Happy New Year! I thought I would try another audio post. I recorded this yesterday, Jan 6, and what follows is the transcript, lightly edited for grammar and general coherence.
In recent weeks, I’ve veered this newsletter into partisan politics to an extent that I never intended, and I promise to pivot away to things I actually enjoy thinking about. Before I do though, and since I am recording this on Jan 6, I will exorcise myself of one more political demon. This is for people who feel confused or upset by how politics has gotten in the way of so many families and friendships, especially since the political rise of Donald Trump. This is my attempt to explore and explain what’s happening in myself when politics turns out to be a dealbreaker…
Recently I listened to a clip of a woman testifying in front of the Georgia State Senate, describing her experience as a mother raising a trans child. She described how she was blindsided, I guess you could say, by her little boy’s insistence that he was really a girl. The mother, a conservative Christian woman living in a red state, didn’t understand what was happening with her child. What she understood about trans issues at all came from her church and her political leaders, so with that guidance she initially pushed back on what was happening with her child, questioned and resisted it like most parents in her situation do. You can find lots of stories of parents describing similar struggles. But because she could see that her child was suffering, and because her love for her child was unconditional and bottomless, she eventually committed herself to figuring it out. All she wanted was for her child to thrive:
She was addressing the Georgia State Senate to oppose a bill that would prevent children like hers from participating in youth sports. There are many such bills around the country in various stages of implementation, including a national bill that that the GOP majority in the U.S. House very recently selected to fast-track. In her testimony, the mother pointed out the sad strangeness of focusing so much political energy on limiting the rights of people who make up significantly less than a quarter of one percent of the U.S. population. For some perspective, there are around 500,000 athletes in college and university programs across the country, perhaps fifteen of whom who identify as trans, according to the NCAA.
This mother, however, was not talking about the NCAA but about youth sports. As I listened to her testimony, I thought about people in my life and others like them across the country who seem to be undone by the mere existence of trans people, who direct outrage at anyone who accepts that trans people have a right to exist. I thought about the ignorant and mean-spirited things some of them say, and stuff they post online. I thought about the insane lies made by our president elect. I thought about how the people pushing for these bills not only seem to lack perspective about the scale of the problem, they don’t exhibit any curiosity at all about the actual issue, or compassion towards the people affected. They put their energy into spreading lies instead of trying to understand anything about the actual experience of trans kids or their families.
The question of trans athletes is not a top-five issue for me to be honest. It’s probably not even a top-fifteen issue. It’s not something I never really think about, but the nature of the debate reveals something. It’s the same with immigration and so many other issues, where the terrain is complicated, but where many people seem to lack both curiosity and compassion. I see people in my life and others throw around phrases like “open border” who can’t then explain what is “open” about the border. They blame Biden or Harris but can’t point to a single policy detail or change that was implemented during their administration. They can’t even point to concrete reasons they’re so worked up about undocumented immigrants. It’s a lot of hand-waving, claims they can’t support with any data or evidence, and rhetoric regurgitated from their favorite pundits. They toss out wildly inaccurate numbers and can’t describe the different ways that migrants arrived here. They aren’t interested in why people left their own countries in the first place, or how asylum works, or H1B, or DACA. They don’t have any solutions to offer except mass deportations, which they don’t understand and can’t explain. They can’t say how it would actually help the country, what it would entail, how it might work, or what it might cost in either human or economic terms.
No curiosity, no compassion.
This is part of what turns political differences into dealbreakers. Curiosity and compassion are linked operations of our heads and hearts. And when we form friendships and family bonds, it’s through those same pathways, our heads and our hearts, which are sensitive to signals from each other that we share the same reality and that our values are aligned.
If someone in my life directs slurs or mean-spirited comments towards people I think deserve better, then it tells me they’re not who I thought they were. It shows a pretty extreme lack of compassion, and it’s a relatively easy decision to end that relationship. Other times though, a person’s lack of curiosity is a signal that our values aren’t aligned. Showing no interest in the basic bones of immigration policy or the experiences of immigrants and trans people and other groups, while making political choices that threaten their wellbeing, can seem like a refusal (or inability) to see them as fellow human beings. This might not be a total dealbreaker for a relationship, but it can confine the relationship to small talk and trivialities. We might chitchat about the weather, about our health, our favorite sports teams. That kind of thing. I don’t need many of those kinds of relationships in my life.
Alright so I’ve made it this far without mentioning Donald Trump, but I am going to go there now because he is the focal point for so much division. This fact in itself is interesting, because he’s far from the worst president we’ve had in terms of human lives destroyed by a U.S. regime. By that metric, Trump is probably not even in the top ten U.S. presidents. But every single day, Trump says and does things that we would judge to be out of bounds, beyond the pale, cruel, stupid, insane, etc., if it came from anyone else. It’s how we reckon with this stuff that says something about us.
I feel like I need to be specific, but to keep this brief, I will highlight just three relatively significant things on Trump’s resume. And I’ll be careful to include only things that I would hope are not debatable. I won’t mention anything from the huge list of things he is merely reported to have said and done, nothing that could be dismissed as fake news.
I’ll start with the fact that Donald Trump is a rapist. I feel weird saying that out loud, especially now that he is about to be president again. But this isn’t some fake news pronouncement of a biased media. It was adjudicated in court and decided by a jury that Trump’s lawyers helped to select. The jury heard evidence. They heard the defense put up by Trump’s lawyers. And then the jury found that Donald Trump committed rape. That’s the word the judge used to describe it. It would be more shocking of course if we hadn’t all heard the Access Hollywood tape back in 2016, the grab ‘em by the pussy tape. So we already knew that Trump is a gross, maybe violent, womanizing creep. In-between, he’s made many other offensive, violent, sexual comments about women, in full view.
The second thing I’ll mention is the constant lying. The big one of course is that Donald Trump continues to lie about the 2020 election, saying that it was stolen. He’s lied about it in public many times, and he still lies whenever he’s asked about it. January 6 happened because of this lie. He whipped his supporters into such a frenzy over it that a violent mob of them stormed the capital. They didn’t get their hands on Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi, but it’s not hard to imagine what they would have done if they had. That’s what they call the big lie, but Donald Trump lies all the time. Big, small, sometimes insane lies. During the 2024 campaign for example, he lied about Haitian immigrants eating pets. He lied about post-birth abortions. He lied about kids getting gender-reassignment surgeries at school. These are ridiculous, idiotic lies told by a grown man during his presidential campaign.
Third and last, Donald Trump has said repeatedly that immigrants are poisoning the blood of America. He’s used that precise phrase and slight variations of it many times, echoing Nazi rhetoric referring to the Jews and the Roma and other groups they wanted to exterminate. Could this language be an accident, a coincidence? Was it an accident when Trump invited the avowed nazi Nick Fuentes for a visit to Mar a Lago? It could have been. But this kind of rhetoric from Trump is one reason neo-Nazis, the KKK, and other white nationalist groups like the Oathkeepers and three-percenters are so excited about him. It’s why they see him as their guy. This isn’t just my belief or my opinion. It’s easy to find officials and spokespeople attached to these groups proudly declaring on the record their excitement about Donald Trump.
So that’s three examples of things about Trump that are well known and not really debatable. There’s so much more obviously. All the relatively harmless but stupid things he says. Windmills causing cancer. The fact that he calls them windmills. The comments about raking the forests to prevent fires. Drinking bleach to kill COVID. That whole thing about electric vehicles versus sharks. Just breathtakingly stupid stuff.
I’ll briefly mention one other thing. It’s not specific to Trump per se, but it was the biggest actual policy promise he made. I’m talking again about mass deportations.
The conversation about why these things are dealbreakers sometimes gets stuck here. One side saying look at that. It’s self-evident why it’s a dealbreaker. And then the other side says something like “well, millions of people voted for him. Are you saying we’re all stupid, or we’re all bad people?” Then it goes nowhere. That’s why I’m going to try to drill into this a little more. What really matters is how people reckon with this stuff, how they weigh it and what they decide to do with it.
One way people have reckoned with it is by rejecting Trump, opposing him. Some people did that from the beginning, when he was running back in 2016 or even long before that. I’m one of those. He just struck me immediately as an awful person, possibly a broken person. Also a fraud. I want to say buffoon, but to me that word means something more benign and amusing than Trump is. He’s too intentionally cruel for that word. Anyway, he disgusted me, and I couldn’t imagine supporting him. For some people who supported him initially, Trump crossed a line at some point. Former supporters point to different things that made them exit the Trump train. The Access Hollywood tape was a big one. The Helsinki meeting with Putin is one I’ve heard mentioned a few times, interestingly. And January 6 of course.
At the other extreme are people who love everything Trump does. The worse he acts, the more they like him. They love the cruelty, the crassness, the lies, the bigotry. Nobody I know was in this category with Trump, but if I did have a friend or family member like that, I think I would have no problem completely cutting them out of my life.
Most Trump supporters are somewhere in the middle. By the way, I used to differentiate between Trump voters and Trump supporters. Back in 2016 it was possible to forgive someone for believing that Trump might rise to the occasion of the presidency. It was possible to vote for Trump, or maybe just vote against Hillary Clinton, without being what I would call a supporter of Trump. But now we’ve watched the guy for almost a decade. We all know exactly who he is and what he’s capable of (or not capable of). People can’t not know what they’re getting when they vote for him. So they have to reckon with the problematic stuff, somehow.
There are people who reckon with it by saying they don’t believe it. It’s fake news. Or he was just kidding. That’s a lighter kind of denial. It was taken out of context. Et cetera. That’s why I’ve avoided mentioning anything here that was reported second or third hand. If a person looks at these things I mentioned and their response is to say it’s fake or otherwise deny it, then that tells me I can’t trust the way their mind works. If that’s not a dealbreaker for the friendship or relationship, then it will at least limit how deep we can go. Not much beyond the weather and other boring chitchat.
Another way people reckon with it is by minimizing. January 6 was a nothingburger. Who cares about the election lies. Lot’s of powerful men have assaulted women. It’s not a big deal. If I hear someone say this kind of thing, then it tells me our values are very much not aligned. I feel like I can’t trust their moral compass. That’s almost always going to be a dealbreaker.
The most common way I see people reckon with Trump is to deflect. People don’t want to reckon with the problematic stuff, so they point to the fact that “millions of people voted for him,” as a way of avoiding the issue. Or, more often, they will turn to whataboutism. What about when Biden… or well, Bill Clinton was a womanizer too. If we’re talking about strangers on the internet or people who aren’t important to me at all, then I can leave this alone. Let them deflect. I wish they would actually confront the questions, but I don’t need them to. If it’s someone I care about though, then at some point I want to know how they actually reckon with this stuff. Do they deny it? Minimize it? Or is it something they struggle with?
That brings me to the last way I see people reckoning with this stuff. It’s shockingly rare, but sometimes a Trump supporter will say that they really struggle with Trump.
That’s a promising start. If they don’t struggle with Trump, then it’s pretty clear that their moral compass and mine are not aligned. I want to make it clear that this is not a judgement about them as a person. It’s not about who’s bad and who’s good, because I don’t really believe in bad people or good people, except possibly in very rare cases. This is about our heads and our hearts and the possibility of forming meaningful connection.
So it’s a promising start when someone says “I really struggle with Trump.” But then if the person voted for him, then the phrase has to end with “but.” And whatever comes on the other side of that “but” is really important. This where we could have a fruitful conversation.
If they say they were mainly voting against the Democrats, then we’re still okay. I haven’t particularly liked my choices on the Democratic side the last few elections either. But then if the first reason they come up with is that, Biden is so old or they just didn’t ‘feel it’ with Kamala, then I am right back to wondering about their moral compass. How is that worse than rape? And lying about the election? And inciting mob violence, and the constant lying, and the bigotry, and on and on? If they mention inflation, then I want to hear them explain how the president is responsible for inflation and how they think Trump will address it. If they mention undocumented immigrants, then I want to hear them explain why they think it’s a problem. I want to hear how it’s a big enough problem to justify the pain that mass deportations will cause. If they mention chemtrails or vaccine injuries or the dangers of fluoride or 5G, then I want them to show me real evidence. Otherwise it’s all just vibes, and sorry, for me vibes don’t override all the problems with Trump, and the suffering his promised policies will bring.
Again, this is not a judgement of who they are. It’s about whether our hearts and minds are aligned, whether I want to share my full self with that person or just talk about the weather.
Postscript
Based on a few private responses to my last post, about Luigi Mangione and Brian Thompson, I feel like I need to make it clear that I was not condoning vigilantism. I wanted to highlight the complicated public response and what I saw as the media’s failure to engage with that and examine why it is complicated, or even accept the reality that it is.
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