For the Love of Trump
How an Indefensible President Made me a Better Parent
I remember it was summertime and it was evening. Other than that, time is relatively irrelevant. I know we were somewhere between day one of Trump’s presidency and day “when-will-this-madness-end,” which is every day since the election results were final. Trumpism was eating my brain.
I know I was driving my two kids home from a sporting event in my soccer-mom minivan, lost in thoughts spinning between rage, disbelief, and incredulity. I do not remember specifics, but I know I was silently brooding about Trumpian things over which I felt I had no control. Cognitive disorientation was my standard mood.
“Mom,” my contrarian, hyper-logical, accept-no-answers-at-face-value, seven-year-old son piped up from the backseat, “it is really true that we are all a part of everyone else in the world and that’s why we should love everyone?”
The question brought my mind only half-way out of its angst. “Yeah, Henry. That how I like to think of the world. We don’t be “good” or “bad” because someone tells us what is good or bad, we be “good” or “bad” because everything and everyone is connected, so we all need to love and take care of each other,” came my halfhearted, numb response.
He paused slightly before issuing a cautious challenge: “Eeeeven Donald Trump?”
“Ewwww,” screamed my daughter. “I don’t want to him to be a part of me.”
“Yeah,” Henry agreed, “he’s mean to everyone, do we really have to love him?”
Dammit! I hate it when Henry does that. Can’t we please talk about some butterflies and rainbows instead? Anyone want a milkshake?
But there it was: my seven-year-old, asking me why the rules I say we must apply to everyone do not apply to Trump.
Since the 2016 election, when my kids were only 4 and 6, I watched them witness the presidency transition from a stately, calming Black man to a crazed, angry orange one. Though kids pay little attention to politics they unwittingly absorb images and energy. Despite their age, I could see them grapple with contradictions as Trumpism frantically redefined values.
To the extent I could know what my kids actually knew about Trump, it is this: They knew he was president and that presidents are powerful, important, and respected. They knew he won an election that everyone was talking about and that the lady, who was the first lady ever to try to be president, got more votes but lost anyway. They knew it was not nice to call her a loser.
They knew Trump yelled a lot and that once at a rally he made fun of a handicapped guy in a way that would have gotten them in a lot of trouble but made a lot of people laugh and cheer.
They knew he said really bad things about women and Mexicans and Black people and Chinese people and Muslims. They knew they had a schoolmate whose dad went to Mexico and never came back because Trump said he was “illegal.” They did not know how a friend’s dad could be illegal, but they knew what it felt like to see her cry because she missed him so much.
They knew of kids in cages at the border who could not be with their own moms and dads.
They knew because they were white and American, they would not be put into cages; they did not understand why those things made a difference, and they cringed at the discomfort of their own security.
They knew the Muslim kids in their classrooms were like their other friends, except the one that was sad sometimes because he had to leave his home on the other side of the world because of a scary war.
My kids knew that I harped on them to always be respectful to everybody, but that I was not respectful about Trump, that I said bad things about him. A lot.
They also knew that their Papa, my MAGA hat wearing, FOX news watching, gun stockpiling step-father, whom they loved dearly, really, really, loved Trump.
They did not know to make sense of all these contradictions.
It was easy for my kids to not like Trump because I did not like Trump and Trump was a weird, angry orange man that appeared only on screens. In his distant, weird projections, not liking Trump felt to them a lot like not liking a bad guy in a movie.
But Papa was not distant or weird looking. Papa was Papa and he was right there in their lives, regularly. Papa gave good hugs and always shared his ice cream. They helped him plant a garden every year and he made the best pumpkin pie in the world during the holidays.
Papa was the only lens through which they could attempt to come to an understanding of Trump.
“If Donald Trump hates Mexicans, does that mean Papa does, too?”
“Does Papa hate Black people?”
What about Grammy? If Papa thinks these things, and Grammy loves Papa, does that mean Grammy is racist? If I love Papa, does that make me racist?
One day my daughter came home from school, “Does Papa think its ok to ‘grab women by the pussy’?”
This one hit hard. My daughter was probably eight when she overheard that gem. I had tried to shield her from that particular headline because she was still so young and how do you even explain it to a child who was long past accepting “it’s grownup stuff.”
For me, it was the most farcical question my kids had asked me about Papa in their attempt to understand him as a surrogate for Trump. For years, I’d listened to Papa tell me that his number one complaint with Bill Clinton was the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Unlike the not so subtle racism that I pretended to not hear during the Obama presidency, Papa still maintained a level of plausible deniability regarding sexism.
“I was trying to raise a young man,” Papa would pontificate (my stepbrother happens to be my age, which means we were both in college during the scandal). “How am I supposed to teach him to respect women when the president is engaging in that kind of conduct in the Oval Office?”
The always pious Papa, who decried the struggle of raising an already grown man amidst a scandal, was questionably silent when it came to Trump’s sexual exploits and unquestionably loud when antagonizing me, often within earshot of the kids, for the public shortcomings of women running for office.
In the interest of being charitable, I chose to believe that Papa thought the kids were not paying attention. I knew they were. We would leave family engagements and I would start fielding questions.
“Who is ‘Pocahontas’ and why does Papa always make jokes about her?”
I tried to handle these questions in what I thought to be an age appropriate, tactful manner: “Just because Papa likes Trump does not mean Papa is a bad person. He really loves you guys and he really loves Grammy and takes really good care of her, that’s the important part.”
Deep down, I was choking on my own echoes of Trump’s “really good people on both sides” bullshit.
One morning, while clearing the standard fare of huckleberry pancakes from the breakfast table at Papa’s house, my mom tried quashing another political taunt Papa launched in my direction: “I just hate it when you two get into these conversations.”
“It’s ok, mom. Differences of opinion are fine.” Because my daughter (now nine) was there, I tried to turn it into a teaching moment by defending Papa’s right to be dead-wrong. “The most important thing is that we be gracious with each other, right Papa?”
“Eh,” he laughed under his breath, “not always.”
As I continued clearing the table, something inside me snapped. I realized that out of respect for my mom and her choice of a husband — who happened to be one of my daughter’s favorite people in all the world — I allowed politeness to move the needle on my own moral compass further to the right than was acceptable.
As Papa snickered that graciousness was not a ground rule for the political attacks I’d come to expect, I finally saw that my willingness to defend his right to believe in the indefensible was doing more harm than good. I realized that I was really teaching my kids that if someone is loving and kind to you, it is ok to turn a blind eye to their hatred and disdain for others.
I was teaching my children to normalize racism, ignorance, and state sanctioned abuse and torture as an acceptable “difference of opinion.”
Under the guise of having a civil discussion with the white patriarch of my own family, my politeness was indoctrinating my kids in the fundamental tenets of a white patriarchy that went against everything for which I claimed to stand. I wanted to puke.
It was a solid three years into the Trump presidency when I resolved to stop defending Papa’s right to support the president. My kids, now 8 and 10, continue to search for answers to resolve the disconnect between loving Papa and not liking Trump. I stopped hiding behind honoring “differences of opinion,” and I started telling them the things Papa says out loud.
I explained to my daughter that, after I enrolled her in a Spanish immersion school, Papa asked if I was nervous that learning Spanish might make her marry a Mexican. My daughter’s eyes grew wide in disbelief.
“What about black people?” she asked.
I explained to her that the last time we all had lunch together, Papa tried to tell me “it’s just common sense to pull over a black kid driving a nice car to make sure he’s not up to trouble.”
“Like in ‘The Hate U Give’?” she asked. Yeah, kind of almost exactly like that, I nodded, apologetically.
“And the Pocahontas jokes?”
“This one is a bit more complicated,” I explained. I sat down with her at a computer and helped her look up articles on Elizabeth Warren, who she was, and how she claimed to be American Indian. We read about Trump making fun of her and challenging her to take a DNA test to prove it. We researched what it means to be part of the Cherokee Nation and why the DNA test debate between Trump and Warren was insulting. We read about her apology, and Trump’s taunts and the Cherokee Nation’s various responses:
“Why does he still make fun of her?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart.” At the time I did not have the heart to tell her that cruelty is the point, but she has since come to understand that.
“Does Donald Trump apologize?” I helped her looked it up. She read that he does not. The sadness of reality came over her face.
“Are you ok?”
“Yeah,” she pondered, “I know Papa loves me and everything, but it doesn’t feel the same anymore.”
“I know,” I hugged her tightly, “and its ok for you to feel that way.”
But Do We Still Have to Love Donald Trump?
Back to her brother’s question.
I did not know how to answer the day he asked. Since then, I’ve been getting better at it and try to improve when I can. Still wobbly and confusing at times, the answer comes more easily when I root it in these anchors:
The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. Indifference allows evil to grow, unchecked.
Hate is not an acceptable response. Hate is rooted in and grows into fear. To hate is to fear, and to fear is to give away one’s power. Trumpism feeds off of fear and hate; fear and hate will only strengthen it.
Love demands understanding. To search for understand is to take away the fear, to see things for what they really are, and to find the power and strength to move forward.
So I now I tell Henry, “Yeah, doodlebug, we still have to love everyone and everything.” I explain that there can be no exceptions, even when its hard, even when people are really, really awful.
I explain that we all have ugly parts that we want to ignore, but we cannot. I tell him that loving the ugly parts does not mean liking them— love should not be confused for a bigger, better version of like. Loving the ugly parts means trying to understand why they’re there, where they come from, and what role we are going to let them play in our lives.
I explain that ignoring the ugly parts causes the bad stuff to live and to grow, like weeds. And that hating the ugly parts makes them just fight back with more hatred — like when him and his sister get into fights about whose turn it is, rather than sharing.
I explain that we have to work hard to find understanding, because understanding help us know how be brave enough to not dismiss things like racism, sexism, and inequality as acceptable differences of opinion because these things are never acceptable, even if they are held by people who give us good hugs and always share their ice cream.
It was Trump brazen, indefensible celebration of the ugly parts of America and my own family that forced me to reconcile, out loud and to a seven-year-old, the contradictions within myself that I’d been uncomfortably ignoring. Now, instead of hiding from them and hiding them from my kids, we talk about them openly, though not perfectly.
And, for the love of god, my contrarian, hyper-logical, accept-no-answers-at-face-value, son knows that its his job to keep asking the questions that make me cringe.
