Mom’s Trump Card
by Rick Whitaker
November 2020
I was shocked. Her father got a Purple Heart when he was wounded in Europe during the War. He nearly died fighting Nazis. And the NY Times published a story in 2018 about some Trumpified self-proclaimed Nazis living just about thirty miles as the crow flies from the house my mom bought from her dad, the house she was living in when her dad was away fighting Nazis in Europe. She didn’t seem to mind, or care, about the batshit crazy people a few towns over, and she held steady, apparently, in her support for Trump. When was she so radicalized? And how? And why? I’ll never know, I’m sure. I asked her in October 2020 to let me know if she decided against voting for Trump again, but she never did, her silence speaking plenty loud for me to draw my grim conclusion, so I wrote something on Facebook about feeling betrayed and lost, angry and stupefied that my own flesh and blood, my own mother, supported someone as despicable as the mob-inciting fraud whose every project had gone down in flames of bankruptcy and unpaid bills and enmity and failure. She told my siblings that she was afraid of me, and wouldn’t speak to me. (Among her worst fears, I believe, is being put into a situation that makes her cry. I cry almost every day; perhaps she does too.) Not that she ever called me anyway. But our relationship faltered, and it’s faltering still. She’s 76 years old, eats mostly junk food, doesn’t exercise, and has medical issues aplenty, and I’d prefer to be close to her now since she’s my only mom, and we did manage to have some good times together over the years — she knew how to have fun back in the day, I’ll give her credit for that. But she won’t speak to me nor I to her, so that’s that. Our squabble is just one of the unknowable number of tragic consequences of all those millions of Americans voting in a man who didn’t even want to win, seems to me. But now that he’s had a taste of real power — and now that he knows you don’t have to read those briefs or give those sappy speeches or mourn those who died from gunshots or the coronavirus or whatever the hell, and if he can get away with inciting a deadly raid on the Capitol filled with Democrats like so many sitting ducks — along the lines of shooting a man on Fifth Avenue in daylight and getting away with it — well, who knows, he may run again down the line, and Gloria, in Ohio, may just wind up voting for that lunatic a third time. Imagine.
But I suppose my entire life has been characterized by the strange and unpredictable. Whose Christian mother has six husbands? A long series of exquisitely unlikely happenings led me from Ohio to New York City, and another facilitated my happiness and modest prosperity. Strange but true -could be my autobiography’s title. (Could be almost anyone’s, if they’ve lived a life worth writing about.) But nothing has been stranger than my mom’s turn to the far right as revealed in her support of the man who is idolized against all logic by almost half the citizens among us, even now. Their frenzied worship and passionate embrace — and hers, my mother’s — is far from finished. And they — she--may yet get to play her Trump card to finish the game.
God help us if they do.
Ach, but God is with them.
Originally published at https://www.memoirist.org on March 6, 2021.
