Maybe because he thought the Bush admin wasn’t bat shit crazy enough?
I wish it was that easy. We are part of a retired friend group who only see each other at our lunches. We did have more individual contact when we were working but we’ve always been more casual friends. This is going to disrupt the group and I will have to explain why to them.
He could have talked about his disagreements with Obama, he could have talked about his agreements with Trump the first term and it would have been fine. I can see that things could have gotten contentious after the insurrection if he had said he was ok with that. But we will never know how the group would have fared if he had been honest about his opinions. And now this comes out of left field, at least for me.
This is the problem for me. It’s not just disagreeing about politics anymore, it’s about real life and real people having their lives destroyed. It’s about changing what this country fundamentally is. I can’t comprehend how anyone can look at all of this and cheer it on. Obviously other people can be friends with someone who feels this way and that’s fine for them. I just can’t do it.
I’m fortunate that there’s no one in my life who is even remotely a Trumpist in any way whatsoever. I have a close and warm relationship with my ex-wife, who runs a successful business and as a business owner tends to be very conservative in most respects, so she could be a candidate for supporting (R) policies in the US. But she loathes Trump with a passion.
I don’t have any MAGA friends or family to lose. But I lost a few friends on Facebook because I was voting for Harris and all they cared about was punishing her for Gaza. In effect, it worked out to the equivalent of falling out over MAGA. In effect, they preferred MAGA to Harris, even if they wouldn’t admit it. If you pointed out that their intransigence benefited MAGA, they’d just get mad at you.
I think of it as a huge plus. Basically MAGAs self-identify as racist sociopaths, and this tells me who i wish to stay far away from. Win win.
I’ve posted elsewhere about a couple of friends - father and son - whom I golf with who voted for Trump. Wouldn’t call them Trumpers. Continue to struggle somewhat about how I think of them given their votes.
Spoke w/ the 80+ year old dad yesterday. He’s been going through some rough chemo/radiation. Sounds awfully rough, and I expect he will die shortly. We found other things to talk about.
Played golf today for the first time this year, with my buddy who said he was voting for Trump because “something needs to be done about immigration,” and “I’m sick and tired of paying so much for eggs.”
To my disfavor, I did not bring up politics. I REALLY enjoy this guy’s company on the course. Maybe I’m too chicken, but I don’t know.
A couple of curious things, tho:
He commented that at his mom’s birthday celebration recently, some relatives wanted to talk about politics, and he told them that if they wanted to talk politics, they would have to leave. Struck me as odd that he wouldn’t welcome the opportunity to defend all the wonderful things his boy is doing.
Second, the three of us got matched up with another golfer. Really nice guy - originally from Indonesia. Pretty quickly my buddy said, “We should invite him to play in our regular game.” I was thinking, “WTF?! Is he a GOOD immigrant/brown person, as opposed to all the BAD ones?”
Don’t look for consistency. Plenty of Trump voters expected him to deport the “bad hombres” and then are positively shocked when he goes after hard-working laborers, small business owners, and now mothers with children born in the US to make his (unconstitutional) prohibition of birthright citizenship effectively retroactive.
Stranger
I assume no one really cares, but. I’ll just post an (hopefully final) update on my social research.
Golfed yesterday with 2 of my buddies, 1 of whom is the Trump voter. At one point I said, “I don’t want to get into an argument, but I just want to finish our conversation from last fall, do you remain a big fan of everything Trump is doing?”
The guy said, “I think a lot of good things are in the works. The border is. closed, and a lot of bad people are leaving the country. But it is still early - it has only been 3 months.”
Then the other guy, who I that thought somewhat apolitical, piped in, “You have to realize what he is trying to do is bring back manufacturing jobs, and that will take a long time to be successful - if it ever is.” (I’m fearing he is less apolitical than I had thought. Or, at least, more easily swayed by clickbait he encounters.)
I thanked them for their opinions and said, “Last year you had suggested that I would be pleased with what happened under Trump. Just to let you know, he has been far worse than I would have imagined. He has not done a single thing that I consider less than horrible. And instead of 3 months being too short a time to judge, he has done far more horrible things faster than I ever would have feared. I don’t want to argue anything or try to persuade you of anything.”
Later on, the Trump guy asked me what I thought of the WI judge who was arrested. I said, as much as I disapprove of essentially all of ICE’s recent efforts, no one - judge or not - gets to decide not to follow the law. I did suggest that I did not see the need to perp walk her from the courthouse, but observed that unnecessary meanness seemed to be a consistent intent of the admin. He expressed his disbelief that someone would shitcan their career over something like that. I suggested the possibility that someone might see the admin’s actions as enough of a threat to our country’s legal system that such sacrifice was warranted.
Just an update on my not at all satisfying efforts to understand an otherwise decent seeming Trump supporter.
IMO this was a great way to handle this. Maybe those guys will think about what you said, and even ask you more questions.
Don’t assume that. I’m interested in these stories. I’m sure others are, too. After all, aren’t Dopers mostly voyeurs, peeking and peering into others’ lives from behind their screens?
These people who figure the Good Things are just down the road a piece make me nuts! And there you were with a bagful of weapons and you didn’t even beat these guys to death. You’re a stronger person than I am.
Your friend would probably say he only objects to illegal immigrants.
That is the usual cover story.
The most vociferously anti (illegal?) immigrant people I know are
-
a person who came to the US as a student (based on forged marksheets) and then dropped into the underground economy until some kind of amnesty in the 1980s. He claims that the four years he spent working illegally in very bad conditions as “paying his dues” which current immigrants are somehow avoiding by mollycoddling nanny state practices.
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an actual Vietnamese boat person who as a child witnessed the brutalization of her family on an island refugee camp after witnessing rape and robbery on the boat itself. She came to the United States under some program. So she hangs her hat on that. She’s “not responsible for Thai immigration policies and practices”
Yeah, but you don’t know who is/isn’t “legal” without at least asking a couple of questions.
My extended family and my wife’s are mostly Trumpers (higher education achievements don’t predominate) but I can’t see cutting them off from contact with us.
But friends are discretionary and all of mine are never-Trumpers. There will be no new ones added to the circle who aren’t.
I never really liked our next door neighbors, but we were civil to them. We went to their house a couple of times. They’re old, so I shoveled their walk when it snowed and took their cans in after trash pickup. The wife, in particular, was unpleasant. I always said she seemed about one glass of wine away from using the N word, but we kept it light and civil with them.
Then during the election, they put up a Trump sign.
Now we just completely ignore them. They texted us a couple of times and we just don’t respond. If they are outside when we are, we just don’t see them. I think that one of their daughters was a USAID funded aid worker like we were and I haven’t seen her or the grandkids around lately.
FAFO
I grew up in a conservative enclave, and went to a far-right conservative college.
So most of my friends were conservatives. But sane conservatives.
Until this administration. Now they refuse to even discuss what they believe with me, they just make snotty little anti-vax/anti-BLM/anti-“woke” comments.
Two of those were my best friends, and now I barely talk to them.