Why My Dad is Voting For Trump

There’s no excuse, but there is a reason

I was at my Dad’s place last June celebrating his 80th birthday when Trump announced his candidacy for president. Dad was elated. I was confused. So I asked him why and while he rattled off all the reasons why he wanted President Trump, I considered the deeper why that he may or may not even be aware of. And here’s what I’ve decided:

My Dad was the fourth (out of five) child born into white poverty in a small central Pennsylvania town. The first-born, a girl, was the product of rape. You see, the town bookie, who also happened to be a one-armed, raging alcoholic, raped a girl of 16. That girl’s father literally took a shot gun to the drunk bookie’s head and forced him to marry her. He said that he’d marry her, but under the condition that he would never hold another job again.

As my Dad tells the story, he kept his promise.

He never worked again, but he did manage to have four more children with my grandmother before she died from anaphylactic shock at the tender age of 27. (As an aside, I have my own personal suspicions exactly how this woman suffocated to death — maybe I’ll fictionalize it someday?) As you might have already imagined, my grandfather abandoned his children.

The two girls, 10 and 8, went to live with their maternal grandparents. The baby boy, just 6 months, went to live with his maternal aunt. The middle boys, 5 and 2 1/2, went into the foster system.

Their first foster family lived a couple of blocks from their grandparents. So, one day, my dad’s grandfather picked him up and sat him down in a little red wagon with his 5 year old brother at the helm. They were each given a banana and a peck on the cheek and they were off to their new home.

My dad cycled through 8 foster homes by the time he was 13. As he says, it wasn’t because he was a bad kid, it was about the timing of it all. The depression was lingering, so when one family ran out of money, he’d get passed to another family.

And then the war came. And as soon as the man of the house was shipped off to war, my dad was shipped off to another family.

Anyway, at 13, my dad landed at a house with a nice family and a 14 year old son. A built-in playmate and friend. Eventually they became brothers and today he is my uncle.

The story doesn’t end there. In many ways, it’s just beginning, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll move along to the punchline.

My dad scraped and clawed his way through life. And he has made a good, middle-class American life for himself. He’s a survivor. There is no doubt. He wanted more from his life than those he’d been surrounded by in his youth. He worked hard and he achieved.

Here’s the problem: he thinks he did it all on his own. He looks at his past as though it was him against the world and he won. He doesn’t look at his past and think of the sacrifices his neighbors made to care for him, even if only for a little while.

From my dad’s perspective, President Trump is the only one out there who is going to protect what he has worked so hard for. And he’ll be goddamned if anyone is going to take away what he has earned and give it to someone else: perhaps some other poor orphan boy?