When friends and family support evil, how should we respond?
I don’t even have to say his name. You already know I’m talking about Donald Trump.
I’ve avoided writing this post for a long time. Mostly, because it’s painful, for a host of reasons I’ll explain below. But it’s long overdue. Well, today is Independence Day, and this is how I choose to honor it—by speaking my conscience on a matter of the greatest importance to the future of our country. Some people, friends and neighbors alike, may not forgive me.
So be it. There are worse things that can happen to you.
Yesterday, my older brother called and complained to me, “You never call. It’s hard not to think it’s intentional.” I told him it wasn’t, but that’s not entirely true.
I didn’t have time for an honest response, but mostly, I didn’t want to have another pointless, bitter argument about Donald Trump. We’ve already had too many of those.
I’ve tried to explain to him and others that it goes way beyond politics. It’s about our nature as moral people. Granted, politics is rife with matters of good and evil. Most pro-lifers believe that abortion is evil, and most pacifists believe that waging war for any reason is evil, but this is different. It’s not a single policy or decision that we’re debating, but the character of the man who is leading America.
It would be pointless to list the countless actions of Donald Trump that I consider evil, but I can sum them up simply: throughout all of history, evil people have always used lies as their main weapon for gaining power, and Donald Trump’s rise to power has been based almost entirely on lies.
His supporters think his lying is smoke, not fire. Or they see it as a highly entertaining kind of sales pitch. But as sure as night follows day, lying leaves behind it a trail of chaos, broken trust, destruction, and all too often, violence. It degrades us and contaminates everything it touches. It drags us down into a pit of confusion and pain. Lying is ultimately a force of darkness.
That’s why supporting Trump is less a political act than a moral one. It differs radically from supporting a specific policy, philosophy, or party. The president of the United States touches everyone and everything. To support him is to support a leader who only cares about himself and will do whatever he can, at anyone else’s expense, to increase his power.
So what do we say to our friends and family who support such a person?
To be honest, we feel betrayed. When our loved ones spoke about their conservative beliefs, we took them at face value. We assumed they were not steeped in racism or hate. They simply had a different vision of the country they wanted to live in than we did, which is bound to happen in a democracy.
But with Trump, that veneer is stripped away and the ugly truth revealed: The paranoia. The hate. The racism. The misogyny. The disrespect for the rule of law and the willingness to embrace evil for personal gain.
We feel as if our friends have joined the confederate states or a fascist party. We watch the daily horror show of Trump and think that our loved ones have lost their minds. We thought we knew who they were. But it’s clear that we don’t. And judging by their angry denials, it’s clear that they don’t even know themselves.
It’s unnerving to speak with such people and almost impossible to treat them as normal. The reality is, we no longer respect you. We no longer trust you. And, yes, we avoid you. Because you’re not only deaf to the evil, but see yourselves as the wronged party.
And ultimately, we feel that our only recourse to restore sanity and morality to our country is to defeat you.
Such is the sad state that we find ourselves in on the 243th birthday of our country. There is damn little to celebrate. We are spiraling into chaos, and our future as a democracy is uncertain.
On this Fourth of July, I pray that we can soon sweep this evil from our country and reinstate the values, the ethics, and the institutions that truly made America great. But that can only happen when our friends and family who support him admit their mistake and the incalculable damage that it has done to our country.