Carly, MD
When Trump first started running I thought it was a joke. I never thought myself to be one to understand the stupidity of mankind, but the events of the past five years proved me wrong. My father is an intelligent man, a retired rocket scientist with his degree from Stanford. He has been conservative leaning for most of my life, but because he was an educated “normal” person I thought he would see right through the alt right. I was sorely mistaken.
I graduated college in 2016 just before the election, and my graduation dinner was when he started tearing our family apart. My father always had a drinking vice and would become more argumentative when intoxicated. This usually manifested at casual gatherings but he knew better than to become belligerent at important celebrations. Over the course of the nice dinner my mother had planned with the rest of my family and a few friends my father rather than being in the moment with us he spoke only of how I was foolish for living in such a liberal state, and implied that college had turned me into a “radical leftist.”
After the entire restaurant was giving us sidelong glanced and all of our family and friends had left the table out of frustration and disgust with my father I finally was the last to leave him smugly drinking his scotch. He’d ruined what could have been a joyous celebration of a milestone for one of his children and he sat there like he’d won something. My mother said this was the beginning of the end.
Over the last four years of the administration he became more and more fanatical to the point that any seemingly innocuous topic was potentially a hot button. If you said it was a nice day he might bring up how climate change was a liberal conspiracy. One time we we’re talking about how long 2020 felt and it seems like a decade ago that Kobe died. My father flew off the handle saying “Kobe killed himself and his daughter because he was stupid for flying in a helicopter in the fog.” Then went into how the BLM movement is a terrorist group and he’s being discriminated against for being white.
He recently told my mother that her and his children were not important to him citing that achieving Trump’s America is all that matters and it will save us. That’s when it hit me, Trump is a cult. I had thought before that Trump supporters were just members of the alt right or uninformed center right who simply had strongly held misguided ideals. But forsaking your loved ones for politics or religion is a hallmark of cultism. I just somehow never thought it was something that could happen to my family.