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Confessions of a Trump Supporter’s Daughter
Between the pandemic and the election, it’s now harder than ever to talk politics with my dad without putting our relationship at risk
I can’t talk to my dad about politics. This is ironic, given that I graduated with honors with a degree in political science. Politics is, proverbially, my “whole thing.”
This standoff is certainly not for lack of trying to connect with my dad. The past three and a half years have been filled with dinner-table debates and verbal sparring over the morning paper; my dad has a tendency to read inflammatory headlines aloud, and I have a tendency to rise to the bait. But most recently, the combination of quarantine and the election cycle has rendered that type of discussion impossible. To engage would be to risk the disintegration of our father-daughter relationship.
This is because the typical Trump supporter’s primary argumentative tool is not objective fact or legal justification, but false equivalence and ad hominem. An argument with a Trump supporter is an entirely different animal than the scholarly debates I enjoyed in college and, occasionally, in the workplace — the Trump supporter views disagreement as a personal attack and responds in kind.
This is not to say that the other side of the aisle is not guilty of the exact same thing. Some social scientists have found that internalizing one’s political viewpoint until it encompasses your personal identity could be responsible for the ever-growing rift between ideologies. In my case, however, no matter how many times I cite a law or point out a faulty source, I somehow without fail find myself on the defensive.
Somewhere in between these two versions of my dad was a Tucker Carlson segment.
“When you’re older you’ll understand” is a favorite line I hear from my dad. (I’m 22.) “You gave in to the propaganda” is a close second. “You’re young, of course you’re a liberal.” Almost without fail, you can find an “Oh, honey” in there somewhere. It’s a back and forth of buzzwords and redirection underpinned by inexplicable bitterness and overall distrust in the world. And, because of my age and stature…
