Estrangement and the 2024 Election

Are you sick of your aggressively Trumpist relatives?

Nobody is undecided in this thing unless they are under a rock, passive, or voters being intimidated.

Would you be surprised if I told you I have seen three posts in the last month in the subReddits “Boomers Being Fools,” “Am I Overreacting,” and that one for people who are in relationships with Q anon-ers, posts that are some variation on the theme of My parent/husband/brother is telling me that if I don’t vote for Trump, I have to move out/am cut out of the will/I will be in trouble.”?

Probably not, if you aren’t on the Orange Team and you are still dealing with someone who is.

One unexpectedly cool thing about estrangement is that I have had the honor to connect with other adult children of narcissists or other people who have some type of estrangement due to some type of caregiver trauma.

And most of those communities ban politics, so you never are really sure, but there are quite a few of us who are estranged from people who just happen to be Trumpers.

“Are there any people who are estranged from family where politics is involved that aren’t on the left and being estranged from right-wing families?” asks my writing coach. “There’s like, about three to every ninety-seven,” I say.

Whereas a lot of my friends are struggling with families who were moderately conservative once-upon-a-time and had their souls slowly and then exponentially sucked out of their eyeballs by Fox News, my family, I’m convinced, were born to be Trumpers.

Where my friends watched their families lock on in about 2008 with the birther crap and then wing out quickly into pizza-gate territory, my family sat poised at the edge of society until it crumbled enough into cruelty to meet their standards.

I see the signs: my father using very racist language and epithets, the Dale Carnegie book he gave me, the Nixon biography on the shelf, the idealization of Reagan, the leaning in to Rush Limbaugh, the fetishization of Anne Coulter, the fetishization of Sarah Palin, the volume on the omnipresent Fox News going up with each year as his hearing went down, the Swift Boat book he gave me, and his absolute inability to see me as a human being or talk to me about anything but politics.

And while he himself wasn’t all that religious, a lot of his family went deep down the Conservative Catholic rabbit hole, making them, you guessed it—single issue voters!!

Is there ever anything that is meant by “single issue voter” that isn’t code for “I want to ban abortions”?

You may have watched your Uncle Jerry turn into a person you couldn’t recognize, but my Pop, and by extension, his brothers, his sister, and many of their kids and grandkids, especially the ones who are complicit by not confronting their bigoted family and try to bothsides their way out of accountability.

Papa Cazzata died in January of 2016, and I like to think he was called home before he could do more damage in an America ruled by the Mustard Maniac. Once he had told me, years earlier that he didn’t like George Bush junior and thought he was an idiot. Years later, I held on to that anecdote as a sort of flimsy hope that my father was a sexist, racist, ableist, philandering Republican, but would somehow stop at the boundary of being a Trumper. (I know.)

Now that I think about it, my father was good at lying. It’s more likely that he was too embarrassed to admit in front of me that he liked Bush.

As weird as it sounds, as powerless as I felt, he did on some level want my approval. And because I can’t wholeheartedly approve of something that repulses me, he didn’t really get real approval from me. Just politeness and civility, which made him more mad. And because he didn’t get that supply from me, that’s when the real misery with him began.

Had my father lived to see these current times I think all of his synchophants would have come around and shoved MAGA hats on his tipping head, or wheeled him through Yuge crowds to a DonnySmallHands rally, where he would wave like a mayor. It would be something to do.

When I look back on my relationship with him, the whole thing brings about the sensation of having an elephant sitting on my chest. He terrified me as a child, which tortured me with guilt, because he was my father. He made me feel deeply uncomfortable in numerous ways and never respected a single boundary I set, and in fact would go out of his way to stop short of malicious compliance to the boundary, He made me feel terrible pretty much every time I saw him, for years and years.

Eventually, I chose me, and went no-contact.

I didn’t have to hear his rants on politics anymore after that. Sweet relief. Trauma to unpack, in the silence.

But, I’m willing to bet he would have been a Trumper, and was moving towards his MAGA era when he died.

I didn’t cut contact with him because he was a Republican.

And if you’re in my shoes now, and you pray for the sweet, sweet sound of no-contact and permanently shutting off the rant valve—it was never about the Mango Mussolini.

Anyone still supporting him either admires his behavior or excuses it because their agenda is more important than other human beings. In order to decide what human beings deserve grace and power, they use violent ideology and eugenics.

It’s always ok to stop contact.

If you want to find a blog post that will gently steer you towards communication strategies that will allow you to numb out enough to stay in toxic connections to people who don’t respect your humanity, or if your lack of access to resources makes ceasing contact impossible: search away. You will find a bunch of blogs, starting back at 2008.

If you’re here because you’re done, because you have the heartbreaking privilege to leave, I’m here to say: there’s life, after the estrangement. Yes, we have to live in the world with family and friends and neighbors and bosses and jobs and security cameras. But nobody can make you accept the unacceptable in close relationships, or the company you keep.

There are a lot of us out here.

We have new dreams to dream, new units to form, and new movements to move.

You can think of estrangement as your liberation work. You absolutely can.