powerful man who uses his platform to call for violence against the vulnerable.
Can you really expect people to tolerate your support for a person like that?
Now comes the whataboutism
Of course he refuted my position. He claimed that the left incited violence because that’s what Trump supporters do. They don’t have evidence for their claim, but they scream it and yell their lies from the top of the hills.
My wife and children have never been harassed and assaulted by members of the political left.
They have been harassed and assaulted by members of the political right.
Why doesn’t that matter to a former friend who wants to repair a relationship? Why doesn’t he care or respect how I might feel about assaults against my family?
He claimed that I was misrepresenting reality.
He claimed that the facts were on his side.
So, I sent him the facts.
And I sent him this link.
It’s all there.
Right-wing groups have been responsible for 90% of recent attacks and plots.
It’s a fact.
There’s evidence.
Check the arrests.
But Trump supporters aren’t interested in facts. Faced with facts, they become more and more agitated. Sometimes, they even say what they really think.
This former friend began ranting and raving about black lives matter. He began ranting and raving about Antifa. He didn’t supply any evidence. He didn’t show any facts. But he insisted that his position was the right one. He insisted that I was delusional and that I was being stubborn and that I wasn’t taking the matter seriously.
His words were half-frantic. I got a glimpse of his mental state and saw how he was caught up in a network of lies and half-truths. It would have taken me ten minutes to explain how he was wrong on any of a dozen declarations that came in rapid succession.
Part of me thinks that maybe if he reflected upon his reaction with a clear head he would recognize the moment where he lost control. I think he’ll feel the embarrassment of an abusive husband the morning after a violent argument with his wife.
But still there will be no resolution.
Discussions with Trump supporters are difficult because sooner or later they have to face the fact that they are wrong. They have to face the fact that they’ve been a fool. It’s embarrassing to have to admit a mistake. In most social interactions we let mistakes slide to save people from that embarrassment.
But you can’t do that when those mistakes involve choices that put your children’s lives in danger. You have to call people out, and if those people want to stay in your life, they have to own up to their error. It has to come into the light.
It’s embarrassing.
It takes a big man to do it.
Trump supporters are not big men.
You’re telling me it’s the white people that are bad?
The comment came out of absolutely nowhere and all of a sudden everything was clear.
He was interpreting all of this as an attack on his race.
This is how Trump supporters think. They say all these other things. They put on a mask and pretend to be rational, and then, out of the blue, they slip up and say something insane.
“You’re telling me it’s the white people that are bad?”
Then he went into incarceration rates, because, of course, he perceives no prejudice in our legal system.
Then he began to defend the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6th.
Then he accused me of hubris, he accused me of being irrational.
He accused me of “having all the answers” and “having all the facts” and being cruel and unreasonable for kicking family members who are Trump supporters out of my life.
I asked him this:
He wouldn’t denounce it
At this point, it was time to go and pick up my beautiful daughter from school. I blocked the former friend’s email and got in my car.
It was cold. The temperature has been hovering around ten below zero the last few days.
I was trembling, but not from the cold.
These emails had been harassing me all morning. I was in a bad mental state. I was frustrated and angry.
When people won’t recognize the truth of right wing violence, it infuriates me.
These lies of right-wingers who try to pretend the left is violent are more than I can take.
There’s no evidence to say something like that. FBI data shows the right are violent. The right! THE RIGHT!
So this guy, unwelcome and unwanted, had pushed his way back in my life to harass me with his lies.
I pushed the feelings aside.
I found peace in the company of my daughter.
But, despite all of this, I was still holding out a sliver of hope that I could get through to him. So, when I got home, I unblocked him and wrote this:
The last straw
I was thinking of how Republicans have recently made parental rights a talking point, so I thought I had him.
He agreed that I did have rights as a parent, but then he instantly pivoted and started writing insults about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. He started screaming about how unfair it was that Biden declared he was going to nominate a black woman to the supreme court.
He leveled more criticisms against me for not associating with friends and family.
It was odd that he kept coming back to that. It’s as if he believes an obligation to friends and family is untouchable.
Check that, he believes that I have an obligation to always support friends and family, but not that he does. It’s a slave/master relationship and he’s furious that I refuse to abide by it.
I was getting angry again, so I wrote this:
I didn’t leave it at that.
I sent one more message and I called him insane. I used profanities.
This is my family. Leave me alone. Have some respect. We’re talking about my family. Leave me alone. Don’t mess with my family. What’s wrong with you?
I said that, but with more profanities, then I blocked his email.
The resolution
I was tempted to write about this last night. Instead, I sat up with my wife and watched Key & Peele.
The sketches made a new kind of sense to me. It felt tragic to sit there and watch them.
I was still trembling. I felt a kind of hopeless despair. How can you interact with people who refuse to acknowledge reality? Was my life in danger? Would he come after me?
It was as if I’d been in a fight. I’d just been sitting in my office, working, and I got sucker punched out of the blue.
These people are all around. They plow the roads, they pump your gas. They refuse to denounce white supremacy.
“White people aren’t bad,” they say, as if that has anything to do with anything.
They feel no qualms at all about putting their crazy out in plain view.
In fact, they INSIST you must tolerate them.
They’re all on a hair trigger and could go violent at any time. Maybe some of them wake up on the morning of the next day with blood on their hands and they regret their behavior. Still more deny it ever happened.
I have to protect my children from these people.
I have to protect my family.
What’s wrong with them?
Why won’t they respect that?
The show ended and as I was brushing my teeth, I heard a notification on my phone. It was a message from the credit card company. They had refunded the fraudulent charge.
Thank goodness, a victory, a much needed victory, a tiny sliver of nourishing relief…
I needed that.
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You are 100% in the right on this. Just like one doesn't negotiate with terrorists, one also doesn't negotiate with Trumpers--they are terrorists, too.
I have withdrawn from relationships with Trumpists, including declining a marriage proposal.
Before 2020, Trumpist friends started trying to force me to agree with them and vote for Trump. They rejected facts out of hand and defaulted to Fox News talking points that were the same as Russia’s news reports. Even then the linkage was obvious if one just observed. They did not think for themselves anymore.
Those friendships were damaged permanently. Even if I occasionally socialized again with those friends we were never as close again. I am withdrawing more from them now as they are emboldened to openly express prepackaged views that are becoming more extreme than ever.