The Lost Americans
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“Donald Trump gave people permission to be the worst version of themselves.” — Stuart Stevens, former GOP strategist and author of “It Was All a Lie”
To my readers who have lost Trump-supporting, Q-Anon-believing friends and family — do you miss them? I have to confess I do not. And here’s why:
My family members who fell into the Trump cult were never very good people to begin with. And I don’t just mean, flawed people. They’ve actually committed very bad acts.
For example, one of them lied to another family member and said she had cancer just to extort money out of him. Another one knew her daughter was being molested by her alcoholic father (he had offered to buy her a car if she’d sleep with him again), but because she couldn’t handle the daughter in her teenage years, shipped her out of state to go live with — you guessed it — her father. She also stayed with an alcoholic husband for years and years, despite the guy’s inability to help provide for the family. They ended up homeless for a while.
She had a really good government job. I remember all throughout my youth, she’d complain, though, about the “N-words” who worked there. How they were “lazy”, because they knew that they’d never be fired because of “affirmative action.” As this family member got sucked deeper and deeper into right-wing propaganda, I’d get all kinds of crazy propaganda emails from her government account. Like, 20 or so a day. I’m not sure how she could’ve been doing her job, when she was sending out so many anti-gay-marriage tomes and Clinton conspiracies.
Another family member was married to a guy, fresh out of prison, who molested me in the back seat of my 20-something niece’s car with his wife present. (Somehow I got stuck seated in the middle, between them). When I told her about the molestation, she decided I was lying and believed him over me. I’m sure you can guess how that turned out. He ended up putting his hands on at least two other female family members.
Then there’s the one who thought my dad was a walking ATM machine. My stepmother actually took me aside to complain that they were growing broke because my dad was sending this family member money for everything, even to repair the broken soft top on her convertible. My dad wasn’t wealthy by any stretch of the imagination…
