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The Empathy Divide

Republicans have a set of rules for the world, most of which involve things other people are doing incorrectly. If someone is on government assistance, they lack a work ethic. If someone attempts to cross a border, they don’t respect the law. If a woman finds herself in a complicated pregnancy, she has made poor choices. If someone is raising a child who identifies as LGBTQ+, obviously the problem is modern parenting.

It is a moral system built around the smug theology of personal responsibility, in which human vulnerability is treated less like a fact of existence and more like a character defect. And a life relatively free of hardship is routinely mistaken for evidence of superior character.

And it’s a remarkably convenient system. Because if suffering is always the result of bad choices, you never have to ask whether the system itself might be broken. Poverty becomes laziness. Addiction becomes weakness. Immigration becomes criminality. An unwanted pregnancy becomes irresponsibility. A child struggling with identity becomes a parenting failure.

Everyone gets exactly what they deserve.

It’s a beautiful theory. Right up until life has the audacity to happen to you.

Because sometimes the person who needs help is not some stranger you’ve been taught to blame. Sometimes it’s your kid. Sometimes it’s your sister. Sometimes it’s your neighbor. Sometimes it’s you.

And suddenly the political debate stops being something you watch on television while yelling at people you’ve never met. It walks through your front door. It sits down at your kitchen table. And it has your last name.

And that is when the tidy little theology of personal responsibility encounters its oldest and most inconvenient enemy: real life.

Suddenly, the “illegal alien taking our jobs” is Miguel, who’s been landscaping your yard for fifteen years and is beloved by your dog. The “welfare leech” abusing the system is your own daughter, standing at your doorway holding a layoff notice while her savings drain out. The “irresponsible woman” seeking an abortion is your granddaughter, sitting in a stark doctor’s office listening to a hospital legal team explain that they cannot treat her septic miscarriage until her life is sufficiently in danger. The “transgender menace” threatening Western Civilization is your kid, sitting on the edge of their bed, holding their breath to see if you’re going to stop loving them.

And then, magic!

The rigid moral principle suddenly develops a remarkable capacity for nuance.

In the rarest and most interesting cases, someone actually follows the logic all the way through. They realize that if a system is cruel enough to grind down someone they love, it has probably been grinding down strangers with equal savagery all along. The abstract political enemy evaporates. What remains is a human being.

And that can be an extraordinarily uncomfortable thing to discover. Because once you see the person behind the category, you have to confront the possibility that the category was always bullshit. The people you dismissed as statistics were people. The people you called irresponsible were people. The people you blamed were people. And, occasionally, you realize that the policies you defended did not merely produce abstract “consequences.” They produced suffering. Sometimes you even notice the blood on your hands.

But far more often, the human brain performs a piece of breathtaking Olympic gymnastics. It doesn’t abandon the rule. Oh, no. That would be far too easy. Instead, it creates an exception: a beautifully tailored, morally customized exception designed specifically for the person standing in front of you.

Miguel isn’t “one of those illegals.” Miguel is a good man. Hard worker. Loves dogs. Has been doing the yard for fifteen years. Frankly, he does a better job than the guy before him.

Your daughter isn’t a “welfare leech.” She’s a hard worker who got screwed by corporate America.

Your granddaughter isn’t “murdering a baby.” She’s experiencing a tragic medical complication. Obviously, that’s different.

And your gay child isn’t part of the “woke agenda.” They’re confused. They’re vulnerable. They need protection.

And so the rule survives. Not because the rule was true, but because you found a way to make the people you love exempt from it.

Which is, when you think about it, an astonishingly elaborate way of saying:

“I don’t mind cruelty. I just don’t want it happening to anyone I know.”

And that, right there, is the frustrating part about conservatives. Because the question is no longer whether they can feel empathy. Clearly, they can. They just seem to require a personal connection before activating it. And if that is the standard, then perhaps the real political challenge is not convincing conservatives to care about strangers. Perhaps it is convincing them to understand that the stranger was never actually a stranger.

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The history of selective enlightenment is long.

• Dick Cheney spent decades helping construct one of the most hardline and ruthless strains of modern conservatism, including a political movement that made opposition to gay rights a reliable culture-war weapon. Then his daughter Mary came out as a lesbian. Cheney broke with his own party, supported same-sex marriage, and defended his daughter’s right to marry the woman she loved.

• Ronald Reagan championed absolute gun rights and railed against federal interference, right up until a bullet entered his body on a Washington sidewalk. Suddenly, the Brady Bill wasn’t government tyranny; it was an urgent necessity.

• Nancy Reagan fiercely opposed embryonic stem-cell research on moral grounds, until Alzheimer’s began taking her husband. Then, rather remarkably, the science she had once regarded as a moral boundary began looking a lot more like a potential lifeline.

• Pro-life lawmakers seeking IVF: Conservative politicians across the country co-sponsored “fetal personhood” legislation that legally imperiled fertility clinics, until those same politicians, or their wives, needed IVF to start a family, prompting a mad scramble to craft hyper-specific legal carve-outs to protect their own fertility treatments while keeping the underlying restrictions intact for everyone else.

But you don’t need to look to Washington to see the phenomenon. You can find it in your own family, your own neighborhood, your own workplace. Frankly, you can probably find it at Thanksgiving, sitting three seats away from you, explaining why the government should stop helping people while asking you to pass the gravy.

When I compiled responses from readers about the Trump supporters in their lives for a recent article, I was interested in what it meant to love, live with, lose, and occasionally reach someone who had fallen into MAGA. A pattern emerged almost immediately: the political abstraction would hold perfectly well until it acquired a human face.

A Filipino girlfriend made immigration policy suddenly about someone he loved. Immigrant friends at church turned deportation from a talking point into the possibility of losing people he actually knew. A transgender granddaughter transformed the culture war from something happening on Fox News into something happening to a child he adored.

And throughout my Among the Believers series, the pattern kept repeating with almost comical consistency. People who had spent years accepting political arguments in the abstract began questioning them when those arguments collided with their own lives.

Gas and groceries got expensive, and suddenly inflation was no longer an economic statistic. It was the reason there was less money left at the end of the month. Trade wars didn’t remain a line in a campaign speech. They showed up in the fields and rotted the crops in their silos. Rolling back overtime protections sounded wonderfully business-friendly until sixty hours of work produced a paycheck without the time-and-a-half that was supposed to come with it.

Medicaid cuts were perfectly acceptable in the abstract until an elderly mother needed her medication and the family discovered that “personal responsibility” does not, in fact, lower the price of insulin. And vaccine skepticism can remain a wonderfully theoretical exercise right up until a child suffers lifelong, preventable damage.

It is a political philosophy that survives entirely on distance. The moment that distance collapses, the moral certainty starts to unravel.

The left, by contrast, begins from a fundamentally different moral premise. We don’t need to know someone to believe they deserve dignity, freedom, healthcare, or equal rights. We don’t need a child of our own to care about children, an immigrant in our family to oppose deportation, or a transgender person at our dinner table to defend their right to live as themselves.

The starting point is simpler: human beings have value before we know their names. That distinction matters.

Progressive morality does not require suffering to become personal before it becomes worthy of our attention. It understands that a person facing eviction is not necessarily experiencing an individual failure. Their circumstances may have been shaped by housing policy, wages, medical costs, economic structures, history, circumstance, or plain bad luck. The same is true of someone without healthcare, someone fleeing war, or someone whose life has been made precarious by forces entirely beyond their control. You don’t need a personal connection to recognize that they deserve dignity. Their humanity is the qualifying condition.

But that doesn’t mean the left is immune to the power of personal connection. We don’t need to know someone to care, but knowing someone can make caring impossible to ignore. It can take a principle you already hold and give it weight. It can turn something you understand intellectually into something you feel in your bones. The political issue becomes a person. The policy becomes a consequence. The thing you were willing to fight for in theory becomes the thing you would crawl over broken glass to protect.

And that is a different kind of political awakening. Not the discovery that someone else is human, but the discovery of just how much it matters to you that they are.

So I asked my readers about those people.

We can care about strangers. We should care about strangers. But sometimes one particular person changes the temperature of the fight. They give an abstraction a name. They put a face on something you already believed was worth defending. And once you love that face, indifference is no longer an option.

The answers reminded me that, for progressives, personal connection isn’t the foundation of empathy. It’s an accelerant.

You didn’t suddenly discover that the issue matters.

You discovered exactly who is counting on you to keep fighting.

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Who Makes You Fight Harder?

LGBTQ+

On LGBTQ+ issues, Trump and Republicans have turned cruelty into a political weapon, particularly against transgender Americans. They have made people’s identities, families, and basic rights into targets of legislation and culture-war theater.

A grandmother wrote to me about her 19-year-old grandson. She remembered watching him as a six-year-old, placed on a football field by a father who had very specific expectations for who his son ought to be:

“He was hanging out in the field following butterflies. Not following the game, not really there at all. And I knew. He was on a path only he could see.”

So she made a decision that would define the rest of his childhood.

“I just hugged him and was there when he ‘disappointed’ everyone who had expectations of him that he was never going to fulfill.”

In a culture war that demands young people perform an identity scripted by politicians and traditionalists, choosing to walk your own path takes quiet, constant bravery. But knowing you don’t have to walk it alone changes everything.

Thirteen years later, her pride hasn’t wavered.

“I love my gay grandson and I have such enormous pride in his ability to stick to his path. It has never been easy or accepted by many, but he knows no matter where he goes he has me and his other lesbian grandmother on his side always.”

Another reader put it simply:

“My two trans grandchildren. I adore them at every stage of their lives and always will!”

And then there is Jen, whose education in this particular fight began in the early 1990s, long before most of the country had the vocabulary to describe what her family was experiencing.

“When I was 13, October of 1992, I found out my dad is transgender. My dad felt like a woman in a man’s body. We didn’t even have the word transgender then in the early 90’s. It was crossdresser at best and transvestite at its most inhumane and derogatory.”

For most of her adolescence, Jen was trying to make sense of the parent she thought she knew.

“For so many years (almost my entire teen years) I used to pray to God to make my dad gay instead of trans. I told God, I could understand dad being gay, I could not understand my dad not feeling like a man.”

Her father transitioned in the early 2000s, living as Brenda. She saw transgender people become, however imperfectly, more visible and more accepted. She saw the possibility that her father might finally be understood as a human being rather than treated as a problem requiring explanation. And then she watched that progress sharply reverse.

“I watched the world — or at least the country, or at least some of the country — become more and more open to trans people. Like there was a point when it seemed like the country recognized their humanity and human rights. And now in the last few years I’ve watched that pendulum swing really hard backwards.”

Brenda died in August of 2006, twenty years ago this month.

What she left Jen was not simply a political position. She left her an understanding of what authenticity can cost when the world would prefer that you remain someone else.

“My dad only wanted to be herself and have the world accept her, or at the very least, let her exist as her. She taught me the cost of being authentic, and I witnessed the cost of not being authentic. Because of her, I want to help people see the humanity in all forms of people and their differences. She showed me what real bravery is, and I’ll be trying to match her bravery until the day I die.”

IMMIGRATION

On immigration, Trump and Republicans have turned human beings into threats, numbers, and categories, reducing people fleeing violence or seeking a better life to the word “illegal.”

A reader shared the story of a young woman she worked alongside.

“A young woman I worked with, told me how she and her brother and mom had to flee Honduras in the middle of the night. Her father was a policeman, and drug dealers had killed him, and had said they were coming for his family. They got here as refugees seeking permanent legal resident status.”

Reaching safety wasn't about circumventing the law. It was the only thing that kept them alive.

For another reader, the immigration debate has a name. It’s her mother’s.

“I am the daughter of an undocumented immigrant, through no fault of her own. She was smuggled into the US at 2 years of age. After trying all of her short life to gain citizenship, she died still unable to become a citizen.”

Her mother spent a lifetime trying to navigate a system that refused to see her, even as she stepped up to serve the country that kept her in the shadows:

“This is a woman who drove a transfer truck for the US Army during WWII; so, in the only way she could, she helped win that war.”

Her daughter carries that history into the present.

“I understand the fear that is gripping the very soul of all immigrants right now, whether ‘legal’ or ‘illegal.’ They are all in danger, and we MUST do everything in our power to bring this cruelty to an end.”

Another reader’s immigration story is also a story about what can happen when someone is given a chance.

“My son-in-law was brought here illegally from Mexico when he was four years old. He grew up in Alabama, learned English in kindergarten, and turned out to be a hell of a student. But being undocumented made just about everything harder. No Social Security number. No driver’s license. No insurance. And he couldn’t leave the country to see his family.

By 15, he figured college probably wasn’t in the cards. He was doing great in school, but what good was it if he couldn’t get into college or find a decent job?”

Then DACA changed the trajectory of his life.

“Then President Obama created DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), and that gave kids like him a chance. He got a full academic scholarship, went to college, and earned a degree in criminal justice. He joined the Army, partly because he wanted to prove he was as American as anybody else. At 24, he became a U.S. citizen.”

And now:

“Now I get to call him my son-in-law. He’s a wonderful husband to my daughter, a great dad, and in a few weeks, he’s going to make me a grandpa. Knowing what he had to overcome makes that mean even more to me.

That’s why I believe in giving people a pathway. Sometimes you give somebody a chance, and they make something pretty damn good of it.”

HEALTHCARE

On healthcare, Trump and Republicans have turned access to something people need to survive into something people are expected to prove they deserve.

The language is about fiscal responsibility, work requirements, and program integrity.

The consequences are much more intimate.

For some readers, the person who made the fight feel more urgent wasn’t someone else. It was themselves.

That’s what happened to people who relied on the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). When the enhanced subsidies disappeared, the political language was about tax credits and federal spending. For the people paying the premiums, it was much simpler: their insurance became unaffordable.

“I didn’t decide that I didn’t need health insurance. I decided I couldn’t afford the price they were charging me for it. Those are two completely different things. But after Republicans allowed the enhanced Obamacare subsidies to expire, the premium became hundreds of dollars more a month, I had no choice but to walk away.”

Another reader:

“I went from $544 a month to more than $1,300. Tell me how I’m supposed to pay that. I’m a home-care worker. I’m not sitting on some pile of money. At some point you can’t call it insurance if the person who needs it can’t afford to buy it.”

And then there was a mother who found herself facing a choice no parent should have to make.

“I have two kids, 10 and 7. My 7-year-old had been sick for a couple days, but that day he got really bad and was having trouble breathing. Then my 10-year-old crashed his bike and broke his arm. We’d lost our Obamacare, and I couldn’t afford to take them both to the ER. I was sitting there trying to figure out if they both really needed to go. One kid can’t breathe and the other one’s got a broken arm. I’m their mom. I should be able to take my kids to the hospital when they need it. Instead I’m sitting there trying to figure out which one is bad enough to spend the money on.”

For people approaching Medicare age, losing affordable coverage can be particularly cruel.

“I thought Obamacare was what was going to get me through those years until Medicare. I didn’t realize how much of my premium was being subsidized until that help disappeared. Then it nearly tripled. At 59, you’re too young for Medicare and too old to pretend you can just go without insurance.”

And then there is Medicaid, where losing coverage can mean navigating a maze of new requirements just to get back what you already had.

In Nebraska, one reader is fighting to get Medicaid restored for his developmentally disabled daughter.

“My developmentally disabled adult daughter lost her Medicaid because of Trump’s law requiring recipients to work or volunteer 80 hours per month. My daughter doesn’t understand any of this. We’re on the phone for hours every day to try to straighten this out. It feels like the system is counting on me to get tired and give up.”

And eventually, all the policy language ends in the same place: with a person deciding whether they can afford to find out what’s wrong with them.

“I still have the same body I had last year. I still have the same medical problems. But I can’t afford to see the doctor every time something is wrong anymore. So I wait. I tell myself it’ll get better. And if it doesn’t, I wait a little longer. That’s what losing affordable insurance means. You don’t stop being sick. You just stop being able to do anything about it.”

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WOMEN’S RIGHTS

Republicans have spent decades telling women that equality has gone too far, that reproductive freedom is negotiable, and that the government should have a say in decisions that belong to women and their doctors. They have turned women’s autonomy into another front in the culture war.

For some women, the fight is not an abstraction.

It is an inheritance.

“My great-grandmothers fought for women’s right to vote. My grandmothers fought too, and my mother carried that fight into her own workplace. I grew up knowing that women’s voices were never going to be heard unless we insisted on being heard.”

Another reader watched the women in her family fight to be seen, respected and treated as equals.

“I’ve always felt responsible for carrying the fight forward. My mother and grandmothers taught me that we don’t fight just for ourselves. We fight so the women who come after us don’t have to fight the same battles all over again.”

Another reader spent her career caring for women.

“I battled my way through medical school in the ’80s, completed an OB-GYN residency, had two babies while I was training, worked 100-hour weeks while pregnant, and moonlighted to pay the bills. Women’s health has been my life’s work. Seeing Roe overturned and watching abortion bans put women’s health in peril has nearly crushed my soul.”

Then she looks at her granddaughters.

“I’m in my 60s now, and I’ll fight this fight until my last breath. And when I look at my granddaughters, I know exactly why I’m still fighting. I want them to inherit a world where the freedoms we fought so hard to give them are theirs to keep, not ours to win all over again.”

The next reader watched a young woman she cared about go through the consequences of an abortion ban.

“My daughter’s friend was pregnant in Texas after Roe was overturned. She wanted that baby. Then her water broke way too early, and the doctors knew that baby wasn’t going to make it. But there was still a heartbeat, so they told her they couldn’t do anything.

She got sicker and sicker and then she went septic. The doctors were scared to act because of the law. By the time they finally could, the infection had done so much damage they had to take her uterus out. She survived, but she can’t ever have children now.

That did it for me. I’d always cared about women’s rights, but seeing what happened to that young woman changed something in me. She wanted that baby. She wanted to be a mama. And because of that law, she lost both the baby and the chance to ever have another one.

I’ll fight for women’s rights till the day I die. After what happened to her, I just can’t sit back and keep my mouth shut.”

Another reader has children whose futures make the stakes personal.

“I started working in politics in 1976, my freshman year of college, and I’ve never stopped. I have three daughters, a non-binary child and two granddaughters, so this is personal as well as political. I’m fighting for the world they will inherit. I may not be able to do everything I once could, but I can still make calls, write postcards, show up and resist. You don't have to finish the work, but you must not stop doing it.”

And another has spent a lifetime doing exactly that.

“I was born in 1951, and for decades I’ve made my voice heard against war, hunger and injustice. We fought, we protested, we made progress, and now we find ourselves having to fight again to save our democracy. Freedom was a gift given to us by our forefathers and we need to keep the flame alive for future generations. I’ll keep fighting for my children and grandchildren, and for every person who deserves to live free. I’ll be out in the streets, calling and writing Congress, and encouraging other women to show up. We’re tired, but we’re not done.”

MILITARY

Republicans have turned “support the troops” into something closer to “support the president.” As though criticizing a war, questioning a commander-in-chief, or objecting to sending American soldiers into harm’s way somehow means you’re against the people wearing the uniform.

I think supporting the troops means something much simpler: Protect them.

Don’t send them into harm’s way for bullshit. Don’t ask them to die for political vanity. And when they come home, take care of them.

One reader knows exactly what that sacrifice looks like.

“My father, uncles, and grandfather all served in WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam. My son was killed by an IED in Afghanistan in 2016, leading a team of engineers in a rebuilding program.”

And then:

“I am glad they are not around to see this clown of a president cutting Social Services that many veterans depend on for survival and calling them ‘losers’!”

Another reader remembers what her father believed he was fighting for.

“My father was a WWII veteran. He knew what it meant to ‘liberate and not to conquer,’ and taught me well, for which gift I am eternally grateful.”

She remembers him coming home.

“Coming home on a Liberty Ship, he first spotted Lady Liberty on the horizon, holding her light high to greet the returning heroes to ‘the land of the free.’”

Seven decades later, at his funeral:

“As he presented my mother with the funeral flag, the honor guardsman gently kissed her forehead in respect. My folks were in their 70th year of marriage. I thank that good soldier for his kindness to her. It still means so much to me, and honored her faithful waiting for my father to return to her from the horrors of Nazi-occupied Europe. A beacon of love burned bright for him.”

Then she says:

“That gift my father and all the other soldiers fought for WILL NOT be surrendered to the likes of the motley crew currently squatting in The People’s House. Never.”

Another reader wrote about her father, who served in the UK and Europe and received a Bronze Star.

“He would be appalled at what is transpiring in the USA today. It would make him angry. It would also make him sad that everything he and his comrades achieved is now in danger of being wasted and tossed aside.”

And she isn’t sitting this one out.

“As my father’s child, I cannot stand idly by. So I must now go out and protest, must write and call my members of Congress, and when the time comes, cast my vote to remove this odious joke of a president and all he stands for from office.”

For some readers, the wound is even more personal: their parents were lifelong Republicans.

One wrote about her father, a World War II Navy veteran:

“My parents both served. They actually met at a dance for service members in Washington DC towards the end of the war. Dad was in the Navy and Mom was a WAC. They were lifelong Republicans, but Mom passed away in 2004 and Trump was a bridge too far for my dad. He could see the man for what he was and couldn’t bring himself to support a person like that.”

Her father was living with her on January 6.

“He watched the assault on the Capitol on TV with tears streaming down his cheeks, heartbroken at what had become of his party and his country. He passed away less than six months later.”

Her conclusion needs no explanation.

“I will never forgive Donald Trump and MAGA for betraying the very country my father fought to protect. Rot in Hell, you bastards.”

And another:

“My father served three years in the Army in the European theater during World War II. He rarely spoke of his service. My father must be rolling in his grave at the prospect of such a man being Commander-in-Chief. Perhaps the greatest lesson my father ever taught me is that character and integrity matter; perhaps more than anything else in our public affairs; certainly more than party loyalty.”

Then there is the family whose parents enlisted to fight fascism.

“My father, a first generation American son of immigrants, left college in 1942 to enlist in the Navy so he could serve his country in WWII and fight against these very atrocities. My mother turned away from her opportunity at nursing school and enlisted in the Navy in 1942 so she could serve her country in WWII and fight against fascist atrocities.”

They raised their children with the values they believed they had fought for:

“We were taught to put others before self, respect everyone, and stand up for what is right. Our parents adopted all of us and taught us these basic character traits/principles when we were young children. It really is so simple to be a decent human being.”

The people who served were not fighting for a president. They were not fighting for a party. They were not fighting for the privilege of never questioning whoever happened to occupy the White House.

They were fighting for an idea of America.

For some, that meant defeating fascism in Europe. For others, it meant coming home to a country that promised freedom. For their children and grandchildren, it became a responsibility to decide whether those promises were still worth defending.

It is worth remembering what those people went to war against. And for their descendants, sometimes the only way to honor that sacrifice is to keep fighting for what they fought for.

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AND THEN THERE’S ME

I come from a family of liberals. Not the sort who inherited a political identity, put it in a frame, and left it hanging above the fireplace forever. My parents were New Deal and Great Society liberals. I became a progressive. My children went farther left than I did. At some point, our family stopped arguing about whether capitalism needed fixing and started arguing about how much of it should be left standing.

So I didn’t need a personal connection to tell me that people deserve healthcare, that immigrants deserve dignity, that women should control what happens to their own bodies, that LGBTQ+ people should be able to live their lives without politicians turning their existence into a legislative hobbyhorse, or that democracy is worth defending. I already believed all of that.

Then life decided to make the argument more personal.

I have a wife who is an immigrant. I have a daughter who is a physician and has spent years seeing what happens to people who can’t afford the care they need. And I have a trans daughter. So when Republicans build an entire political campaign around demonizing people like her, restricting their rights, and making their lives more dangerous, I don’t get to experience that as an interesting disagreement between two competing policy positions.

It is my daughter.

My family didn’t teach me what to believe. They didn’t introduce me to these issues. They gave issues I already cared about a face, a voice, a name, a birthday, a place at my dinner table. They didn’t suddenly transform me into someone who cares about immigrants, healthcare, women’s rights or LGBTQ+ equality. They gave those issues a pulse.

And that’s what I heard in these responses. None of these readers needed someone they loved to tell them that injustice was wrong. They knew. But sometimes a person comes along and makes an issue impossible to keep at arm’s length.

Maybe that’s what personal connection is really for. Not to teach us whom to care about. To remind us why we cannot stop.

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Readers also shared deeply personal stories about the issues I didn’t have room to include here: the economy and workers’ rights, disability, climate and the environment, public schools, gun violence, voting rights, criminal justice, and racial justice.

I’m going to keep sharing those stories in future articles, because after reading all of these responses, one thing became impossible to miss: the people who make an issue personal are everywhere. They are our parents and children, our partners and friends, our neighbors and coworkers. Sometimes they are the reason we start fighting. Sometimes they are the reason we keep fighting.

If there is someone in your life who made an issue you already believed in feel more urgent, more immediate, more impossible to ignore, keep sharing their story with me.

I’m listening.

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The Stranger’s Library

On books and the bewildering business of being human.

My essays combine stories from my own life with reflections on the books that have shaped how I see the world.

The Stranger's Library

Books I'd save from the fire.

By Open Letters by Mersault

✦ ✦ ✦

For the past few months, I’ve been following Trump voters into churches, diners, political meetings, block parties, golf courses, and patriotic galas, trying to make sense of a movement I have spent a decade despising. Think of me as an unfunded Margaret Mead with an attitude.

In April, I launched Among the Believers, a series timed to the run-up to the midterms, sending myself into rooms I normally wouldn’t otherwise set foot in. This is the fifteenth installment. The premise was straightforward: go where they gather, listen without flinching, try not to become one of them in the process. It has gone fine. I have not become one of them.

Along the way, I’ve learned that understanding people is harder than mocking them, and considerably more useful. If we want to stop this movement, we’d better understand the people sustaining it, even if the answer turns out to be deeply discouraging, which, reader, it usually has been.

But for all the time and money I’d spent seeking out strangers, it dawned on me, somewhere around the eleventh time someone recited a Fox News segment back to me verbatim, that I might already know people uniquely positioned to help me understand Trump voters. Better yet, they might be among the few people actually capable of changing their minds.

Those people are you.

The overwhelming majority of you, scattered across all 50 states and more than 110 countries (hello to my friends in Indonesia, Finland, and Somalia!), are exactly who you’d expect: bleeding hearts, the choir I’ve been preaching to since the first issue. A smaller contingent are right-wing lurkers who subscribe on the theory that it’s wise to keep their enemies close, and who occasionally write in to threaten me, which, as far as the algorithm is concerned, still counts as reader engagement.

What fascinated me wasn’t your politics. It was your proximity.

Some of you are married to Trump supporters. Raised by them. Raising them. Sitting across from them at Thanksgiving, mouth shut, wine glass a little too full, wondering when exactly you stopped being able to recognize the person passing the potatoes. Others have spent forty years building a life with someone whose political journey has carried them somewhere you never imagined they’d go. Less an ideological drift, at that point, than a full denominational switch, conducted from the next pillow over.

So I reached out to you, inviting anyone with a close relationship to a Trump supporter to answer a simple question:

What’s it like?

The responses poured in.

Over the following weeks, I interviewed many of you. Dozens more completed detailed questionnaires. One reader invited me onto a video call with both him and his wife so I could hear their story together. Marriage as a bipartisan committee hearing. More than once I finished reading an email and simply sat there for a minute, doing the thing therapists call “sitting with it.”

I went looking for Trump voters. What you handed me instead were your marriages. Your families. Your grief. The specific way politics keeps letting itself into rooms it was never invited into and refusing to leave.

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As I sorted through the interviews, questionnaires, and emails, a pattern began to emerge. No two stories were quite alike, but they kept circling the same handful of themes. Broadly speaking, they fell into four camps.

The Non-Starters

Before I heard from readers trying to navigate politically divided relationships, I heard from readers who wanted to make one thing perfectly clear: they would never find themselves in one. Ever.

A vote for Trump, several explained, would be grounds for divorce, disownment, or, at the very least, separate Netflix accounts. They weren’t answering my question so much as issuing a preemptive press release.

“I could never be in any kind of a relationship with a DJT supporter.”

“For me it’s simple: if you support Trump then our values are diametrically opposed, I don’t respect you, and I want nothing to do with you. There’s no compromise or middle ground.”

One reader reached for metaphor.

“Supporting Trump would be one fat, orange straw too many for this camel’s back.”

Others didn't bother with nuance.

“I would NEVER even consider living with a Republican, not just a MAGA idiot. It is clear by now that anyone who follows them has a mental deficiency that is incurable. I do not have patience for idiots.”

Technically, they hadn’t answered my question at all. They weren’t interested in navigating a relationship with a Trump supporter because, for them, that relationship would never begin.

The Peacekeepers

The second, and much larger, group came from readers whose lives were simply too tangled up with Trump supporters to walk away. A father who taught them to ride a bike. A grown child who used to call every Sunday. A friend of thirty years who still shows up when the car won’t start. Their circumstances varied widely, but their strategy was almost always the same.

Politics became the forbidden subject. They had learned, usually the hard way, that preserving the relationship often meant abandoning any hope of winning the argument. Over and over, I read some version of the same sentence: "We just don’t talk about politics." An astonishing number of long relationships now seemed to rest on a carefully negotiated conversational embargo.

One retired teacher married to a Republican said her marriage had lasted more than two decades because of a single agreement.

“When we decided to marry 24 years ago, we agreed that we would not talk politics. I don’t think either one of us believed that would happen.”

For years, it worked. Then, as she put it:

“We managed to make it work until two things happened: FOX News and Donald Trump.”

The peace treaty didn’t collapse. It simply became more elaborate.

“I’ve learned to leave the room or put in my iPods when he turns on the TV because if I happen to make a comment, laugh, or snicker he often will become enraged.”

"We sometimes share articles via text messages. This is fairly safe because we usually don't respond."

The arrangement has preserved the marriage, but not without cost.

“When we met, I was politically active with the local Democratic Party. I campaigned, attended precinct and regional conventions, attended rallies, and so on. I stopped when we married.”

“I truly believe the tension and hostility generated by my husband’s infatuation with and indoctrination by FOX News and all things Trump is negatively affecting my health. I am under constant stress.”

Then, almost as if to remind me this wasn’t an old story but one still unfolding, she added:

“Right now, he’s sitting next to me on the couch and reciting to me from a FOX News segment!”

Not every family succeeded in preserving the peace. Some had already crossed the point of no return.

“We also have family members and friends who have clashed, and don’t speak. My sister and brother don’t speak anymore. There are lasting breaks in so many friends and families that will remain long after Orange Caligula is gone.”

Two emails, in particular, carried the unmistakable tone of grief.

“I really wish I wasn’t married to a man who voted for him the first time, swears he didn’t vote in the last election, but defends him no matter what Donald does. I just cannot fathom his thought processes. Political issues [he] hears discussed on FOX can aggravate him and put him in an angry mood, and he walks around angry all day. To maintain our marriage we do not discuss anything involving politics or the state of the country. There are no tender moments. I believe [he] sees me as the enemy. I've given a great deal of thought to ending our relationship due in large part to our political disagreements. He is not the person I thought I married. I have no respect for my husband anymore and it has made the prospect of my remaining years depressing.”

“I’m 82, my brother 87. He became a Trumper, and it was one of the most horrible things I’ve ever felt. It truly broke my heart, as a guy who never even voted suddenly became a Trump know-it-all. We barely talk, just an email or text once in a while about family, but that’s it. I’ve stopped trying to explain how awful this fascist regime is, especially being Jewish, to no avail. I’ve stopped trying. A lifelong relationship down the drain.”

One reader described a twenty-two-year relationship with a lifelong Republican that has survived not because they solved their political differences, but because they accepted they never would.

“We had one big fight about Jan 6 when he made excuses for Trump’s insurrection at the Capitol, and then agreed we each have our differing opinions and nothing will bring us together. It’s as simple as that.”

She still describes him with genuine affection.

“He is very caring and would do just about anything for me. Everything else about this man is good, kind and giving.”

She insists he respects their truce.

“He never brings up politics around me or acts like a MAGA. He never tries to change how I feel. He goes silent and kindly changes the subject if I do.”

And despite her contempt for Trump, she refuses to let politics become the defining fact of their relationship.

“I am not willing to discount and throw away everything we have shared.”

“I’ll be damned if I let that Divider in Chief cause me to walk away from a relationship that is good for me in every respect other than I can’t vent and curse about my outrage to him.”

Another reader proposed something none of the others had. Instead of filling out my questionnaire, he asked whether I'd be willing to interview both him and his wife together.

They had nearly divorced after she voted for Trump in 2024. Things were better now, he wrote. Not perfect, but better. If hearing both sides would help my reporting, they were willing to tell the story together.

The next day, the three of us spent more than an hour together on Zoom as they recounted, sometimes correcting and sometimes confirming each other’s memories, how a marriage that had survived more than fifteen years had nearly unraveled over a single vote. At one point his wife reached over and touched his arm.

He began at the moment everything changed. A few days after the election, his wife told him she had voted for Donald Trump.

“I did not argue or fight with her,” he told me. “I just needed some space.”

The space became a separate bedroom.

“We stopped sleeping together. I even moved out of the bedroom.”

They continued living under the same roof, but they described themselves as little more than polite roommates. They barely spoke. Friends and family quietly tried to hold the marriage together.

Eventually, she suggested something I’d heard from dozens of other readers.

“We could just agree not to discuss politics or Trump anymore.”

The couple had been trying to have children. During one of those difficult conversations, he told her he’d changed his mind.

“I just wouldn’t feel right raising kids with a Trump voter.”

She told me she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“Are you really willing to throw away an entire relationship over a politician neither of us would ever meet?”

He answered exactly as he had that day.

“It came down to values. I didn’t want our child to grow up believing that someone who behaves like Trump is someone to admire.”

She shook her head.

“That’s not what my vote meant.”

She insisted she'd never admired Trump. The vote, she told me, had never been about him. It had been about the policies.

“I don’t like the way Trump behaves,” she said. “I voted for policies, not the person.”

Then she offered an analogy.

“If I had two doctors, and I didn’t personally like one of them, but I thought they were the better doctor, I’d still choose that doctor.”

He smiled slightly, recognizing an argument they’d clearly had before.

“My answer was that if I found one of the doctors morally reprehensible, I wouldn’t use that doctor. I’d find a third.”

For a while, divorce seemed inevitable. Then, instead of calling a lawyer, they called a therapist.

When they described their sessions to me, the therapist’s advice to communicate wasn’t the interesting part — by then, they’d already spent months talking, arguing, apologizing, trying to understand each other. The interesting part was that she understood what they were actually fighting about. After listening to both of them, she concluded they weren’t really fighting over tax policy, immigration, or even Trump. They were fighting over what a vote meant. She suggested that his hatred of Trump had begun to overshadow his love for his wife.

He didn’t entirely disagree.

His wife admitted something of her own.

“If I’d known it would become this big of a problem in our marriage,” she told me, “I never would have voted for Trump.”

The therapist encouraged them to keep talking, but she also offered an observation that neither of them has forgotten. She told them that, in her experience, couples who arrived in her office because of Trump often weren't really arguing about politics anymore. They were trying to answer a much more unsettling question:

What does your vote tell me about who you are?

They weren’t debating a politician anymore. They were trying to decide what that vote revealed about the person they had married. Questions of trust. Identity. Judgment. Whether they still recognized the person sitting across from them. Once politics becomes a referendum on character, she said, it’s extraordinarily difficult to keep the argument confined to politics.

Listening to them months after their therapy sessions, I never had the impression therapy answered those questions. It simply gave them a way to keep asking them without tearing the marriage apart.

They’re still together today. Neither pretends the disagreement disappeared. They just decided there was something they valued more than being right.

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The Converters

The most hopeful responses came from readers who had helped someone they loved leave MAGA.

None gave credit to a single brilliant argument. There was no devastating statistic. No perfectly timed fact-check. No viral article that suddenly made everything click. If anything, they made changing someone's mind sound exhausting. Instead, they described years of conversations, corrections, arguments that seemed to go nowhere, and a stubborn refusal to surrender the people they loved to a movement built on fear and misinformation.

Then life intervened.

Politics stopped being theoretical and became deeply personal. Immigration wasn’t just an issue anymore. It was a wife trying to immigrate legally. A church friend terrified of deportation. A transgender granddaughter. A gay son. Again and again, the distance between those people and my people quietly disappeared.

One reader’s story contained nearly every ingredient I’d been seeing: persistence, proximity, and eventually, change.

“Thankfully, my MAGA man started seeing the light shortly before the election, and had become a full convert. We wouldn’t still be together otherwise. I don’t know how I got through to him, honestly. I just kept fact checking the bullshit that he was parroting over and over (exhausting!) and eventually it clicked. Now he has been protesting with me, and cut off his MAGA sisters, and stopped hanging out with MAGA friends because they infuriate him.”

Another reader described to me over the phone how, over the course of nearly two years, she slowly helped her husband find his way back to their transgender granddaughter.

“When our grandchild came out as a trans girl, my husband didn’t know what to do with it. He watched Fox News every day and all these websites that talked about transgender people like they were dangerous or somehow a threat to children. That’s all he could see. Not our granddaughter. Just everything he’d been taught to fear.

“It broke my heart because my husband practically helped raise... well, her. Back then, of course, we knew her as our grandson. Her parents both worked, so every weekday before school and every afternoon afterward, she was at our house. Grandpa made breakfast, helped with homework, drove... well... drove him then... to soccer practice. If something good happened at school, Grandpa was the first person she wanted to tell. If she was sick, she wanted Grandpa. They were together almost every day for years.”

“Then she came out as transgender. He loved our grandchild, but all that fear got in the way. He just... stopped calling. Stopped showing up. It was like he didn’t know how to reconcile the child he’d helped raise with everything he’d been told to believe.”

“Finally I told him, ‘Would you please have lunch with her? Don’t go to argue. Don’t try to fix anything. Just listen.’”

“They were gone almost four hours. When he came home, he didn’t say much. He just sat at the kitchen table staring out the window. Finally he looked at me and said, ‘She thought I’d stopped loving her.’”

“Later he told me what they’d talked about. She said she’d known for years that something didn’t feel right, but she’d been terrified to tell her parents because she didn’t want to disappoint her family. She said coming out wasn’t becoming someone new. It was finally admitting who she’d always been.”

“Then she told him something that just wrecked him. She said, ‘Grandpa, I was so scared you wouldn’t love me anymore.’”

“He told me later that was the moment everything changed. He said, ‘All this time I thought I was protecting my beliefs. I never realized she thought I’d stopped loving her.’”

“He cried telling me that.”

“Things didn’t magically change overnight. He still had questions. He still had to unlearn a lot. But he started listening instead of assuming. He started seeing her again.”

“About three months later we celebrated my husband’s seventy-fifth birthday when one of our neighbors walked over and asked who the person standing next to my husband was.

“Without missing a beat, he smiled and said, ‘This is my granddaughter.’”

“She looked over at me with tears in her eyes.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single word mean so much to another human being.”

What started with his granddaughter didn’t stay with his granddaughter.

“Once he let himself be wrong about her, he started wondering what else he’d been wrong about. He started asking me things like, ‘Do you think they lied to me about this too?’ He went back and looked up things he’d just accepted for years. Things about immigrants, about vaccines, about the election. Not all at once. But it was like once you find one crack, you can’t stop noticing the rest of them.”

“People ask me how I changed my husband’s mind. I didn’t. I just got the two people who loved each other most to sit across a table long enough to remember why.”

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The Self-Converts

Finally came a group I hadn’t anticipated: former Trump supporters. Rather than describing someone they had changed, they described how they themselves had changed. In many ways, they were telling the same story as the Converters. Only from the opposite side.

By now, I wasn’t surprised by what I kept hearing. Once again, nobody pointed to a single conversation that changed everything. They remembered dozens of conversations that seemed to change nothing at all. Until, somehow, they did.

Again and again, people described politics changing only after it stopped being abstract. A policy debate became the face of someone they loved, and the arguments they’d been making for years suddenly had a name attached.

“My relationship with [my girlfriend from the Philippines] opened my eyes to what Trump's immigration policies mean for someone I love. I'm hoping to bring her to the United States, and I'm afraid a Trump administration will make that harder.”

Another reader described attending church alongside immigrant families.

“The people I went to church with were afraid of being deported. I didn't want that to happen to them.”

Fear, I began to realize, has a hard time surviving proximity.

Then something else happened. They became curious.

“I started asking questions about what I'd always believed, and the answers I got just didn't make sense anymore.”

One former evangelical described returning to Scripture itself after years of defending Trump’s immigration policies.

“I re-read Matthew 25's command to welcome the stranger and Leviticus 19's instruction to love the foreigner, and I realized that, from a biblical standpoint, Trump's policies toward immigrants were antithetical to what the Bible says we should do.”

One former Trump supporter distilled his entire journey into a single observation:

“Looking back, I think propaganda works by killing curiosity. Once I became curious about what was outside my bubble, everything started to change.”

Curiosity was only the beginning. From there, many readers described the much slower work of relearning how to evaluate evidence, question assumptions, and distrust sources they'd once accepted without thinking.

Another described the process more explicitly.

“I decided I needed to de-program myself. I learned how to evaluate sources, understand my own biases, and question my assumptions.”

A third put it more simply.

“I learned how to think critically, do my own research, and verify what I was being told. That changed the way I see the world.”

By the end of these conversations, politics almost felt incidental. They weren't really describing a change in ideology. They were describing a change in how they thought.

“I had to let go of my need to be right about everything.”

“The more I learned, the easier it became to admit I'd been wrong.”

“I stopped seeing everything through a political lens. I started seeing it as a question of right and wrong.”

Perhaps the sharpest observation came from a self-described former Proud Boy.

“Trump doesn't know you. The fact that you're even thinking about his feelings proves you have an unhealthy obsession.”

I couldn’t think of a better ending than the one he gave me.

“Now I understand what ‘woke’ actually means. I woke up, and I realized I was wrong.”

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So... Is There Any Hope

I thought I was collecting reporting. Instead I accidentally wandered into people’s lives. I came away convinced that proximity matters enormously—and that it guarantees almost nothing.

It didn’t save the marriage in the “grief” email. It didn’t make the twenty-four-year truce painless, or spare the retired teacher her iPod-in-the-ears evenings, or stop octogenarian brothers from going silent for good. Plenty of the closest relationships in my inbox stayed exactly as divided as the country that produced them. If proximity were a cure, the Peacekeepers wouldn’t exist. They’re the control group, and the results aren’t great.

But here’s the thing I can’t get around. Every reader who described an actual conversion started in the same place: a relationship that already existed.

Nobody left MAGA because of a headline. Nobody came back because of the perfect argument, the devastating statistic, or the viral clip. Every story began with someone they couldn’t easily write off. Sometimes that meant years of patient conversations. Sometimes it meant a granddaughter and a four-hour lunch neither of them knew they needed. Sometimes it meant a therapist who finally shifted the question from “Who’s right?” to “What does your vote tell me about who you are?”

Looking back, I don’t think anyone changed because they were persuaded. They changed because the people they loved became harder to dismiss than the stories they’d been told.

So proximity isn’t a strategy. It’s closer to a precondition for one—necessary, nowhere near sufficient, and useless to anyone who doesn’t already have it. It’s no help at all to someone who has it and, understandably, wants nothing to do with it. Plenty of the Non-Starters were right about their own lives. Some relationships aren’t worth the cost of keeping. Nothing here is meant to argue otherwise.

What I can tell you is that every conversion in my inbox began inside a relationship. Not every relationship survived. Not every relationship should have. But I couldn’t find a single person who changed in isolation.

A postscript, for the readers who wrote to me: some of you are in this piece. You’ll know which paragraph is yours. I hope I got it right. Many more of you aren’t quoted here at all, not because your story mattered less, but because there were simply more of you than I had room for.

Your emails moved me, inspired me, made me laugh, and more than once made me well up at my desk in a way I wasn't expecting. A few of you I’m still writing back and forth with, weeks later, in what has quietly become more of a mutual support group.

Keep writing to me. I can’t promise you’ll make an upcoming article. I can promise I’ll read every word. I hope, more than that, that reading someone else’s story made your own feel a little less like something you’re carrying alone.

This series isn't done. I've already started digging into another corner of America's political divide. You'll read about it soon.

✦ ✦ ✦

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The Stranger's Library

Books I'd save from the fire.

By Open Letters by Mersault

My essays combine stories from my own life with reflections on the books that have shaped how I see the world.

Five novels that forever changed the way I experience the world

Six books on love, memory, death, and the moments we cannot fully explain

Six novels on the impossible task of understanding your own life

Eight Japanese novels that taught me the shape of loneliness far from home

Five novels that make the American West stranger, darker, and far more interesting

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Six novels about the pursuit—and peril—of knowledge

Five novels narrated by animals that reveal surprising truths about humans

And many more!

✦ ✦ ✦

When I decide to write about a subject, or, more recently, when I spend time with groups for my Among the Believers series, it’s rarely because I think I’m an expert with wisdom to dispense. Quite the opposite.

Sure, I usually have opinions going in. Sometimes they’re reasonably well informed. Sometimes they’re little more than assumptions dressed up with confidence. But I’m generally drawn to subjects precisely because I don’t understand them well enough. Writing gives me an excuse to do research, spend time with people I wouldn’t otherwise meet, and see whether my preconceptions survive contact with reality.

I don’t expect readers to learn from me so much as learn alongside me.

Sometimes I’m satisfied with the results. Not because I imagine I’ve produced the definitive treatment of a subject, rendering all future journalism unnecessary, but because I feel I’ve come to understand the topic (or the people) a little better and expressed that understanding in a way that feels honest and reasonably complete.

More often, though, I leave with the uncomfortable suspicion that I've mistaken the foothills for the mountain, and that a larger story lies just beyond what I managed to understand.

This is one of those stories.

The American left has spent generations arguing with itself. I gave it a few weeks, an alarming number of browser tabs, and one organizing meeting. There are obvious limits to that approach. My resources (intellectual, temporal, and financial) are finite, and I worry that any attempt to compress a movement this sprawling into a few thousand words risks producing an account that is not merely incomplete, but unfair.

I care about getting this one right. The last thing I want is to leave readers with a distorted picture of a movement I broadly sympathize with.

With that disclaimer suitably out of the way, and with equal parts curiosity and inadequacy, I walked into the meeting.

The first two installments of this series established both the common ground and the fault lines.

In Part 1, I looked at the ideological differences within my own family, three generations of leftists wrestling with how much of America needs changing.

In Part 2, I watched the Democratic Socialists of America present a platform that was strikingly unified in its diagnosis of the country’s problems and its vision for the future.

But it wasn’t until the presentation ended and the discussion began that I discovered where the real debate lives. Democratic socialists largely agree on the society they want to build. They disagree, sometimes passionately, over the path to getting there.

Which, I suppose, is one of the left’s oldest traditions.

That’s where we begin.

During the presentation, the speakers offered an ambitious explanation for nearly everything that feels broken about modern America. War, economic inequality, unaffordable housing and healthcare, climate change, artificial intelligence, and political dysfunction weren't separate crises. They were all symptoms of the same underlying disease: a capitalist system functioning exactly as intended, concentrating wealth and power while keeping working people divided, insecure, and politically weak. (See the end of this article for a link to the Democratic Socialists of America's Workers Deserve More program.)

Whether or not you accepted the diagnosis, it possessed something every successful ideology needs: a single explanation capable of making a complicated world feel coherent.

Then we took a twenty-minute break.

Revolutionary movements, it turns out, have intermissions.

As everyone drifted toward the coffee, bathrooms, and conversations, the soundtrack playing over the Bluetooth speaker was almost too perfectly chosen.

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

I approached a young man who looked to be in his thirties as he poured himself a cup of coffee. He was conventionally handsome in a way that almost felt focus-group tested: thick brown hair, blue eyes, and carefully maintained stubble.

In my head, I'm still roughly his age. Then I caught my reflection in the window and remembered I wasn't. I could have been his father. Easily.

"So... how did you end up here?"

He laughed.

“I used to be a Democrat.”

There was a pause, as though he were deciding how much of the story to tell.

“I actually quit the party.”

“What happened?”

“I grew up in a little rural town,” he said. “Worked in a sawmill until there just wasn’t any work anymore. If you go by the stereotypes, I should’ve ended up MAGA. White guy. Thirties. Rural background. That’s the script. But that’s never really been me.”

He smiled.

“I graduated high school in 2005, so I kind of came of age during the Bush years. Between 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the economy, I was pretty much sworn off Republicans from the beginning.”

“So you signed up with the good guys.”

“Yeah. For a long time I was just... a pretty standard Democrat.”

“What changed?”

He shrugged.

“I just got tired of watching Democrats look completely helpless. Trump would do something outrageous, ICE would do something outrageous, and Democrats always seemed one step behind. Just reacting.”

He said Biden’s election gave him hope.

“I really thought maybe this was the reset. Like, okay, maybe they’re finally going to get their act together.”

“And then... well, you know. Gaza. Biden’s support for Israel. The whole age thing. Insisting on running again. It just felt like they couldn’t get out of their own way.”

“So you left.”

“I just registered with no party.”

"So how does somebody go from disillusioned Democrat to walking into a DSA meeting?"

“I actually looked into it maybe five years ago.”

“And?”

“I bounced.”

“Why?”

“I’m still culturally more comfortable around rural people than city people, even though I live in a city now. A couple of DSA folks made some pretty dismissive comments about the kind of place I grew up. Like rural America was just something to sneer at.”

He shook his head.

“That didn’t sit well with me.”

“So what brought you back?”

“The New York mayor’s race got me paying attention again. One night I just joined. Honestly? Half on a lark. Half because I wanted to register my own little protest against the Democratic establishment.”

“And then you came to a meeting.”

“I figured I’d probably confirm all my worst assumptions.”

"So where were the beret-wearing revolutionaries?"

He smiled.

“There were, like, thirty people. I was expecting maybe eight.”

“What surprised you most?”

“There was this group of retired machinists who’d driven in from a small town a couple hours away because they wanted to start their own chapter. I wasn’t expecting that.”

“And there were a lot of new people. Some from rural areas. People disagreed with each other, but nobody was demanding ideological purity or anything. The whole vibe was, ‘Okay, where can we find common ground? What can we actually get done?’”

He wasn’t trying to convince me. If anything, he still sounded a little surprised by what he’d found.

“So what keeps you coming back?”

“The action.”

He said it without hesitation.

“I mean, sure, people have their ideological commitments. I probably have more of a socialist bent than I would’ve admitted ten years ago. I’m still never calling anybody ‘comrade.’” He laughed. “But that’s not really why I’m here.”

He looked around the room.

“Look at what’s happening. ICE. Trump. Iran. The economy. Everything just feels like it’s getting worse.”

He shrugged again.

“Is DSA the answer? I honestly don’t know. But people are actually showing up because they want to do something. And right now, that feels like a hell of a lot more than I can say for the establishment.”

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

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The discussion segment got underway. If democracy really permeated every aspect of the organization, this was the test. PowerPoints are easy. Open microphones are harder.

After the first two questions, which dealt with such thrilling subjects as getting a copy of the presentation and the logistics of the next meeting, I began to worry. Either this discussion wasn't going to tell me anything I didn't already know or, even worse, I'd just built the third installment of this series around the least interesting part of the evening.

So I raised my hand.

“Listening to the presentation, it sounds like you want stronger unions, universal healthcare, affordable housing, and a government that’s more responsive to ordinary people. A lot of Democrats would say they want those things too. So where’s the line? At what point does someone stop being a Democrat or a progressive and become a democratic socialist?"

Anna didn’t hesitate.

“The difference isn’t a particular policy,” she said. “It’s how you understand power.”

She explained that Democrats generally see capitalism as something that can be regulated to produce fairer outcomes. Democratic socialists see the concentration of economic power as part of capitalism itself, not a flaw that can simply be corrected. If wealth remains concentrated, she argued, corporations will eventually shape politics through lobbying, campaign spending, media influence, and their leverage over workers.

“That’s why we talk about economic democracy,” she said. “Democracy shouldn’t stop at the ballot box.”

That was the first time I understood the distinction. The disagreement wasn't really over the destination. It was over what kept pulling the country away from it.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s assume you’re right. What do you actually do about it?”

“Win elections,” someone shouted from the audience.

A ripple of laughter. A few people applauded.

“Winning elections matters,” she said. “But if all you do is elect different people into the same system, you haven’t changed who has power.”

"So how do you change it?" someone shouted.

“By organizing,” Anna said. “In workplaces. In neighborhoods. In elections.”

She wasn’t talking about waiting for Election Day. She meant helping coworkers form a union, fighting a neighbor’s eviction, organizing tenants against rent hikes, showing up at city council and school board meetings, campaigning for local candidates, and building relationships that last long after the campaign signs come down.

As she talked, I realized I'd been treating DSA like a political party. They didn't seem to think of themselves that way. Elections mattered. But they were only one expression of something larger: helping people organize their workplaces, neighborhoods, and communities long before anyone cast a ballot.

“Winning elections matters,” she said. “The question is whether winning elections changes who actually has power.”

That shifted the conversation.

If organizing was the engine of change, where should all that organizing go? Should democratic socialists work inside the Democratic Party, alongside it, or against it?

That’s where the conversation became considerably less unified.

Everyone in the room agreed that democratic socialists should run candidates for office. What they couldn't agree on was whether the Democratic Party was a path to change, a temporary ally, or part of the problem.

Then everyone started talking at once.

A dozen or more people jumped in, some speaking from the audience, others lining up at the microphone. There were nods of agreement, murmurs of dissent, people itching for their turn to respond.

No one argued about the destination. They argued about the map.

As I listened, the arguments gradually sorted themselves into these broad camps.

1. Transform the Democratic Party

One group argued for staying inside the Democratic Party. They weren’t starry-eyed about it. Most were deeply frustrated with Democratic leaders, corporate donors, and the party’s instinct for caution. Still, they saw an obvious practical advantage.

America effectively has a two-party system. Democratic primaries already offer a path to office. The ballot lines exist. The campaign machinery exists. The voters are already there. Why spend years building a new party when all of that already exists?

If democratic socialists could win Democratic primaries, they could move the party left from within.

2. Use the Democratic Party

Others agreed that running as Democrats made practical sense, but for a very different reason. They didn’t believe the Democratic Party could ultimately become a socialist party. To them, it was a means to an end.

Run as Democrats because that’s where people already vote. Build organizations, recruit candidates, win offices, and expand your base. Then, once democratic socialists had enough independent power to stand on their own, split off and form an independent workers’ party.

Several people referred to this strategy as the “dirty break.”

The Democratic Party wasn’t the destination. It was the on-ramp.

3. Leave the Democratic Party

Others argued that even using the Democratic Party as a temporary vehicle was a mistake. Every election required compromise, they said, and every compromise pulled candidates a little closer to the political center. Eventually, the Democratic Party would reshape democratic socialists more than democratic socialists would reshape the Democratic Party. That wasn’t a prediction so much as a lesson, they believed. History was full of movements that entered major parties hoping to change them, only to be absorbed instead.

They viewed the Democratic Party as too dependent on wealthy donors, corporate interests, and institutional habits to ever become an effective vehicle for democratic socialism. Every campaign run under the Democratic label, they argued, strengthened the very party they ultimately hoped to replace. Better to begin building an independent movement now, even if the road was much longer.

Of course, "building an independent movement" is easier to say than to do. America's winner-take-all electoral system has never been especially friendly to third parties, which is one reason this argument keeps resurfacing.

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There was logic to all of these arguments. But I couldn’t shake what I suspected many of my readers were thinking.

I raised my hand again.

“Can I ask the question I suspect a lot of Democrats would ask?”

Anna nodded.

“A lot of Democrats would say this isn’t a normal political moment. They see Trump as an authoritarian threat to American democracy. If that’s true, shouldn’t defeating him and the movement he represents take precedence over every other political disagreement? Doesn’t challenging Democrats increase the chances that Republicans win?”

Anna thought for a moment.

“Trump is dangerous,” she said. “Nobody here wants Republicans to win. But if Democrats know progressives will always support them because Republicans are worse, they have very little reason to change.”

The possibility of losing progressive votes, she argued, is what gives those voters leverage.

“Primaries are how parties decide what kind of party they want to be. If we never challenge incumbents, we’re basically telling Democratic leaders they can ignore us and still count on our votes.”

She argued that every election arrives with the same message: Now isn't the time. Wait until after this one. But if every election is treated as too important to challenge the party, she said, then there will never be a politically convenient time to change it.

I noticed she hadn't really disputed the premise of my question. Challenging Democrats could, in some races, help Republicans. Her argument wasn't that the risk didn't exist. It was that refusing to challenge Democrats carried a greater long-term risk.

Then she shifted from strategy to diagnosis.

“Trump wasn’t an aberration,” she said. “He was a symptom.”

She argued that decades of inequality, declining unions, unaffordable housing, and a political system increasingly shaped by concentrated wealth had left millions of Americans feeling abandoned. Those conditions didn’t excuse Trumpism, she said, but they helped create it.

“If all we do is defeat one Republican candidate without changing the conditions that made someone like Trump possible, we’ll keep fighting the same battle over and over.”

That's when I realized we weren't really arguing about elections anymore. We were arguing about time.

Democrats and democratic socialists often begin with the same fears and end with different priorities.

Democrats ask, "How do we win the next election?" Democratic socialists ask, "How do we change the next fifty years?"

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’

More Agreement Than Disagreement

No one raised their voice. No one pounded the table. But the passion was unmistakable. People interrupted. Heads nodded vigorously when someone made a point. Others folded their arms until they had a chance to answer.

It reminded me of an extended family arguing over Thanksgiving dinner, except everyone had read Karl Marx.

Listening to the discussion, I found myself wondering how an organization like this ever accomplished anything.

If one group wanted to transform the Democratic Party, another wanted to use it temporarily, and a third wanted to leave it altogether, what happened after the meeting ended? Did everyone simply go home convinced everyone else was wrong?

Talking with members after the meeting and reading more about the organization, I realized the answer was... not really.

The disagreements were genuine, sometimes passionate. But they weren’t treated as existential. The implicit bargain seemed to be: agree on the destination, argue about the map, then go knock on doors together.

Whether members favored transforming the Democratic Party, making a "dirty break," or abandoning it altogether, the day-to-day work looked remarkably similar: organizing workplaces, supporting strikes, fighting evictions, building tenant unions, recruiting new members, and campaigning for candidates the chapter had endorsed.

Most DSA members, I later learned, don’t belong to ideological camps at all. They simply show up to their local chapter, volunteer for campaigns, and try to improve their corner of the world.

The organization votes. Sometimes one side wins. Sometimes another does. Members grumble, lose arguments, revisit them at the next convention, and continue organizing in the meantime.

Messy? Absolutely.

Efficient? Not especially.

Democratic? Undeniably.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

For three hours I’d listened to competing ideas about how society should organize itself. Then, with the meeting officially over, someone started stacking chairs, someone else folded tables, another person emptied the trash, another rinsed out the coffee urn, and before long everyone had quietly found something to do without anyone telling them who should do what.

I couldn’t help thinking there was probably a metaphor in there somewhere.

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Read the Democratic Socialists of America's new program, Workers Deserve More.

Find your nearest DSA chapter through the organization’s official chapter directory. Most chapters host public meetings, educational events, and community organizing activities that are open to newcomers.

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Before we begin, a quick recap. If you read Part 1, consider this the "Previously on..." segment. If you didn't, welcome.

In Part 1, I turned the Among the Believers lens on my own side. I wrote about three generations of leftists in my family and the ideological disagreements that separate us—not over whether America needs to change, but over how much, how quickly, and whether its institutions can be reformed or must be replaced.

People talk about “the left” as though it’s a single political movement. I wasn’t convinced it was.

To find out, I stopped theorizing and attended a meeting of young leftist organizers. I settled on the Democratic Socialists of America for a simple reason: if there is a single organization that serves as a crossroads for today's younger left, it's probably the DSA. Not every young leftist belongs to it, of course, but few organizations better capture the conversations, tensions, and aspirations reshaping the movement.

A few days after the meeting, a CNBC poll reinforced the idea that democratic socialism had become a political force worth watching. It found that voters were now more receptive to candidates who identify as democratic socialists than to candidates aligned with MAGA or endorsed by Trump. The shift was driven largely by younger voters.

Most of my preconceptions about places I've never been come from movies. So imagine my surprise, and mild disappointment, when my meeting with young socialists didn't take place in a dimly lit Lower East Side storefront sometime around 1972. In my imagination there would have been cracked plaster walls, mismatched folding chairs, hand-painted protest signs drying in the corner, and faded posters of Che Guevara, Angela Davis, and Ho Chi Minh glaring down amidst a haze of hash smoke. A mimeograph machine churned out revolutionary pamphlets while, somewhere in the back, a comrade pried open a dusty crate labeled “FOR THE REVOLUTION,” revealing a cache of surplus Soviet rifles.

Instead, my GPS deposited me in an unremarkable suburban industrial park. White stucco. Dark-tinted windows. A row of identical doors facing a neatly striped parking lot. Professionally maintained shrubbery. Carefully spaced trees. It looked less like the birthplace of a workers' uprising than a place where you'd expect to refinance your mortgage.

Inside, perhaps twenty-five people sit around a horseshoe of tables facing a large television, where another dozen or so members have joined on Zoom. Standing at the front is a man in his early thirties with short black hair, a neatly trimmed beard, and a thoughtful, measured demeanor. His name is Joshua. He's the organizer I'd spoken with several days earlier. The meeting was open to anyone, but before I attended we’d spent nearly an hour on the phone talking about my background, the Among the Believers series, the audience I write for, and my own history of progressive activism and occasional political gadflyism. He couldn’t have been more welcoming.

While he explained how the meeting would unfold, I took the opportunity to look around. People continued filtering in, exchanging hugs and introductions, checking their phones, and helping themselves to a folding table laden with snacks. The room skewed heavily toward people in their twenties and thirties, with what appeared to be a direct leap to septuagenarians. Along with the granola on the snack table, they were the only surviving link to the activist generation Hollywood had spent decades teaching me to expect.

A few days earlier, the Democratic Socialists of America had unveiled its new national platform, Workers Deserve More, during a livestream introducing the organization’s priorities for 2026 and 2027. Now local chapter leaders are walking members through what it means, how to discuss it with voters, and how to use it to recruit, organize, and campaign.

Joshua begins with a point of pride. The DSA, he says, has surpassed 125,000 members, making it the largest socialist organization in American history. Then he acknowledges the movement’s obvious challenge. Getting 125,000 socialists to agree on anything is no small feat.

The platform, he explains, isn’t doctrine handed down from on high. It’s the closest thing the organization could produce to a democratic consensus.

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If Joshua serves as the evening's master of ceremonies, the next speaker, Anna is the revival preacher.

She begins, fittingly, with a testimony.

“I took the circuitous route to democratic socialism,” she says. “I would say I was more of a liberal.”

The Iraq War started her journey leftward. She recalls supporting Barack Obama because she “couldn’t understand how anyone could support Hillary Clinton” after Clinton voted for the war. But over time, liberalism itself came to seem inadequate. “As my political education increased,” she says, “I realized the power of organizing and the power of a workers movement. And with every day I become more and more convinced that this is the path forward.”

I’ve noticed that every political movement has its conversion stories. Evangelicals tell you when they accepted Christ. MAGA supporters remember the moment they “woke up.” Democratic socialists explain when they stopped believing the Democratic Party could deliver the changes they wanted. Different revelations. Same narrative structure.

That last point would become the evening’s central theme.

I expected Republicans to play the villain in tonight’s presentation. Instead, the Democratic Party occupies center stage.

Anna describes it as an institution that has become incapable of reforming itself. “There’s no internal democracy within the institution,” she says. She points to Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. “How many Democrats didn’t want Joe Biden to run again in 2024? And yet the institution boxed out... a primary process in order to force that through.” It isn't simply a criticism of Biden. It's an argument that the Democratic Party has become less democratic than the Democratic Socialists of America. Throughout the evening, speakers repeatedly invoke the phrase "internal democracy," arguing that democracy isn't merely something exercised every four years at the ballot box. It's how an organization writes its platform, chooses its candidates, and governs itself.

It’s a revealing inversion. Republicans are treated almost like a force of nature—dangerous, yes, but expected. Democrats, by contrast, are the obstacle that still disappoints. Throughout the evening, the DSA isn’t presented as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. It’s presented as the organization capable of succeeding where the Democratic Party has failed.

Only then did I realize the speakers weren't trying to convince me the Democratic Party could be fixed. They were trying to convince me it had already outlived its usefulness.

The confidence is unmistakable.

Anna speaks as though history has begun bending in her direction. Democratic socialist candidates are winning races. Membership has surpassed 120,000. Americans, she argues, are increasingly receptive to ideas once dismissed as fringe. “DSA’s power and its strength in numbers continues to grow,” she says. “We’re seeing kind of the culmination of that project.”

Even conservative attacks become evidence of success. If Republicans are talking about democratic socialism, she suggests, it’s because democratic socialism is becoming impossible to ignore.

America, she says, is “the wealthiest country on the planet.” Instead of “committing genocide in Gaza and slaughtering people abroad,” it could “take care of people back home.” But first, “we have to break the back of the billionaire class,” not simply to redistribute wealth, but because concentrated wealth has captured American democracy itself.

One word keeps surfacing throughout the evening: workers. Anna rarely talks about "progressives" or "Democrats." Nearly every issue is reframed in terms of "working people," a "workers movement," or a "working-class coalition." It took me a while to realize that "worker" wasn't shorthand for factory workers or union labor. It's almost everyone who earns a living by selling their labor rather than owning the business. A Starbucks barista and a software engineer belong to the same political category. The language isn't accidental. It's an attempt to persuade people to see themselves first not by race, religion, gender, or profession, but by their shared relationship to work and wealth.

Anna argues that capitalism leaves people "isolated" and "atomized," forever reaching for "a quick hit of dopamine" on their phones while something more meaningful slips away. DSA, she says, offers "community." It offers "purpose." I came expecting an argument about wages and healthcare. Instead, I heard an argument that one of capitalism's greatest failures isn't merely economic. It's that it leaves too many people feeling alone.

I was surprised most by the mood. I expected a movement on the defensive, bracing against a hostile political climate. Instead, the prevailing emotion was confidence. Anna argues that "people aren't afraid of the word socialism anymore." Nobody speaks as though they're preserving an endangered ideology. They speak like they're building a winning one. The atmosphere isn't one of resistance so much as momentum. Whether that confidence is justified is another question. But it's impossible to miss.

Then, with the audience suitably inspired, she turned things over to the committee that had spent the past year writing what I initially assumed was a political platform but would later discover socialists call a program. The evangelist leaves the stage. The interpreters are about to explain the scripture.

Rachel and Maya spent the next hour walking members through the Workers Deserve More document that will guide the organization's electoral work, political education, and organizing efforts for years to come.

This would take a while.

I shifted in my chair, ate another handful of granola, and prepared myself for what I assumed was about to be the political equivalent of reading the dishwasher warranty.

Political platforms are usually where inspiration goes to die. They begin with lofty aspirations and end in a thicket of bullet points, tax credits, and verbs like strengthen, expand, and modernize. I expected an hour of policy.

Instead, I got something stranger.

It took me a while to understand that they weren’t really presenting a platform at all. They were presenting an explanation. Not simply for what government should do, but for why the world looks the way it does. Why so many people struggle in the richest country on earth. Why some people benefit from that arrangement. And why democratic socialists believe a different economic order is possible.

That distinction turned out to matter.

Most political campaigns promise to solve problems. Workers Deserve More was trying to expand the boundaries of what people believed was politically imaginable. Before people will fight for a different society, they first have to believe one is possible.

Maya imagined someone reading the document and thinking, “Maybe I’m down with all these things. Maybe I’m a democratic socialist too.”

That was revealing.

The document wasn’t principally written to win votes. It was written to make organizers. Throughout the evening, organize kept surfacing like a refrain. The program wasn’t something members would read once and shelve. It was something they were expected to carry into conversations, campaigns, workplaces, and eventually into the movement itself.

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If the first section explained why the program exists, the second explained the kind of society it hoped to create. Here, too, Rachel began somewhere I didn’t expect. Rather than opening with capitalism’s failures or economic inequality, she asked the audience to imagine a different life.

“What would it be like to live in a world without capitalism?”

Rather than answering with economic theory, she described ordinary experiences: taking a day off without dreading the work waiting when you returned, leaving a toxic job without losing your health insurance, facing an unexpected expense without fearing eviction, having enough time and stability to think about something other than survival.

It occurred to me that she wasn’t describing socialism so much as the absence of chronic anxiety.

There was almost nothing about state ownership, nationalization, or markets. Instead, she kept returning to relief, security, dignity, and, above all, time. The future she wanted people to imagine wasn’t defined by what government owned. It was defined by what ordinary people no longer feared.

That was a different understanding of freedom than the one I was used to hearing.

Conservatives often define freedom as freedom from government. Rachel was describing freedom from economic vulnerability.

“Socialism,” she said, “is actually about freedom.”

In this telling, freedom wasn’t simply the absence of government. It required enough security that people could make meaningful choices about their own lives. Or, as she put it, people should be able to “lead their lives instead of just survive.”

Before explaining what was wrong with America, Rachel wanted people to picture what a better America might feel like. She wasn’t trying to make the audience angry. She was trying to make them ambitious.

Only later would that optimistic vision give way to a much broader critique of American institutions.

Only after constructing that vision did the presentation pivot toward the present. If the opening pages described the world they hoped to build, the next explained why they believed such a world was necessary in the first place.

Anna began without ceremony.

“Things are bad. Things are very bad.”

As Anna walked us through the program, one idea kept surfacing. It separated democratic socialists from most liberals almost immediately.

Most liberals believe the economy is producing unacceptable outcomes. Democratic socialists believe it’s producing exactly the outcomes it was designed to produce.

Not for everyone, of course.

For the people who already hold economic power.

Anna didn’t describe unaffordable housing, employer-based healthcare, layoffs, artificial intelligence, or widening inequality as evidence of a system that had malfunctioned. She described them as evidence of a system functioning exactly as intended.

Accept that premise, and almost everything else follows.

If the system is broken, you repair it. Elect different politicians. Pass better laws. Regulate the excesses.

But if the system is doing exactly what it was built to do, reform begins to look less like a solution than a postponement.

You replace it.

She ticked through the familiar list: rising rents, inaccessible healthcare, workplace surveillance, layoffs, climate change, and a precarious economy.

Then came the sentence that, more than anything else I heard that evening, crystallized the democratic socialist worldview.

“For the bosses, for the landlords, for the capitalist class,” she said, “things are going according to plan.”

It wasn’t simply a criticism of wealthy people. It was an argument about power.

Seen through that lens, capitalism isn’t merely an economic system. It’s a way of distributing power. Employers decide whether you have a paycheck. Landlords decide whether you have a home. Insurance companies decide whether you receive medical care. Investment firms decide whether your workplace survives another quarter.

Democracy, they argue, often ends the moment most Americans clock in for work.

Once I understood that premise, the rest of the program became easier to read. Universal healthcare, stronger unions, public housing, and the rest weren’t presented as isolated policy proposals. They were different answers to the same question: Who gets to make the decisions that shape other people’s lives?

That also explained why the presenters kept returning to organization. Winning a better contract mattered. Electing a sympathetic mayor mattered. But neither permanently changed who held power. Reforms could always be reversed if they depended on political goodwill rather than organized workers.

Eventually I realized every road in the discussion led back to the same destination: capital is already organized. Workers have to be, too.

Only then did I understand why they kept calling it a program instead of a platform.

It wasn’t organized around industries, government agencies, or even policy areas. It was organized around a theory of how society works and, just as importantly, what human beings need in order to flourish.

In fact, the next major section was titled Freedom to Flourish.

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Most political platforms are organized around problems: taxes, healthcare, education, immigration. This one was organized around an aspiration.

Rachel wasn’t asking what programs government should administer. She was asking what people need in order to live fully human lives. The policies flowed from that larger question.

She described an economy that leaves people in a permanent state of insecurity. Americans work longer hours than workers in many other wealthy countries. Healthcare remains tied to employment. Childcare consumes enormous portions of family budgets. Housing costs continue to outpace wages. People with stable careers often feel that one layoff, one illness, or one unexpected expense could upend their lives.

The point wasn’t simply that life had become expensive. It was that chronic economic anxiety leaves very little room for anything else. That helps explain why the first proposal Rachel emphasized wasn’t a wage increase.

It was time.

The platform calls for a thirty-two-hour workweek with no reduction in pay. I’d expected healthcare or labor unions to dominate the discussion. Instead, Rachel kept returning to time itself. More time with family. More time for friendships, education, hobbies, community, or simply rest.

The argument wasn’t merely economic. If the purpose of an economy is to improve human life, increasing productivity should eventually buy something more valuable than higher profits.

It should buy time.

Once I noticed that idea, I started seeing it everywhere.

Paid family leave. Vacation. Sick leave. Universal childcare. Shorter working hours.

These weren’t presented as workplace benefits. They were presented as freedom.

Rachel returned repeatedly to the same distinction. The goal of socialism, she argued, isn’t simply to help people survive. It’s to create the conditions under which people can actually live.

That same logic shaped the discussion of healthcare. Universal coverage wasn’t presented primarily as a way to improve medical outcomes. It was presented as a form of freedom. As long as workers fear losing health insurance by changing jobs, organizing a union, starting a business, or leaving an abusive employer, they are never entirely free to make those choices.

Housing followed naturally. The program argues that housing should be treated as a human right rather than a financial asset, expanding public and social housing while strengthening tenant protections. But again, the conversation quickly moved beyond affordability.

Security, Rachel argued, isn’t the opposite of freedom.

It’s what makes freedom possible.

By then I could anticipate the pattern. Healthcare. Housing. Childcare. Retirement. Education. Time itself. Nearly every proposal tried to move one part of life a little farther from the marketplace. Rather than asking how markets might distribute these things more efficiently, the program asks whether markets should be responsible for distributing them at all.

To me, that’s one of the document’s defining questions.

The argument wasn’t simply that government should do more.

It was that some of the most important parts of human life shouldn’t be governed primarily by the logic of buying and selling. If Freedom to Flourish laid the program’s economic foundation, the next section widened the lens considerably.

Rachel explained that the committee had deliberately organized the document around themes rather than policy silos because they wanted readers to see how different struggles reinforce one another. Housing, labor, healthcare, race, immigration, gender, and democracy weren’t competing issues. They were different expressions of the same underlying distribution of power.

One chapter title immediately caught my attention:

Finishing Reconstruction.

It was an unexpected choice. Most political platforms talk about civil rights, racial justice, or equal opportunity. This one reached back to Reconstruction, the brief period after the Civil War when formerly enslaved Americans exercised political power before that experiment was violently dismantled across much of the South.

The title wasn’t simply a history lesson. It was an argument.

Reconstruction, in the program’s telling, never truly ended because it was never allowed to succeed.

That framing changes how democratic socialists understand racial inequality today. Rather than treating disparities as isolated injustices requiring targeted reforms, the platform argues that racism has been woven into American capitalism from the beginning. Slavery generated enormous wealth. Segregation preserved economic hierarchies after slavery ended. Housing discrimination shaped who accumulated wealth and who didn’t. Unequal schools, policing, healthcare, environmental hazards, and employment opportunities weren’t presented as disconnected policy failures. They were presented as the accumulated consequences of institutions built over generations.

As I listened, I realized the presenters weren’t asking whether existing institutions could become fairer. They were asking how those institutions had been shaped by racial hierarchy from the beginning. That’s a different question, and it naturally leads to different answers.

The discussion then turned to class. The presenters never suggested that class mattered more than race. If anything, they argued the opposite: the two had strengthened one another throughout American history. Employers benefited from divisions among workers. Politicians exploited those divisions to weaken labor movements. Unequal access to housing, education, and healthcare reinforced both racial and economic inequality across generations. Addressing one while ignoring the other, they argued, left both systems largely intact.

I noticed the same pattern repeating throughout the program. Feminism, immigration, labor rights, constitutional reform—they all kept circling back to a single question:

Who holds power?

It wasn’t a collection of unrelated progressive priorities. It was a coherent theory of how power operates in American society—and how democratic socialists believe it ought to be redistributed.

The program’s section on Socialist Feminism extended the same analysis into another part of life that’s often treated as private rather than political.

Anna argued that capitalism depends on enormous amounts of labor that rarely appear in economic statistics. Raising children. Caring for aging parents. Supporting family members with disabilities. Maintaining households.

The paid economy, she argued, rests upon work that is frequently unpaid, underpaid, or simply taken for granted.

I realized socialist feminism meant something different from what I’d assumed. It wasn’t simply feminism paired with left-wing economics. It began from the premise that gender inequality and economic inequality continually reinforce one another. If childcare is prohibitively expensive, caregiving falls disproportionately on women. If domestic labor remains invisible, inequality begins long before anyone clocks in for work.

That also explained why the program treated universal childcare, paid family leave, shorter working hours, universal healthcare, stronger labor protections, and expanded public services as feminist policies. The goal wasn’t merely to make caregiving easier.

It was to redefine caregiving as a collective responsibility rather than a private burden, usually carried by women.

No matter where the discussion began—housing, race, labor, gender, healthcare—it eventually circled back to the same questions.

Who performs the labor that keeps society functioning?

Who benefits from it?

Who gets to decide?

That instinct became even clearer when the presentation turned to immigration.

At first, the programs's call to abolish ICE seemed like one of its most controversial proposals. Rachel and Anna saw it differently. To them, it was another example of institutions exercising extraordinary power over vulnerable people.

Like nearly everything else I’d heard that evening, immigration wasn’t presented as a separate issue. It became another way of talking about power, security, and who gets to control other people’s lives.

By this point, I had begun noticing another word almost as often as workers: democracy.

The presenters used the word so often, and in so many different contexts, that I eventually found myself mentally cataloging each appearance. There was democracy inside the DSA itself, which Anna had praised earlier in the evening as one of the organization’s defining strengths. There was political democracy, of course, but also workplace democracy, economic democracy, housing democracy, and democratic control over institutions that most Americans would never think of as democratic at all.

Only then did I realize the adjective in Democratic Socialists of America wasn’t ornamental. It wasn’t simply there to distinguish the movement from twentieth-century communism. It described the movement’s central ambition.

Again and again, Rachel and Anna returned to the same question:

If Americans believe democracy is the best way to govern a country, why should it stop at the office door?

Why shouldn’t the institutions that shape our daily lives, our workplaces, our healthcare system, our housing, even our economy, also be subject to democratic decision-making?

Once I understood democracy as their organizing principle, I started recognizing the same argument beneath proposal after proposal.

Why should executives alone decide how a company is run?

Why should investors determine whether a factory closes?

Why should private equity firms shape the future of hospitals?

Why should landlords exercise so much control over whether families can remain in their homes?

The issue, as they framed it, wasn’t simply unequal outcomes. It was who gets to make the decisions.

That turned out to be one of the program’s biggest conceptual shifts. Democratic socialists weren’t asking citizens to think differently about elections. They were asking them to think differently about democracy.

Elections remained essential, but they were only one expression of democracy. The larger project was extending democratic decision-making into parts of American life where it had historically been absent.

By then I found myself anticipating the conclusion before the presenters reached it. Stronger labor unions weren’t only about higher wages. They gave workers a greater voice over the conditions of their employment. Public ownership wasn’t valuable simply because government might operate services more efficiently. It placed certain decisions under democratic rather than private control.

If democracy is the guiding principle, structures that limit or dilute majority rule inevitably come under scrutiny. The discussion that followed wasn’t about tweaking existing political arrangements. It was about asking whether some of America’s oldest power structures still deserved to exist at all.

The presentation ended, but the meeting wasn’t over.

For the next hour, audience members challenged the speakers, challenged one another, and occasionally challenged some of the movement’s own assumptions. The orderly presentation gave way to an unexpectedly spirited debate over strategy, ideology, political compromise, and a question that has haunted the American left for generations:

Should democratic socialists work within the Democratic Party, make a "dirty break" from it, or treat it as part of the problem?

It turned out to be the most revealing part of the evening.

I’d spent the two hours learning the movement’s vocabulary.

Now I was about to discover that speaking the same political language didn’t necessarily mean agreeing on how to change the world—or whether the Democratic Party was a vehicle for that change or the obstacle standing in its way.

That’s where Part 3 begins.

Subscribe for free and I’ll deliver it straight to you. Paid subscribers get it a little earlier.

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By Open Letters by Mersault

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land

And don’t criticize what you can’t understand

Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command

Your old road is rapidly agin’

Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand

For the times, they are a-changin’

A brief note before we begin.

I’ve spent the last few months wandering into rooms where I don’t belong.

My Among the Believers series has taken me into churches, MAGA breakfasts, Republican fundraisers, neighborhood block parties, Hispanic golf tournaments, former gay lounges, and conservative focus groups. My goal has been to understand the people and ideas shaping the American right. Sometimes I've come away with a more nuanced understanding of viewpoints I didn't share. Other times I've walked away convinced my original assessment had been, if anything, a bit too charitable. And yes, on occasion, the only reasonable response to what I witnessed was ridicule.

But after spending all that time trying to understand the American right, it occurred to me that I was giving my own side a free pass.

I assumed I understood “the left.”

That was a remarkably confident assumption for a movement that can’t even agree on what “the left” means.

So, for the first time, I turned the lens around.

Call it Among the Unbelievers, though that’s not quite right. Nobody you’re about to meet is short on belief. If anything, conviction is the one resource the left has in inexhaustible supply.

The problem isn’t belief.

It's that the farther left you travel, the harder it becomes to tell whether you're looking at one movement or several.

That struck me as worth investigating.

So I went to a meeting.

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People assume the great American family drama is conservative parents versus liberal children.

Not in my family.

My parents were leftists. I’m a leftist. My adult children are leftists.

The disagreement has never been whether capitalism deserves criticism, whether racism is real, or whether government has a responsibility to protect the vulnerable. Those were never the debates at our dinner table. Our divide has always been over how far left is left enough.

Each generation has pushed a little farther than the one before it. More uncompromising. More idealistic. More certain the generation before it hadn't gone far enough.

My parents worried that I was becoming too radical. I now occasionally catch myself thinking the same thing about one of my children. It's deeply unsettling because it suggests I have become the sort of adult who mistakes the next generation's political idealism for naïveté.

My mom and dad, the grandchildren of immigrants who fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe, were lifelong Democrats, with one regrettable lapse for Reagan. Like millions of other Americans, they fell for the Hollywood casting. It lasted one election. They came to their senses.

For the next forty years, they railed at the television through one presidency after another, furious at corruption, hypocrisy, and injustice. But that was the extent of their activism. They voted. They donated a little. They complained. They yelled at the evening news as though the president might hear them through the television. Then they went on with their lives.

Regardless, I appreciated them. So many of their contemporaries eventually surrendered to the Republican Party's decades-long war on expertise, evidence, and intellectual curiosity, then happily mainlined the political narcotic of Fox News and the outrage ecosystem it helped create. My parents never did.

My leftism has always been more active, and more confrontational. I vote, donate, and volunteer, sure. But I’ve also spent much of my adult life speaking at town council and board of education meetings, writing pointed letters to the editor and equally pointed ones to my representatives, showing up at protests and counterprotests, and even permanently losing the hearing in one ear after an unhinged MAGA zealot blasted a bullhorn directly into it.

Now I write this Substack.

I’m not claiming any of this is noble, or even effective. For all I know, I've made things worse on occasion. But doing nothing has never felt like neutrality to me. It has always felt a little too much like acquiescence.

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As for my two children, I'll start with my oldest. She's 28, a physician, and a radical in both mind and body. She has immersed herself in the intellectual tradition of the left, reading political philosophy, revolutionary history, economics, sociology, memoir, critical theory, feminist scholarship, abolitionist writing, and firsthand accounts from organizers and activists. She doesn't just know what she believes. She knows why she believes it.

She knew from an early age that she wanted to become a physician. Not for the prestige or the paycheck, but because she couldn't imagine spending her life doing anything that didn't directly alleviate suffering. Her dream isn't a lucrative private practice in an affluent suburb. It's to provide free medical care to underserved communities in America and, eventually, to people living in some of the poorest places on Earth.

But a few years ago, her politics and her calling collided in a way neither of us saw coming.

She had just completed the first two preclinical years of medical school, immersed in lectures, anatomy labs, and endless exams. Ahead of her were two years of clinical rotations, where she would finally step out of the classroom and into hospitals and clinics, working alongside physicians and caring for patients. After years of sacrifice, she was standing at the threshold of everything she had worked toward. She was about to begin fulfilling what she believed was her life's purpose.

Then the call came.

By chance, it arrived while she and I were stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge headed into New York City. What had already been an infuriating crawl across the Hudson was about to become something much worse. I could hear only my daughter’s side of the conversation, but I didn’t need the other half. Her voice changed. The pauses grew longer. The color drained from her face.

I knew something was terribly wrong.

Her medical school belonged to a wealthy university that wanted to keep growing. Unfortunately, hundreds of mostly low-income Black and Latino residents were living on land the university now coveted. The plan would erase an affordable housing community that had existed for decades.

To the university, it was expansion. To the residents, it was home.

My daughter couldn't square the university's professed values with what it was about to do.

She believed a medical school existed to improve the health of a community, not help displace it. So she became one of the student organizers, working shoulder to shoulder with residents and community leaders. Together they staged peaceful sit-ins and demonstrations, asking the university to use a tiny fraction of its wealth and influence to protect the people being pushed aside by its expansion.

The administration didn’t answer with compassion. It answered with retaliation.

My daughter was the first student organizer to receive disciplinary notices. It later emerged that the administration's initial disciplinary actions had singled out students of color, my daughter among them.

As the traffic crawled across the George Washington Bridge, there was nowhere to escape the conversation unfolding inside our car.

My daughter's measured demeanor and grave tone concealed the panic building beneath the surface. For nearly thirty minutes she said almost nothing beyond an occasional "I understand," "Okay," or "Yes." Only after she hung up did she break down in tears.

The university was preparing to expel her. She had one last chance to plead her case before the university's disciplinary board, but the hearing was still thirty excruciating days away.

Ultimately, after a series of letters, meetings, and testimony before the medical school’s highest disciplinary authorities, she was allowed to remain.

The administration wanted a mea culpa.

Instead, my daughter did something far more difficult. She refused to apologize for believing that institutions with immense wealth and power have a moral obligation to protect vulnerable communities rather than displace them. She defended her conviction that standing beside people with far less power than yourself is not misconduct. At the same time, she acknowledged that some of the tactics employed during the protests had fallen outside the school's rules. It was enough to satisfy the institution's need for contrition without requiring her to abandon the convictions that had brought her there in the first place.

Was it worth it?

The housing complex was ultimately demolished. Hundreds of families still lost their homes.

But that’s not the whole story.

Without the protests, the residents almost certainly would have received nothing. Instead, the campaign forced an unprecedented settlement: permanently affordable housing on part of the site, millions of dollars in compensation for displaced families, and financial and legal support for residents rebuilding their lives. Even critics acknowledged the concessions were historic. As one of the community organizers later observed, had they not fought back, they likely would have received zero.

It wasn’t the ending my daughter had hoped for. But it was proof that principled resistance, even when it falls short of its ultimate goal, can still change lives.

And my other child?

She’s every bit as thoughtful and intellectually curious as her sister. While she isn’t nearly as politically active as either her sister or her father, politics found her anyway.

She didn’t choose that.

She’s a transgender woman. In today’s America, that alone has made her the subject of endless political debate, legislative attacks, and manufactured moral panic. Simply existing has become, in the eyes of much of the modern Republican Party, a political act. She isn’t trying to provoke anyone. She's trying to build a life. Yet her very existence has been recast as a threat by politicians who have discovered there's electoral value in turning people like her into cultural villains.

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Looking across three generations of my family, we all identify as leftists. That may sound like ideological uniformity. It isn't.

Political labels are imperfect, but as a rough guide, my parents fit somewhere among the Great Society liberals, center-left Democrats who believed government could be a force for good but trusted institutions to do the work once the right people were elected. I'm probably best described as a progressive or left-liberal activist, convinced that voting is only the beginning of civic responsibility. My oldest daughter could fairly be called a democratic socialist, although if you asked her, I'm quite certain Marx and Engels would make cameo appearances before the conversation was over.

The left's fiercest arguments aren't over whether America needs to change. They're over how much must change, how quickly, and whether the institutions we inherited can be reformed or must be replaced.

My parents believed the system was fundamentally sound. Elect good people. Pass better laws. Expand opportunity. Bend the arc, slowly, toward justice.

I have far less faith than they did. I think power rarely concedes anything voluntarily. It has to be challenged, embarrassed, organized against, protested, voted out, and dragged, often kicking and screaming, toward progress. But I still believe the institutions themselves can be made to serve the public good.

My daughter questions the premise altogether. She wonders why anyone would expect institutions built to preserve power to willingly dismantle the very hierarchies that gave them power in the first place. Where I see an institution capable of improvement, she often sees institutions that must be dismantled.

Spend enough time on the left and you discover there isn’t one left. There are liberals, progressives, social democrats, democratic socialists, revolutionary socialists, anarchists, and countless hybrids who borrow a little from each while rejecting the labels altogether. They may all want a more just society. Beyond that, consensus becomes much harder to find.

Conservatives often imagine “the left” as a single organism, marching in lockstep under one banner. That’s because they’ve never been to a leftist organizing meeting. Put ten leftists in a room and by the end of the night you’ll have eleven factions, three manifestos, and an argument over whether the snacks were ethically sourced.

Politically, though, those distinctions matter far less to the right than they do to the left. As democratic socialists have begun winning high-profile races (Zohran Mamdani, Melat Kiros, Claire Valdez), Republicans have increasingly collapsed liberals, progressives, democratic socialists, and even mainstream Democrats into a single political category: socialist. Increasingly, communist. Whether that characterization is fair isn't the point. If the left is going to be treated as a single movement, it's worth asking whether it actually is one.

So I decided to find out for myself.

I went to a meeting of leftists to see what I could understand.

If the left is ever going to build a durable political majority, all groups will have to do something they’ve never found especially easy: work together. Winning elections requires coalition. Governing requires even more of it. If every disagreement becomes a purity test, if every ideological difference becomes grounds for exile, we’ll fracture long before our opponents have the chance to defeat us.

The question wasn’t whether we shared enough values to call ourselves leftists, but whether we shared enough common purpose to win elections and govern together afterward.

My eldest daughter, now immersed in the ninety-hour weeks of her medical residency, put me in touch with a group of twenty- and thirty-somethings who occupied the farther left end of the political spectrum.

I wanted to know what they actually believed—not the caricatures offered by cable news or social media, but the real thing. I wanted to know whether people with such different ideologies could rally around common causes and common candidates when it mattered. Could they build the kind of coalition that wins elections and governs effectively? Or would every internal battle ultimately strengthen the very people they hoped to defeat?

Over the next few days, I crammed. I read about democratic socialism, social democracy, Marxism, anarchism, labor organizing, mutual aid, abolition, intersectionality, decolonization, climate justice, housing justice, direct action, coalition politics, and the century-old ideological fault lines that have kept the left arguing with itself almost as long as it has argued with the right. Then I went to the meeting.

Most importantly, though, I had one pressing concern.

Would these young radicals think I was cool?

And where, exactly, had I stashed my old Che Guevara T-shirt?

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PART 2 NOW AVAILABLE!

What do today's young leftists actually believe?

I attended one of their organizing meetings to find out. Over the course of a full day, I got an unfiltered look at the ideas, priorities, and aspirations of a generation that may help shape the future of the American left.

Or become its greatest obstacle.

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On books and the bewildering business of being human.

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By Open Letters by Mersault

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The Blind Spot

I’m your standard-issue monolingual American.

Sure, I took the requisite two years of a foreign language in high school. I chose Spanish. It seemed the obvious choice. I grew up surrounded by Spanish speakers, lived in a city with a Spanish name, drove streets with Spanish names, and, not insignificantly, harbored a lifelong affection for Mexican food. And don’t get me wrong. I can ask where the bathroom is or request permission to use the pencil sharpener with the mellifluous delivery of Julio Iglesias. Anything else I may have learned has long since been reclaimed by time.

Most of my life, my illiteracy wasn’t merely linguistic. It was cultural. Historical. Geographical, if I'm being completely honest. Mexico, in my mind, was a single place populated by interchangeable Mexicans. Beyond that lay Central and South America, which I mentally filed under "more places where people speak Spanish." It embarrasses me to admit that I had compressed dozens of countries, hundreds of millions of people, and centuries of history into one large, conveniently blurry idea.

As I grew older, I was convinced I finally understood and appreciated the diversity of the Spanish-speaking world.

The Wrong Question

Then came the 2024 presidential election.

Trump's support among Hispanic voters had been climbing for years. According to Pew Research Center, he won 48 percent of Hispanic voters in 2024, up from 36 percent in 2020 and 28 percent in 2016. I found this bewildering. Here was a candidate whose dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants, hardline immigration agenda, and habit of turning nearly every disagreement into a cultural grievance seemed designed to repel Latino voters. And yet, nearly half had supported him. Why?

The moment I asked the question, I realized I was repeating the very mistake I had just condemned.

My mistake was assuming there was such a thing as "the Latino vote."

Whether you call people Hispanic or Latino, those are demographic labels, not political identities. They encompass people whose roots span more than twenty countries and whose histories, priorities, and lived experiences are often radically different. A Cuban American in Miami, a Mexican American in Southern California, a Puerto Rican in Philadelphia, a Venezuelan refugee in Florida, and a third-generation Latino in Arizona may all check the same census box while seeing the world in entirely different ways.

Why, then, had I expected them to vote alike? And why do journalists, pollsters, pundits, and political strategists so often speak as though they do?

Looking for People

The statistics explain what happened, but not what they foretold. Was 2024 the beginning of something enduring, or simply the product of a particular political moment? A year and a half into Trump’s presidency, we’re finally in a position to find out.

I had wanted to devote an installment of Among the Believers to Hispanic conservatives from the very beginning because I wanted to understand the people hidden behind a label I had come to realize I barely understood.

But where was I going to find such a group?

I’m almost embarrassed to admit how limited my own world was. I lived in Southern California, surrounded by millions of Hispanic Americans, yet most of my interactions amounted to little more than transactions, brief conversations, and familiar faces I never truly came to know.

An Unlikely Invitation

Enter my brother-in-law.

He has spent most of his career in the wine industry, and his company happened to be sponsoring the Hispanic 100 Celebrity Golf Classic and reception. The event was organized by the Hispanic 100 Foundation, a nonprofit with deep ties to conservative politics and Hispanic Republican leaders. As one of the sponsors, he had a couple of complimentary tickets and invited me along.

I should confess that I have a longstanding dislike of golf. It commandeers vast tracts of land, guzzles water, dumps fertilizer and pesticides into the environment, and somehow expects the rest of us to regard this as a perfectly sensible use of resources simply because wealthy people enjoy it.

But I wasn't there for the golf. I was there for the golfers.

More accurately, I was there for the reception afterward. It offered something I’d been looking for since the election: the chance to replace articles, polling data, and demographic analyses with actual conversations.

Statistics can reveal patterns. They cannot introduce you to a single human being.

A Brief Disclaimer

Before we go any further, I should probably tell you where I stand.

Regular readers of Open Letters by Mersault, and Among the Believers in particular, know that my tone is never accidental. Some of the communities I explore earn ridicule. Others earn respect.

I disagree with much of what the Hispanic 100 Foundation stands for politically. But I also believe in giving credit where it’s due. For more than a decade, it has funded scholarships, paired first-generation college students with mentors, and invested in developing young leaders. I can oppose its politics while respecting the good it does in the community. The world is complicated enough that both things can be true at once.

As for the people I met that evening, I’ll let them speak for themselves.

So, if you came expecting the customary cynicism and snark, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until the next article.

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The Least Interesting Part

A line often attributed to Mark Twain is that “golf is a good walk spoiled.” I’d only add that being a golf spectator is an afternoon you’ll never get back. Following a gallery from hole to hole in hopes of catching a better glimpse of someone taking another swing at a little white ball lost its novelty almost immediately. I spent most of the tournament in the hospitality tent, drinking my weight in iced tea and waiting for the reception to begin.

The Conversations Begin

In earlier installments of Among the Believers, I approached my subjects with a fair amount of anxiety. This time, much of that evaporated thanks to my brother-in-law. My brother-in-law is one of those maddeningly gregarious people who can strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere. Within minutes he was introducing me around the room, explaining who I was and what I was writing.

I braced for suspicion. Instead, I found curiosity. People didn’t seem bothered that I was there to write about them. Quite the opposite. They were eager to tell their stories.

The conversations were too numerous—and too overlapping—to recount one by one. What follows isn't a chronology but a collection of the themes that emerged over the course of the evening.

There Is No Latino Vote

It didn’t take long before I started hearing the same objection. Sometimes politely. Sometimes not.

“Latinos aren’t a monolith... they are people of different countries and backgrounds.”

Another person put it even more bluntly.

“Latino is an absurdly broad demographic category made up of extremely different groups of people.”

One person offered an analogy that perfectly captured the absurdity of treating millions of people as a single political constituency.

“While a British person, a German, a Croatian, a Spanish and a Danish are all European they are never covered as a true monolith... they would refer to their own country first than ‘European.’”

Others pointed out that even the labels we casually use erase enormous differences.

“A Cuban-American voter is fundamentally different from a Mexican-American voter. The only thing lumping them together does is create articles every four years trying to make sense of us.”

Several people rejected the idea that ethnicity itself should predict politics.

“We vote based on our perceived needs. We’re very independent minded and don’t vote on brand loyalty.”

Another captured the same frustration from a different angle.

“People need to stop treating Latinos like we’re one giant voting bloc.”

One person finally put words to the frustration I'd been hearing all evening.

“We’re not the maids, we’re not the fucking gardener, and we’re not children here for anyone’s lectures. We’ve got just as much right to vote like assholes as anyone.”

That was the moment I stopped looking for the Latino vote and started looking for Latino voters.

Values Come Before Politics

Once people stopped talking about ethnicity, they started talking about something else entirely: how they were raised. Again and again, politics took a back seat to values.

One commenter summarized what I would hear throughout the evening.

“Most immigrants have conservative views. They came here to work, raise a family, and build a better life.”

Another offered a reminder that political values don’t emerge in a vacuum.

“Politics in Latin America are written in blood.”

For many immigrants, politics isn’t an abstract debate over tax rates or regulatory policy. It’s shaped by memories of authoritarian governments, corruption, violence, confiscated property, and economic collapse. Whether those memories came from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, or elsewhere, they inevitably traveled with them. Americans often inherit political parties. Many immigrants inherit political memories. Those aren’t the same thing.

The more people talked, the less I felt I was hearing a single “Latino perspective.” I was hearing different histories arriving at many of the same values. Family surfaced first. Not taxes. Not immigration. Not even Trump. Family.

“The Republicans have done a good job of selling the party as one of God and family. Things Latins support and identify with.”

Another explained why many relatives had drifted away from Democrats.

“Many Latins see Democrats as a party of queers and trans. A party of ungodliness destroying the family... It’s all about messaging.”

It’s all about messaging.

Whether that caricature bears any resemblance to reality is almost beside the point. Political campaigns rarely succeed by changing people’s values. They succeed by convincing people the values they already hold are under attack. You don’t have to persuade someone to love their family. You only have to persuade them their family is in danger. For years, Republican politicians and conservative media have framed political disagreements not as debates over tax policy or health care, but as existential battles over God, family, children, and civilization itself.

Democrats, meanwhile, were trying to persuade voters with legislative accomplishments. Republicans were persuading them with anxieties. One side was selling policy. The other was selling apocalypse. History suggests apocalypse is a much easier sell. Fear has always enjoyed a better marketing department than hope.

Religion surfaced just as often.

“Latinos are overwhelmingly Catholic and socially conservative.”

For many, those beliefs translated directly into political priorities.

“With the more Catholic members, they will vote for anyone... who is against abortion rights.”

But even here, the picture refused to stay simple.

“Conservatism doesn’t look the same in every country... no one in my family likes Trump despite being conservative and religious.”

That comment reminded me that we’ve developed a bad habit of treating “conservative” as though it means the same thing everywhere. It doesn’t. A conservative raised under Castro, Chávez, or Ortega arrives at that label by a very different path than someone raised in Orange County or Alabama. Shared values don’t necessarily produce shared politics.

Then came the comment I couldn’t stop thinking about.

“All my family voted for Trump and regret what he has done to our community, but they are afraid of trans people. Doesn’t matter if it’s real or not.”

That may have been the most revealing sentence of the evening.

Fear doesn’t have to be factual to become politically powerful. It simply has to feel plausible. Once it does, evidence begins fighting uphill. For years, Republican politicians and conservative media have devoted extraordinary attention to transgender people, who make up less than one percent of the population, portraying them as one of the defining threats to American families and children. Listening that evening, I couldn't escape the conclusion that the strategy had been all too effective. Here was someone describing family members who regretted what Trump had done to their own community, yet remained motivated by fears that, in the speaker’s own words, “didn’t matter if it was real or not.” Fear had become powerful enough to outweigh lived experience.

Another person summarized it more bluntly.

“The right-wing propaganda machine is strong.”

I think that’s true, but not because Latino voters are uniquely susceptible to propaganda. Human beings are. We all gravitate toward stories that affirm our values and validate our fears. Politics has understood that for thousands of years. The technology has changed. Human nature hasn’t.

By now, a pattern had become impossible to ignore. I had started the evening asking what politics had done to Latino voters. I left wondering what life had done to them first. Long before anyone became a Republican or a Democrat, they had already become a parent. A Catholic. A refugee. A business owner. A survivor of corruption. Those experiences shaped the values they carried into the voting booth. Political parties weren't creating those priorities. They were competing to claim them.

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Immigration Is Really About Fairness

If there was one issue I assumed might unite Latino voters, it was immigration. Instead, it exposed one of the deepest divides of the evening.

The people who favored stricter immigration enforcement almost never framed it as hostility toward immigrants. They framed it as fairness.

One person explained it this way.

“For the people that went through the long legal process, it feels unfair that others just broke the law and came here illegally.”

Beneath many of the conversations was the same story.

“My parents waited years to come here legally. They followed every rule, paid every fee, and sacrificed more than most people can imagine. It’s hard not to feel resentful when someone else gets what they spent years earning.”

I understood the moral logic. If your parents spent years navigating America’s immigration system, it’s easy to resent the perception that someone else skipped the process. Legal immigration wasn’t simply paperwork. It represented sacrifice, perseverance, and respect for the rules. If others appeared to bypass that process, it didn’t merely feel illegal. It felt as though those sacrifices had been diminished.

To many progressives, that position can seem hard to understand. Shouldn’t shared heritage produce shared empathy?

Apparently not.

For many of the people I met, the issue wasn’t ethnicity. It was fairness.

What I hadn’t expected was how many people distinguished between supporting secure borders and supporting everything done in the name of securing them. That’s a distinction our politics rarely bothers to make. You can believe a country has the right to control its borders while recoiling at masked ICE agents detaining people outside courthouses. The principle hadn’t changed. The implementation had.

Others in the room viewed the issue through an entirely different moral framework. They spoke about asylum seekers fleeing gangs, political persecution, or collapsing economies. They wondered what exactly desperate families were supposed to do when the legal path had become so narrow that, for many, it effectively no longer existed. To them, the moral failure wasn’t crossing the border. It was leaving people with no realistic alternative.

The phrase “they should come legally” has become one of the most successful slogans in American politics because it quietly assumes something that often isn’t true: that a functioning legal pathway exists for anyone willing to use it. That’s the part Republicans rarely mention. It's difficult to celebrate legal immigration when the legal process itself has become so unpredictable—or so perilous—that many people conclude there is no front door left to use.

Same border. Different definitions of fairness.

That tension surfaced in one of the evening’s most memorable observations.

“Nothing more anti-immigrant than a Latino with papers.”

Another person described it differently.

“Same for the Cubans in Miami... Now they want to pull up the ladder behind them.”

The accusation is familiar: I got mine.

But not everyone accepted that characterization. One person challenged the premise entirely.

“People don’t see it as pro- or anti-Latino. It’s American vs. foreigner.”

That sentence explained why so many conversations about immigration never seem to go anywhere.

Progressives often begin with human suffering. Many Latino conservatives begin with citizenship. One side asks what we owe desperate people. The other asks what we owe the people who followed the rules. Neither side believes it’s arguing against compassion. Neither side thinks it’s arguing against fairness. They’re simply defining those words differently.

That doesn’t mean the politics surrounding immigration have been honest. They haven’t. For more than a decade, Republicans have transformed immigration from a policy debate into a permanent emergency. They weren’t simply arguing for stronger borders. They were telling a story about invasion, crime, national decline, and a country slipping away. Every story needs a villain, and immigrants became an unusually convenient one.

Democrats, meanwhile, answered with policy papers, economic studies, and labor statistics. Those facts mattered. They weren’t answering the same emotional question. Republicans were telling people what to fear. Democrats were explaining labor markets.

Stories beat spreadsheets. Especially frightening ones.

Listening that evening, I’d been asking the wrong question. I wanted to know what Latino voters thought about immigration. What I should have been asking was why people who often shared the same underlying values could arrive at such different conclusions.

The answer wasn’t ethnicity. It was biography.

People Before Categories

The evening had certainly revealed how effectively Republicans had turned immigration, crime, religion, and cultural change into emotionally compelling stories. But the more people I listened to, the more I realized that explaining Republican success was only half the story. The other half was understanding why Democrats seemed so consistently surprised by it.

Again and again, I heard people resist being reduced to a demographic. They didn’t reject being Latino. They rejected the assumption that being Latino should determine how they voted.

“We vote based on our perceived needs. We’re very independent minded and don’t vote on brand loyalty.”

Another attendee put it even more personally.

“Every election I’m suddenly ‘the Latino voter.’ The rest of the time I’m just a father trying to pay my mortgage, raise my kids, and take care of my parents.”

Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, Today I’d like to spend the day representing my demographic. They wake up thinking about work, the mortgage, whether the car needs new brakes, whether their daughter is happy at college, or how they’re going to help an aging parent. Politics, meanwhile, keeps insisting they introduce themselves as census categories.

As the conversations accumulated, I noticed something else. Almost nobody described themselves the way political consultants describe them. They didn’t introduce themselves as Latino voters, members of a coalition, or part of an emerging demographic. They talked about children heading off to college, businesses they were trying to keep afloat, churches that anchored their lives, neighborhoods that had changed, and grocery bills that seemed to rise every week. One attendee summed up that frustration better than I ever could.

“Stop talking to me like I’m a demographic. Talk to me like I’m someone who’s trying to build a life.”

I wasn’t convinced Democrats actually misunderstood what these voters valued. If anything, many of the policies Democrats champion speak directly to the concerns I heard all evening. Parents wanted affordable childcare and better schools. Families worried about healthcare costs. Adult children worried about aging parents. Small business owners wanted economic stability. Students wanted opportunity. On paper, Democrats had answers for many of those concerns.

So why wasn’t that translating into political support?

Because voters weren’t rejecting the values behind Democratic policies. They often weren’t hearing those values in the first place.

Political researcher Melissa Morales stumbled onto part of the answer while testing Democratic messaging. When voters heard the Child Tax Credit described as a government program designed to reduce poverty, support actually declined. When they heard the identical policy described as helping hardworking parents provide for their families, support increased. Her explanation was devastatingly simple: “We set up the government as the hero and working people as people who need to be saved.” Her alternative framing was even more revealing: “It is the working parent who is the hero of that economic story.”

Suddenly, the conversations I'd been having all evening made more sense. The people I met didn’t see themselves as victims waiting to be rescued. Many would have found that suggestion insulting. They saw themselves as people who had already overcome extraordinary obstacles. Their parents had crossed borders, escaped failed governments, started businesses, worked multiple jobs, learned a new language, and built lives from scratch. They didn’t want politicians congratulating themselves for helping them. They wanted politicians to recognize what they had already accomplished.

Respect, I realized, wasn’t another issue on the ballot. It was the language people wanted every issue spoken in.

One conversation after another returned to that same emotional terrain.

“My parents didn’t build a life here because government rescued them. They built it because they worked harder than anyone I’ve ever known.”

“Don’t tell me how you’re going to help Latinos. Tell me you understand what my family has already overcome.”

I believe we often mistake those sentiments for conservative values.

They’re not. They’re immigrant values. They’re working-class values. They’re the values of millions of Americans who believe dignity begins with earning your own way, even when you occasionally need a hand.

Somewhere along the way, Democrats became extraordinarily good at explaining government and surprisingly bad at explaining people. They talked about programs instead of purpose, benefits instead of aspiration, legislation instead of the lives that legislation was meant to improve.

Republicans, meanwhile, rarely started with legislation at all. They started with stories—about families, neighborhoods, churches, children, patriotism, and belonging. Many of those stories were exaggerated, misleading, or simply false. But they succeeded because they attached themselves to identities people already held long before politics entered the conversation.

That, I suspect, is what Democrats still don’t fully understand.

Most people don’t vote for legislation.

They vote for the lives they hope that legislation will make possible.

A child who can afford college. A grandmother who can pay for her medication. Parents who no longer have to choose between seeing a doctor and paying the electric bill. A small business that survives another year. A family that finally has enough left over at the end of the month to stop worrying.

Long before anyone becomes “the Latino voter,” they’ve already become a parent. A worker. A son. A daughter. A believer. A business owner. Politics doesn’t erase those identities. At its best, it speaks to them. At its worst, it replaces them with a demographic label.

After several hours of conversations, I realized the Democratic Party didn’t really have a policy problem.

It had a storytelling problem.

Somewhere between people’s values and Democratic policies, the story got lost. The people I met weren’t looking for a party that could recite a platform. They were looking for one that understood the lives they’d already built before anyone ever asked them to become “the Latino voter.”

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Values Become the Judge

By the end of the evening, I realized that the people who were reconsidering Trump hadn’t abandoned the values that led them to vote for him. They were measuring him against those very values.

For months, I’d listened to pundits describe Latino voters as though they’d undergone some dramatic ideological conversion. What I found instead was something much more ordinary. Most people hadn’t changed their beliefs about family, hard work, faith, responsibility, or opportunity. The change wasn't in their values. It was their assessment of whether the Republican Party was still living up to them.

The first cracks appeared when the conversation turned to the economy. Many people had voted for Trump believing he would make life more affordable. They weren’t quoting inflation statistics or economic forecasts. They were talking about grocery stores, rent checks, utility bills, and family budgets.

“I voted for Trump because I wanted lower prices and a stronger economy. I didn’t vote to spend another year wondering which groceries I could afford.”

“Every month I kept thinking, ‘Maybe next month it’ll get better.’ Eventually I stopped waiting.”

“I voted with my wallet. My wallet isn’t thanking me.”

Economic disappointment alone probably wouldn’t have changed many minds. Politicians have been overpromising on the economy for generations. But disappointment has a way of making people look more closely at everything else.

Immigration was where those doubts became harder to ignore.

Earlier in the evening, I’d heard people passionately defend secure borders and legal immigration. Those convictions hadn’t disappeared. What had changed was the growing realization that enforcing immigration law and treating immigrants with dignity weren’t mutually exclusive.

“I still believe in secure borders. I just don’t believe cruelty is a border policy.”

“I thought they were going after dangerous criminals. I didn’t expect families who were trying to follow the rules.”

“When people are afraid to show up for their own immigration hearings, something has gone very wrong.”

“I voted for Trump, 100 percent, but I never thought we would get this type of lawlessness... People are never going to forget what the fuck we are going through right now.”

Republicans spent years insisting immigrants should come “the right way.” Then people watched asylum seekers arrested at court hearings, longtime residents detained during routine ICE check-ins, and families separated while attempting to comply with the legal process. For many, the contradiction became impossible to ignore. It’s difficult to praise legal immigration while making the legal process itself an act of peril.

But immigration was never really the point. Every conversation eventually circled back to family.

Family had surfaced in nearly every discussion throughout the evening. Parents wanted better lives for their children. Adult children worried about aging parents. Grandparents wanted safe neighborhoods and good schools. Family wasn’t simply another political issue. It was the lens through which almost every political issue was judged.

Family still mattered. Faith still mattered. Security still mattered. But many were beginning to ask whether the party they’d trusted was still honoring those priorities.

Earlier that evening, someone had unknowingly summarized the entire conversation.

“We vote based on our perceived needs.”

The standard hadn’t changed.

People were still judging politicians by whether they protected their families, rewarded hard work, respected faith, created opportunity, and treated people with dignity. What had changed was the growing belief that Trump and the Republican Party were no longer living up to that standard.

One attendee summarized that realization.

“I didn’t leave the Republican Party. It stopped looking like the party I thought I was joining. The values that brought me here are the same values making me question whether I should stay.”

I heard versions of that sentiment throughout the evening. Not from everyone. But often enough that it no longer felt anecdotal.

That, more than anything else I heard all evening, gave me hope.

Not because I suddenly believed Democrats were winning Latino voters. I didn’t. Most of the people I met remained skeptical of both parties.

It gave me hope because they were doing something citizens in a healthy democracy are supposed to do: holding the people they trusted accountable.

For years we’ve described Latino voters as though they were moving from one ideological box to another. That isn’t what I witnessed. I watched people carry the same values into a changing political landscape and ask whether the party they’d trusted still deserved them.

As those values lead them away from Trump, it's not because they changed.

It's because, in their eyes, he did.

As I’d hoped, the Hispanic 100 Celebrity Golf Classic broadened my understanding of Latino conservatives.

Sadly, my opinion of golf made no comparable progress.

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For those just joining us, this is the latest installment in my ongoing Among the Believers project, an effort to spend time inside conservative spaces and understand the people who inhabit them.

In Part 1, I described my infiltration of a Republican women’s patriotic gala in Orange County. There were balloons. So many balloons. There was Lee Greenwood. So much Lee Greenwood. There were speeches about Christian values, armed citizens, and California’s imminent collapse under Democratic rule.

Mostly, though, there were Republican women.

I’d arrived armed with a head full of questions and a vague ambition to better understand how people whose politics I oppose make sense of the world. What I wasn’t prepared for was how quickly the interview would turn around.

After the speeches, attendees spilled out onto the hotel's pool deck for a cocktail reception. Strings of lights glowed overhead. Wine glasses clinked. Republican women in stars, stripes, and rhinestones mingled beneath the palm trees.

Spotting three women gathered around a cocktail table, I approached with the first of my carefully prepared questions already loaded in the chamber.

I never got the chance.

“What brought you here tonight?” one of them asked.

“Um…” I said.

"I'm proud to be an American," I half-sang. The song had burrowed into my brain.

“Where at least I know I’m free,” another woman full-sang, completing the lyric.

Just like that—instant rapport! My first positive interaction of the evening. Maybe these people weren’t so bad after all, I thought. For one fleeting moment, I considered registering Republican.

Then another woman gushed, “I love that song!”

The feeling passed. My political realignment was over.

Then I answered honestly. Well, honestly-ish.

“I’m relatively new to Orange County, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn a little more about local politics.”

“You’ve come to the right place,” one of them said. “What do you want to know?”

“All you need to know is to vote Republican,” another declared.

The three women clinked their wine glasses.

They had offered the perfect segue to the questions I’d prepared earlier, questions designed not merely to understand how Republican women see the world, but to coax them into explaining beliefs that are rarely questioned within their own circles.

“What issue matters most to you right now?” I asked.

“The economy,” one woman said immediately. “My kids are doing everything right and they still can’t afford a house.”

“Everything costs more,” another agreed. “Groceries, insurance, utilities. It just keeps going up.”

The third took a sip of wine. “Honestly? Keeping California livable for families.”

“In what way?”

“Affordable. Safe. A place where young people can actually build a life.”

“And the border,” one of the others added. “I don’t think that’s controversial. Every country needs borders.”

“I just want people to follow the law. Come here legally, work hard, pay your taxes. That’s how it ought to be.”

“What are you most worried about?”

“My grandchildren,” one said. “I worry they won’t have the opportunities we had. We’re taxing people out of the state.”

“That too many people are taking advantage of the system while everyone else pays for it.”

“That we’re becoming so divided nobody can even talk to each other anymore. We need to keep the culture stable.”

Heads nodded around the table.

“What do you hope will be different a year from now?”

“I'd like politicians to spend less time fighting and more time fixing things.”

“I’d like groceries and gas to stop costing so much.”

"Government should do the basics well, stay out of people's lives, and stop wasting money."

“And maybe a few more Republicans elected in California,” another added, prompting laughter from the rest. Another round of clinking glasses.

Not wanting to be rude, I tapped my glass of ice-diluted Diet Coke against theirs, sacrificing a small portion of my leftist credibility in the process.

Looking back on the evening, I came to think of these women as MAINLINE REPUBLICANS. They worried about housing costs, inflation, grandchildren, and California's future. They were partisan, certainly, but not especially ideological. Republicanism seemed less a crusade than a habit, a community, and a worldview inherited over decades. Had I left the gala after speaking with them, I might have concluded that Republican women were motivated primarily by practical concerns and garden-variety partisan loyalties.

The next group would disabuse me of that notion.

Before the evening was over, I would encounter two other species of Republican woman. They occupied the same gala, applauded the same speakers, and voted for the same candidates. But the similarities ended there.

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The next group of women would come to occupy a very different category in my mind: MAGA HARDLINERS. Younger, louder, and marinated in online conservative culture, they approached politics less as a civic responsibility than as a never-ending battle against the forces they believed were destroying America.

Feeling encouraged by my initial success, I set off in search of another table. At the edge of the patio sat five women who appeared to be in their twenties and thirties, making them considerably younger than most of the guests I had encountered so far. They were arranged on padded outdoor sectionals around a circular fire pit that, at the moment, sat unlit.

Suddenly, I became acutely aware that I was a middle-aged man approaching a group of women half my age for reasons that would be difficult to explain in a court of law.

They looked as though they had stepped out of an Instagram reel documenting a bachelorette weekend. Long, carefully styled hair. Ample makeup. Spray tans calibrated somewhere between Newport Beach and Mar-a-Lago. Designer handbags rested beside margarita glasses the size of birdbaths. They were laughing loudly, taking selfies, and appeared far less interested in local ballot measures than in getting pleasantly over-served before whatever adventures awaited after the gala.

I started with the opening line that had worked so well with the group I’d just left.

“I’m relatively new to Orange County, and I thought this would be a good opportunity—”

I was interrupted by a platinum blonde woman in a bright red dress who looked to be in her early thirties and had clearly invested a significant amount of time and money in remaining in her early thirties.

“...a good opportunity to find a sugar baby?” she said, finishing my sentence for me.

She raised her cocktail in salute to her own joke. The table rewarded her with a chorus of approving whoops.

I confess to sucking in my stomach and standing a little straighter. I immediately felt creepy.

“What issue matters most to you right now?” I asked.

The answer came back almost instantly: schools.

“They’re indoctrinating kids.”

“Oh my God, yes.”

“Into what?”

She took a sip of her drink.

“Everything. Gender stuff. America is evil. Boys can be girls. Girls can be boys. Pick a lane.”

Everyone laughed.

“This country’s in a fight for its soul,” another woman added.

“Exactly.”

A third woman jumped in.

"They're trying to erase everything normal."

“Everything normal?”

“Everything is backwards now,” one woman said, gesturing with her margarita for emphasis. “Women are told careers are more important than our men. Having kids is optional. Men are toxic. Mothers are oppressed.”

A woman beside her nodded vigorously.

“Yes! Nobody wants to say that.”

“You agree?”

“Completely.”

She leaned forward.

“I always wanted to be a wife and mother. That’s literally all I ever wanted.”

“And that’s enough for you?”

“My husband leads our family. I take care of our home. We’re happy.”

Another woman raised her glass. “Nobody’s allowed to say it.”

“We’re all thinking it,” another said.

“We just said it,” someone pointed out.

The table erupted in laughter.

“What are you most worried about?” I asked.

“That we’re losing the country.”

Several women nodded.

“How?”

The blonde in red answered first.

“Have you seen TikTok?”

The table laughed.

“No, seriously. These kids hate America. It’s brainwashing by the Left. They hate America.”

“They don’t even know why they hate America,” another woman said. “They’ve just been told they’re supposed to.”

"Teachers are indoctrinating kids. They're teaching little boys they're girls."

“We’re raising a generation that has no idea what made this country great in the first place.”

“What do you think made this country great,” I asked.

“Faith and family,” one woman answered.

A woman who had been quiet most of the conversation finally spoke.

“Jesus!”

“That’s actually true,” another said.

"I'm worried about my future kids," one woman said, taking a gulp of her tequila slushie.

“Because of the economy?”

She shook her head. “No. Because of the culture.”

“The culture,” another repeated darkly.

The word hung over the table like everyone understood precisely what it meant and nobody needed to define it.

“What do you hope will be different a year from now?” I asked.

“I hope people wake up.”

The answer came so quickly it sounded rehearsed.

“Wake up to what?”

“What’s happening.”

“Which is?”

She laughed. “How much time do you have?”

The others joined in.

"People laugh when we say Deep State. Fine. Call it whatever. Bureaucrats. Career government. Those people never leave. Doesn't matter who wins. They're still running everything."

“The people running this country hate regular Americans.”

“I’d like people to stop apologizing for being American,” another woman said.

A woman sitting on the edge of the fire pit reached the bottom of her margarita and sucked noisily through the straw, searching unsuccessfully for liquid that no longer existed.

“I’d like conservatives to stop playing defense all the time.”

“Preach” one of her friends said.

The table fell quiet for perhaps the first time all evening.

As if on cue, the fire pit suddenly ignited with a loud whoosh.

The women erupted in cheers.

Whether it was divine affirmation or a programmable thermostat was impossible to say.

During my time with the group, two of the women peeled away in search of the restroom, leaving me with the remaining three. One of them wore a bright pink MAGA hat perched atop carefully styled dark hair. Apropos of nothing, she said:

“I vote the same way my husband does. He and me are one flesh, so honestly, I would be okay with giving up my right to vote because I know he would represent me well.”

I assumed she was joking.

She wasn’t.

Another woman nodded. “If my husband’s the head of the household,” she said, “and he was voting on behalf of our family, I’d be fine with that.”

The missing women returned from the restroom.

“We need another round,” one announced. The others immediately agreed.

“We’re heading to the bar,” one of them said, looking at me with an expectant expression.

I suspected that if I joined them, my entirely hypothetical sugar-daddy status might cease being hypothetical. I sensed that “We’re heading to the bar” was less an invitation to continue our conversation than an opportunity for me to finance the next round.

Fortunately, the evening’s next scheduled event intervened. Guests were being called into the ballroom for dinner. I wished them a pleasant evening.

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The ballroom was festooned with balloons. I’ll let the reader guess the color.

We were assigned seats at round tables of eight. Once everyone had settled in, I found myself surrounded by six women in their forties through sixties and a lone gentleman in his mid-sixties who seemed determined not to make eye contact with me.

The hard rolls, the cold butter that resisted all attempts at spreading, and the salad swimming in vinaigrette did nothing to dampen the spirits of four women at my table who had thoughtfully migrated their poolside cocktails into the ballroom and supplemented them with generous pours of wine. The evening's patriotism was increasingly well lubricated.

After sufficient discussion of dresses, husbands, and a certain woman named Gloria, who was not present but had apparently committed a series of unforgivable social protocol violations, I found an opening for my questions.

“What issue matters most to you right now?” I asked.

“We’ve taken God out of everything,” one woman said.

Heads nodded around the table.

“Look around.”

I looked around.

“Kids identifying as cats.”

“That’s not actually happening,” I said.

“Well, maybe not cats. But you know what I mean.”

I did not.

The examples came quickly after that.

Pride flags. Pronouns. Woke. Open borders. Men in women’s sports. Abortion. Falling birth rates. Pornography. TikTok. Divorce. Hookup culture. Homelessness.

A woman somehow connected Taylor Swift to all of this, though I lost the thread somewhere between the Eras Tour and the Book of Revelation.

“It all goes back to God,” another woman explained.

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

The certainty was impressive.

Between them, the women had developed a unified field theory of social decline in which every modern problem, from gender identity to student debt, could be traced to insufficient church attendance.

“People are searching for meaning,” one woman said.

“Exactly.”

“They’re filling the hole with politics.”

“Or social media.”

“Or therapy.”

“Or veganism.”

I looked down at my sun-dried tomato ravioli, the evening’s vegetarian option.

I quickly recognized my tablemates as the third group in my emerging taxonomy: CHRISTIAN PATRIOTS, women for whom politics was ultimately subordinate to faith.

“What are you most worried about?” I asked.

“People have stopped caring about each other,” one woman said immediately.

Several nodded.

“There’s no compassion anymore,” another woman said.

“People have become so judgmental.”

“We've lost grace.”

More nodding.

“Nobody thinks about anyone but themselves.”

I ate a ravioli.

“What would helping each other look like?”

“People need to learn responsibility.”

“People need to get back to Christian values.”

“Love thy neighbor,” one woman said.

Several nodded approvingly.

“What does that look like in practice?” I asked.

“Well, for starters, we need to stop rewarding people for making bad choices.”

Another woman jumped in.

“The government gives away too much.”

“Way too much.”

“People need consequences.”

The conversation drifted toward welfare recipients, homeless people, immigrants, and eventually refugees. The women described themselves as compassionate throughout. Compassion, in this case, rarely translated into mercy.

One woman stabbed a fork at her Chicken Toscana.

“I know it sounds harsh.”

The phrase “I know it sounds harsh” appeared to function as a warning label for the sentence about to follow.

“But honestly, if families get separated, that’s the consequence.”

Several women nodded.

A second woman shrugged.

“You break the law, there are consequences.”

“Exactly.”

A third woman shook her head sadly.

“My heart breaks for them.”

She immediately began explaining why they should be deported.

“I don’t enjoy saying it,” a fourth woman added.

The women spent the next several minutes discussing policies that sounded suspiciously like things they enjoyed saying.

By this point in the evening, something had become apparent.

So far, no one had talked about Donald Trump. The resentments, suspicions, and sense of cultural siege that fueled his rise were ever-present, but his name never came up.

The disease no longer required the original host.

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As slices of lemon raspberry cake were placed before us and several women requested decaf coffee, I was preparing to ask this table my final question about the future when the table's attention abruptly shifted to someone standing behind me and, appropriately enough, to my right. It was Young Kim, the Republican congresswoman from my district and, judging by the enthusiasm around the table, the district of several of the women as well.

As I shared in Part One, Young Kim and I have a long-standing one-sided relationship in which I periodically inform her office why I believe she is wrong about something. This has occurred through email, letters, website forms, and twice in person. It occurred to me that if she or her handler knew who I was, this might become awkward.

A little context. Kim originally campaigned as a pragmatic moderate, part of a long tradition of Republican politicians in purple districts who speak like centrists at home and vote like partisans in Washington. When she ran in 2020, her message was “Working Across Aisles” and delivering “Bipartisan Solutions.” She especially touted her support for veterans and victims of domestic violence.

During the recent midterms, however, she dropped the pretense altogether, spending millions on television ads, mailers, and lawn signs branding herself a “100% Trump Republican,” even featuring doctored video of Trump praising her by name. She also supported legislation that severely cut healthcare for veterans and opposed protections for women and children under the Violence Against Women Act.

The moderate had become a mascot.

Like many Republicans navigating the Trump era, Kim has proven far more adept at reading political winds than resisting them. Her most consistent principle appears to be political survival.

She worked the table with the polished ambiguity of an elected official trying to appear deeply familiar with people she may or may not have ever seen before, uncertain whether these women were old friends, reliable donors, prospective donors, or some combination thereof.

A young woman in a navy suit stood beside her. She looked vaguely familiar. Was she the staffer I had previously cornered about ICE? Or deportations? Or Iran? Or the Big Beautiful Bill? After a while they begin to run together.

When Kim’s eyes met mine, I took my shot.

“You’re really leaning into being a ‘100% Trump Republican’ this campaign,” I said, leaving her to decide whether it was praise or criticism.

“Of course,” she said, smiling broadly at the women around the table.

“I’ve always supported President Trump. I’ve always been very clear about that.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’ve always supported common sense policies.”

I looked at her expectantly.

“Safe communities. Strong families. Economic opportunity,” Kim replied, sounding like a yard sign.

“This is a women’s event. What do you see as your record on women's issues?”

She smiled.

“I think people want results.”

It was the sort of answer that could survive almost any political climate because it referred to nothing at all.

Unfortunately for her constituents, the policies themselves were far more specific. And while this story is about Young Kim, readers will likely recognize versions of it playing out in congressional districts, state legislatures, city councils, and county governments across the country.

Trade wars raised prices. Economic uncertainty rippled through small businesses, retirement accounts, and household budgets. Immigration crackdowns destabilized immigrant communities. Cuts to education and research threatened students, educators, and researchers. Congress relinquished authority while the executive branch amassed more of it. Abroad, Kim stood by as Trump pursued unnecessary military conflicts that made an unstable world more dangerous, pushed energy prices higher, and burdened American families with the economic costs of war. Add to that her votes against measures benefiting women and veterans, and the result was a remarkably broad range of consequences. Kim somehow distilled it all into two words: “common sense.”

Sensing my window was closing, I squeezed in one more question.

“Will you be leaning into your support for Trump during the general election?”

“I think voters know where I stand,” she said with a smile.

They don’t. That’s the point.

And like that, she was off to the next table.

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After dessert, the six women drifted off to make the rounds at other tables, presumably to discuss how declining church attendance was responsible for the dry Chicken Toscana or to continue the prosecution of Gloria.

I looked over at the lone other man at the table, who had spent the evening avoiding eye contact and contributing little beyond the occasional nod. I had practically forgotten he was there.

With the women making the rounds, only the two of us remained at the table for the moment.

To my surprise, he looked up and said something I couldn’t hear.

“Sorry?” I said.

He repeated it.

I pushed back my chair and moved beside him.

“I said you asked better questions than most reporters.”

I laughed.

“That’s a low bar.”

“Yes it is.”

He took a sip of coffee.

“You know what the problem is?”

“What’s that?”

He glanced around the ballroom.

“Nobody wants to admit they’re tired.”

“Tired of what?”

He shrugged.

“All of it.”

He ticked off examples.

“Trump. The people who hate Trump. Fox News. MSNBC. Fundraisers. Social media. Every election is the most important election of our lifetime.”

He shook his head. “I’ve lived through twelve of those.”

He looked down into his coffee.

“I didn’t vote for Trump because I love the guy. I voted because the other option seemed worse. Truth is, I don’t trust either party. Washington doesn’t care much about people like me. I thought maybe he'll shake things up. Maybe not. Turns out he made things worse. Way worse. Nothing ever really changes. I don't think either party knows what they're doing. I'm just tired."

He continued without prompting.

“The older I get,” he said, “the less I think people vote for what they love and the more I think they vote against what scares them.”

He looked around the ballroom. “That’s true for everybody.”

I nodded.

As I left the gala, I found myself thinking about the four groups I had encountered.

The evening had introduced me to MAINLINE REPUBLICANS, MAGA HARDLINERS, CHRISTIAN PATRIOTS, and finally, through the quiet man at my table, what I came to think of as the RELUCTANT RIGHT.

The research suggests Trump voters are not a movement so much as a coalition. Looking around the ballroom, that felt exactly right.

The Mainline Republicans worried about affordability and their grandchildren’s future.

The MAGA Hardliners saw enemies everywhere and politics as a form of cultural combat.

The Christian Patriots viewed nearly every problem through the lens of faith and moral decline.

And the Reluctant Right had simply been doing this long enough to distrust certainty itself.

They disagreed about causes. They disagreed about priorities. They even disagreed about what was wrong with America. Yet all four had arrived at the same destination.

Perhaps the quiet man was right. People vote less for what they love than against what frightens them.

Fear, however, is only an explanation. It is not a justification.

Throughout the evening I heard endless discussions about values, morality, family, faith, patriotism, and saving America. What I heard far less about were the people who would bear the cost of the policies being advocated.

The immigrant family.

The deported student.

The refugee turned away.

The woman denied autonomy.

The LGBTQ teenager told they don’t belong.

The child growing up in a country with fewer rights than the one their parents inherited.

The teacher afraid to teach honestly.

The scientist whose research disappears.

The veteran denied care.

The federal worker fired for doing their job.

The journalist labeled an enemy.

The political opponent.

The stranger.

The easiest person in the world to sacrifice is someone you’ve never met.

People rarely support cruelty because they believe they are cruel. They support it because they have found a way not to see the people it happens to.

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In the middle of writing my Among the Believers series, I was laid off from the company I helped build. Read about it. ↓

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Let me start with a confession.

When I embarked on my Among the Believers series back in April, I had only the "concept of a plan"—to borrow one of Trump's more memorable phrases.

I announced to my readers that I was going to spend the run-up to the midterms trying to climb inside the Trump-supporter mindset and understand how these people see the world. My goal was simple: to understand how these beliefs take root and endure. Because convictions don't loosen their grip simply because we disagree with them. And if there's even a small chance that a certainty can crack or a vote can change between now and November, understanding has to come before persuasion.

Noble mission, right?

There was only one problem.

I had absolutely no idea how the hell to go about it.

Where would I find these voters? And once I found them, how would I approach them? More to the point, despite my high-minded raison d'être, did I even want to? I’d spent the past decade carefully organizing my life to avoid people who cheer for politicians I consider corrupt, cruel, and profoundly ignorant.

There are no Trump supporters (or even Republicans) in my family, among my friends, or in my social circle. Not even my brother-in-law! I’m not saying there used to be some and I’ve since excommunicated them. I’m saying they were never there to begin with.

In fact, I can think of exactly one person I’ve known well who ever let slip their right-wing worldview. We worked together for years. The morning after the Las Vegas massacre, when a gunman armed with an arsenal of military-style weapons opened fire on concertgoers from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, killing 61 people and wounding hundreds more, I said something to the effect of:

“I can’t believe I live in a country where dozens of people can be gunned down in a matter of minutes and everyone already knows nothing will be done to stop it from happening again.”

To which my colleague replied, "Well, if that guy really wanted to kill people, he could have done it with knives or anything."

You know.

From the 32nd floor.

I remember just staring at her.

We were on Zoom, but still.

Anyway, I never brought up "politics" again.

(It's worth mentioning that a few years later, the husband of that same co-worker spent six weeks in the hospital, including a lengthy stay in intensive care, after nearly dying from COVID. He had declined vaccination.)

So, the question remained: How was I going to find Trump voters willing to engage?

Well, as any Taoist philosopher will tell you, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Mine began with a focus group and has since taken me to a diner, a church, a former gay nightclub, and a neighborhood block party.

Not all of those excursions were on the up and up.

Two required infiltration. There's no ethical spin I can put on it: I lied my way in. Sometimes by commission, sometimes by omission, but deception nonetheless. I wanted to hear people speak freely rather than perform for a perceived political opponent.

For two others, I worked a few connections.

And for one, I did what I imagine real journalists do: I contacted representatives of a conservative organization and asked for an interview.

That last one—the most aboveboard approach of the bunch—is also the one that almost never works. I've made similar requests at least a dozen times over the past few months and rarely received a reply.

But one guaranteed way to get into a room full of Republican voters is through a fundraiser—the endless procession of pancake breakfasts, barbecue cookouts, meet-and-greets, candidate forums, banquet dinners, cocktail receptions, and the occasional gala that keeps the machinery of conservative politics humming.

The catch: fundraisers raise funds. Which meant that gaining access would require financially supporting the very people I was trying to understand. Or expose. Or excoriate, depending on how things went.

How would I live with myself if I knowingly gave money to a conservative cause? More importantly, how would my readers react? Some would surely pillory me for it. Or worse, unsubscribe. 😱

My dilemma was further compounded by the fact that I desperately wanted to interview women, as most of my interactions thus far had been with men. Some readers had noticed and gently called me out on it.

So, in the interest of connecting with the fairer sex*, I devised a plan. I hope you’ll find it acceptable.

*Ironic use of term

A brief note: I don't identify the organizations I visit. This is partly to avoid litigation and partly to reduce the chances of finding a burning cross on my lawn. That said, if you happen to discover a few breadcrumbs along the way, you're welcome to follow them.

A local women's Republican group was hosting an event titled “Celebrate America's 250'th Birthday Event” (their superfluous apostrophe, not mine). It promised to be “an evening of patriotism, great company, music, and dancing.” Well, I figured, I like one of those things. How could I resist? Tickets for non-members were $65.

Again, the prospect of financially supporting a conservative cause was anathema to me. To offset the karmic damage, I immediately donated twice the ticket price to the ACLU and considered the cosmic balance restored.

Then there was the matter of the mailing lists. I suspected a single ticket purchase could trigger a years-long cascade of urgent appeals to save America, stop socialism, defend Starbucks Christmas cups, and preserve the constitutional right of fictional mermaids to be portrayed by white actresses. Well, there's no controlling junk mail, so consider my overflowing mailbox, stuffed with glossy mailers warning that Western civilization hangs in the balance, a small sacrifice I've made in the name of pretend journalism.

You're welcome.

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I took my dark gray suit out of mothballs and ironed a dress shirt for the first time in a happily very long time. I used extra starch because that’s what I imagine conservatives do. Fortunately, I’ve owned my neckties long enough that they’ve been in style, out of style, and back in style again. Pleased that my pants still buttoned without the aid of a corset, I headed to the boutique hotel where the event was being held. Not wanting to blow my cover before I even made it through the front door, I skipped the valet and parked my leftist Subaru down the street.

I passed giant columns wrapped in red, white, and blue balloons, walked beneath a giant arch made of red, white, and blue balloons, and entered through a giant doorway framed by red, white, and blue balloons. I made a mental note to buy stock in Patriotic Balloons, Inc.

As I stepped into the reception lobby, I was greeted by a song so perfectly, absurdly on-brand that readers may suspect I've invented it for literary effect. I have not. Blasting from the speakers was Lee Greenwood's God Bless the U.S.A., known to most of us by its chorus, I'm Proud to Be an American.

I fucking hate that song.

At first, I assumed it was simply a comedically well-timed needle drop. I soon learned otherwise. During the roughly thirty minutes we spent milling about the lobby area before the event kicked off, I was treated to the song two more times. By the third rendition, I began to suspect the song wasn't background music so much as a patriotic psyop, the sort of thing the military blasts at enemy combatants to shatter morale and break their will.

Though battered and shaken, I pressed on.

As readers of my previous dispatches know, I'm not a naturally social creature. I can impersonate a people person when circumstances require it, but only in short bursts. After about ten minutes of schmoozing, I generally need to retreat to a bathroom, deserted hallway, or other quiet refuge to regroup before venturing back into the fray.

I was also in the minority as a male in what appeared to be a crowd that was 90% women. For the first time in my life, I knew what it must feel like to be a woman at a fantasy football draft, a Civil War reenactment, or a convention for model train collectors. For a fleeting moment, I even felt mildly objectified. For the first time in my life, I understood what it must feel like to be a woman, well, almost everywhere.

Despite these obstacles, I resolved to be sociable.

The room was filled almost entirely with women who looked as though they had spent the last thirty years organizing church bake sales, winning silent charity auctions, and arguing with school principals. The dominant aesthetic might best be described as country-club patriotism. American flags in the form of scarves, earrings, brooches, and pins. Patriotic reds, whites, and blues were everywhere: rhinestones, sequins, and bedazzlement as if the entire crowd had been styled by the gift shop at Mount Rushmore. Crosses hung from necklaces. Hair was coiffed. Smiles practiced.

I approached a high-top table occupied by four ladies who appeared to be in their forties and deployed what I was certain was a devastatingly clever opening line, one that would instantly establish me as witty, charming, and improbably well-read. Using the official and technically correct term for a 250th anniversary, I flashed a smile.

“Happy Semiquincentennial!” I beamed.

I could swear I heard a record scratch as the three women smiled with their mouths while their eyes searched for clues as to what the hell I was talking about.

“It’s the official and technically correct term for a 250th anniversary,” I said with a forced chuckle, foolishly believing this additional context would improve matters.

“Oh,” the charitable one exclaimed. “I hadn’t heard that.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue like ‘bicentennial,’ does it?” I said, momentarily regaining my footing.

“The what now?” another asked.

At that moment, I realized I was the only person at the table with firsthand memories of 1976. My eyes scanned the premises for a bathroom, deserted hallway, or other quiet refuge into which I could retreat.

Just then, a woman stepped up to a microphone set between a large-screen TV and the appetizer table. She radiated polished confidence. Her smile was dazzling, with a shade of white not commonly found in nature. Her blazer was Nancy Reagan red. She introduced herself as the president of the women's club.

After a few perfunctory welcoming remarks and patriotic well-wishes, she announced a surprise video message from California Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton.

The recorded message, which may or may not have been recorded specifically for this women's group, started off with Hilton's familiar campaign refrain: California is broken, Democrats broke it, and only a political outsider can restore the California Dream.

Over the course of the next twelve minutes, Hilton seemed determined to hit every note he assumed would resonate with the audience: attacks on transgender youth, praise for Trump’s immigration policies, warnings about California’s supposedly broken election system, denunciations of the state’s “corrupt” Democratic establishment, and support for turning over California abortion providers to states where abortion is criminalized. It seemed like an awful lot of culture war to pair with chardonnay and crudités, but the crowd responded as one might expect when a band finally gets around to playing the hits.

It's hardly surprising that Hilton secured enough votes to advance to the general election in November.

As the audience finished applauding a television, someone caught my attention.

She glided through the room dispensing smiles, handshakes, and brief moments of personal recognition. She moved from table to table, greeting attendees, touching shoulders, and posing for photographs.

She looked familiar.

I watched her for a moment, trying to place the face. Then it clicked. It was Congresswoman Young Kim.

This presented a problem.

First, Young Kim is the representative from my district. Second, I have sent more complaints and criticisms to her office than Stephen King has published novels, using website forms, email, traditional mail, and, on two memorable occasions, my physical presence. (Readers who follow my Substack Notes have seen a few of these exchanges.)

There was, therefore, a non-zero chance that she or someone from her team might recognize me or my name and have security bum-rush me off the premises.

(Unfortunately, I was compelled to register under my real name. I assumed they would want to see identification at check-in. They did. Conservatives really do love their ID requirements.)

I decided it would be best to steer clear of her.

For the time being.

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The next speaker was David Serpa, who was then running for California State Treasurer. Since the June primary was only days away, his appearance was neither surprising nor especially memorable. The slicked-back hair, royal blue suit, crimson tie, and patriotic balloon backdrop combined into a kind of discount strongman aesthetic. He looked like a man who had spent forty-five minutes practicing “statesman” in the bathroom mirror and emerged looking like the assistant manager of a mattress store during a Presidents’ Day sale.

His message could be distilled into a handful of applause lines:

“We cannot save the state of California if we can’t save the Republican party in California.”

Then, a mere two minutes into his remarks, he made a prison rape joke. Complaining about what he viewed as the ineffectiveness of California Republicans in the state capital, he said:

"...and then we're surprised when we send them up to Sacramento and they act like a bunch of do-boys in prison getting turned out for cigarettes."

For those unfamiliar with prison vernacular, a “do-boy” is an inmate who is dominated and exploited by other prisoners. “Getting turned out” refers to being coerced into sexual servitude.

The audience laughed.

(By the way, I had to look up both terms afterward. Why they rolled so effortlessly off Mr. Serpa's tongue is something I'll leave for readers to ponder.)

He continued.

“A polite society is an armed society.”

Then, after extolling the virtues of an increasingly armed citizenry and without acknowledging even a molecule of irony, he pivoted to Charlie Kirk.

“Charlie Kirk was taken from us. He was looking for peace. They took his life in front of us. It’s often these revolutionary figures that come along that want the best for us, and they eliminate them from the face of the earth.”

For those who need reminding, Charlie Kirk was not some gentle apostle of peace cruelly taken from us. He was a professional demagogue who built a lucrative career trafficking in fear, resentment, conspiracy theories, and cultural panic. He spent years telling Americans that immigrants, LGBTQ people, educators, journalists, Democrats, and anyone to the left of Joseph McCarthy represented an existential threat to the nation. He normalized election denialism, amplified racist conspiracy theories, vilified vulnerable minorities, and helped cultivate the atmosphere of paranoia and grievance that now dominates large sections of the American right.

Whatever one thinks about his murder, and political violence is indefensible, portraying him as a selfless visionary who merely "wanted the best for us" bears little resemblance to the public record.

Having finished canonizing Kirk, he moved on.

“A lot of people run away from the term right wing extremist. I’m here to tell you. I am a right wing extremist. I’m an Oath Keeper. I made an oath to the Constitution. At what point are we going to uphold our value system? Are we going to stand up for Christian values, for traditional marriage, for life?”

“We have to fight to the death against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Foreign and…

At this point he gestured to the audience to complete the sentence.

“DOMESTIC!,” shouted the audience.

As a closer, he invoked a nationalist agitator who spent decades warning Americans about feminists, immigrants, multiculturalism, and the dangers of becoming a less white nation.

“Our enemies are here, guys, they’re in Sacramento, they’re in Washington D.C. I need your vote to restore Pat Buchanan era conservative values like our parents gave us!”

And how did the audience of mostly women react to his presentation?

Well, I'm reminded of the famous diner scene with Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. That is, they seemed very enthusiastic.

California voters proved somewhat harder to seduce. Days later, Serpa finished fourth out of five candidates with 14 percent of the vote.

The president of the organization took the stage once again to release us to the poolside reception before dinner. Wanting to send us off on a high note, she exclaimed:

“Happy Semiquincentennial, everyone!”

The room erupted in cheers.

Soon we were poolside, mingling beneath strings of lights as waiters circulated with appetizers and attendees exchanged pleasantries and political positions.

As for me, I had prepared a basic set of questions to get the conversations rolling. After my earlier setback, I was determined to keep every word comfortably under seven syllables.

“What brought you here tonight?”

“What issue matters most to you right now?”

“What are you most worried about?”

“What do you hope will be different a year from now?”

These were the sort of open-ended questions I imagined would produce thoughtful answers in pursuit of my mission: understanding how Republican women make sense of the world. They also had the tactical advantage of putting me in control of the conversation. Better still, I hoped they might put people on the back foot, forcing them to defend beliefs that are usually accepted without challenge in their social circles.

I noticed three women in their fifties or sixties at a cocktail table near a lamppost that, despite dusk having barely arrived, had already attracted an orgy of gnats. Dressed in varying degrees of patriotic finery, they were laughing together when I approached.

They spotted me a few steps before I breached their social bubble and smiled politely. I returned the smile and opened my mouth, eager to seize the initiative with the first of my carefully prepared questions.

I never got the chance.

“What brought you here tonight?” she asked.

“Um…” I said.

“I’m proud to be an American,” I heard myself half-sing.

✦ ✦ ✦

Come back for Part 2.

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My conversation with these three women was only the start.

What followed was hours spent moving through a distinctly Orange County Republican ecosystem, navigating conversations with people who sincerely believe they are saving the country.

By night's end, I would find myself standing face-to-face with my congressperson, hoping her assistant didn't recognize me as the man who occasionally hand-delivers letters asking her to stop kissing Trump's ass and start representing her constituents.

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Books I'd save from the fire.

By Open Letters by Mersault

This essay is the fifth installment in my Among the Believers series, an ongoing effort to better understand the strange, contradictory, and often surprising coalition assembled around Donald Trump.

Previous entries have taken me to a MAGA focus group, a breakfast diner, a church, a “Christian” men's fellowship, and even my old gay stomping grounds.

This time, the fieldwork took place much closer to home: a neighborhood block party attended by several of the people whose Trump signs and flags had convinced me to avoid them for nearly two years.

If you're not already a subscriber, now would be a good time to fix that. My next Among the Believers adventure is already on the calendar. Assuming I survive it, you'll be the first to read about it.

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I don’t have a great memory—something my wife reminds me of more often than I’d like. I struggle to remember people’s names, important dates, where I left my keys. But I possess savant-level photographic recall for the homes in my neighborhood that were once festooned with Trump and MAGA regalia. Every flag, banner, yard sign, and display—from subtle to ridiculous—is etched into my brain with absurd clarity.

And not just on my street. My knowledge extends well beyond my block and into the winding streets that branch off all around it. Every route to the grocery store, the gym, or the freeway offered fresh opportunities for data collection. Some of this information was acquired passively. Some of it was acquired through what can only be described as reconnaissance.

The signs are gone now, but I could still point out the houses from memory. Ask me to label all fifty states and I'd struggle. Ask me to map the former MAGA outposts within a one-mile radius of my home and I'd produce something approaching a doctoral dissertation in historical geography.

It was among many of the residents cataloged in this mental atlas that I found myself mingling at a neighborhood block party last weekend.

I moved into an established suburban neighborhood in the spring of 2024. My nineteen-home cul-de-sac in conservative Orange County, California, was just one node in a vast suburban network of winding streets, tract homes, and indistinguishable beige stucco.

I'm a card-carrying introvert, and my long-standing strategy of avoiding unnecessary human interaction has not always produced ideal relationships with neighbors. So, in this new environment, I was determined to overcome my insular tendencies and, if not forge meaningful friendships, then at least maintain cordial relations with the people I'd routinely encounter while taking out the trash, collecting the mail, or weeding the yard.

For the first few months, everything was copacetic. I made a point of waving and smiling whenever we experienced the uniquely suburban phenomenon of finding ourselves outside at the same time and entering into a silent social contract that required mutual acknowledgment.

While the presidential election was still months away, I took the absence of political signage in front of people’s homes as a good sign. Maybe it’s the hyper-vigilant control freak in me, but I worried that the appearance of a flapping Trump-as-Rambo flag might puncture the carefully maintained suburban tranquility of the neighborhood—to say nothing of annoying the shit out of me.

My preference for solitude was about to be put to the test when, shortly after moving in, my wife and I were invited to the annual Summer Kickoff Block Party in early June. Perfect. An afternoon of standing around making forced small talk while conducting a risk assessment of the potato salad languishing in the sun. Anyway, determined to make good on my pledge to be a better neighbor, I went.

In the end, the event turned out fine. I successfully navigated several conversations of varying degrees of shallowness and somehow avoided mayonnaise-related food poisoning. I was pleased with myself, both because I had convincingly impersonated a sociable adult and because I had a full year before I'd be expected to do it again.

The residential serenity persisted—until July 13, 2024.

That was the day a bullet nicked Trump’s ear, producing a quantity of blood wildly disproportionate to the injury and, more importantly, one of the most politically useful photographs in modern American history: a disheveled and scowling presidential candidate with a raised fist and face streaked with blood.

With videos of the bloodied-but-unbowed buffoon replaying endlessly across television and social media, whatever reluctance my neighbors had about publicly supporting him evaporated. Virtually overnight, flags appeared. Banners appeared. Yard signs appeared.

My heart sank and blood pressure rose with each new piece of MAGA merchandise planted in a lawn, affixed to a window, or hoisted up a flagpole. One by one, neighbors revealed themselves. The experience was unnervingly similar to watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Stepford Wives as a kid: ordinary people who had seemed perfectly normal were suddenly identifiable as members of the same sinister collective.

In fact, I wrote about my complete refusal to be normal about any of this a month after the election in a piece called "An Open Letter to My Gloating MAGA Neighbor." It became the first article I'd written to flirt with virality. (It still holds up, if you ask me.)

Needless to say, my experiment in neighborliness came to an abrupt end. I had little interest in socializing with people I considered enablers of cruelty and stupidity.

Fast forward to seven months after the election. I was still so seethingly bitter about the result—and the role many of my neighbors had played in it—that my wife and I skipped the 2025 Summer Kickoff Block Party. And if you think no one noticed or cared about my boycott, I’ll have you know that several neighbors later told us how disappointed they were to miss the homemade California rolls* my wife had brought the year before. Apparently they had been looking forward to them all year.

They definitely missed her, at least.

* I recognize the hypocrisy of questioning the safety of sun-baked potato salad earlier in this essay when my own wife brought sushi to an outdoor gathering on a hot afternoon. In my defense, the California rolls were consumed almost immediately and therefore never had the chance to become a delivery system for foodborne bacteria.

Flash forward another year to last week, when I was once again confronted with an invitation to the dreaded annual Subdivision Festival of Mandatory Camaraderie. My reflexive reaction to this was to decline. After all, while my neighbors' MAGA signs may be down, their culpability for the horror show we've all been living through remains firmly in place. Few things have a longer shelf life than introversion paired with a grudge.

But then I remembered you, my faithful reader. I have committed myself to the ongoing project of better understanding the strange and varied coalition that has assembled itself around Trump. Having imposed this obligation on myself, I felt duty-bound to generate a field report (you know, content) for my dedicated Substack audience.

Could I possibly squeeze an article out of a simple neighborhood block party?

Well, you've read this far, so let's hope so.

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On the day of the event, I rummaged through what I call the Sedition Section of my closet—my collection of T-shirts designed to passive-aggressively communicate my political views to fellow suburbanites at Costco and Trader Joe's. (And the coffee shop I'm writing this in.)

There was the one that reads "PROTECT TRANS FOLKS." Another that says "RESIST FASCISM." Then, "BAN THE FASCISTS. SAVE THE BOOKS." Then "STOP PRETENDING YOUR RACISM IS PATRIOTISM." Then the decidedly less nuanced "ANTI TRUMP AF." And finally, for those who prefer their political messaging encoded, "8647."

I thought better of it. If I was going to engage in sensitive conversations, there seemed little point in telegraphing my views before saying a word. So I selected one of my many nondescript T-shirts, all of them some variation of dull, muted earth tones. If auras are real, mine is probably taupe. The shirt also had a front pocket, which provided a convenient place to keep my iPhone and quietly record the conversations.

I made my way up the street. Fashionably late. Not out of strategy, but because my wife was running behind with her homemade California rolls. As it turned out, this worked in my favor. Most of the men I intended to talk with were already a light beer or two into their afternoon and therefore considerably more conversational. I, on the other hand, did not have the benefit of any social lubricant, having given up drinking many years ago. I'd be entering the fray nursing a can of mango-flavored sparkling water.

I immediately recognized who the Trump supporters were even though it had been two years since I had spoken to them. Or waved at them. Or smiled at them. Neighborly relations having entered a prolonged period of diplomatic suspension. There were others, too. People I didn't recognize. Maybe friends of these neighbors. Maybe members of tribes from along the tract-home tributaries that snaked off from our own street, their customs and allegiances unknown to me.

Despite my true nature, I took it upon myself to break the ice in a cold war entirely of my own making. I’ll spare you the discussions of the weather (perpetually unchanged in SoCal), recent DIY landscaping accomplishments, and passionate analyses of basketball and baseball games I had not watched.

But it wasn't long before politics came up—and without any prompting from me. The California elections had taken place earlier that week, and votes were still being counted, as they often are in a state of forty million people that insists on counting all of them. With the Republican candidate for Los Angeles mayor—a reality-TV villain whose governing experience begins and ends with being mad online—slipping further behind as additional ballots were tallied, MAGA politicians and media figures were already portraying routine vote counting as evidence of a rigged election. As usual, the evidentiary spectrum ran from nonexistent to somehow even less existent.

This was a handy topic, as it immediately established a clear demarcation line. On one side stood sensible, reasonable, intelligent men who looked equally handsome in muted earth tones and anti-fascist T-shirts. On the other side stood... well, everyone else. (To be fair, that's an exaggeration. Not the intelligent-and-handsome part. The part about everyone else being on the other side. Stay tuned.)

"Big cheating by the Dumocrats," posited my fifty-something neighbor, a former enthusiast of multiple MAGA yard signs, wearing a garish Hawaiian shirt patterned with hibiscus flowers and beer bottles. (Did I say "posited"? I meant sputtered.)

Laughs all around. Who was laughing in agreement and who was laughing out of discomfort, I couldn’t say.

"Well, we know who's been watching Fox News," I said wryly, punctuating the remark with a well-timed sip of my bubble water.

Silence all around. Who was silent in agreement and who was silent out of discomfort, I couldn’t say.

"Why does this only happen in California?" wondered a man, not actually wondering. “There’s no reason ballot counting should take a month,” he continued, ignoring the fact that only four days had elapsed since the election.

To which I offered this bon mot: “There’s also no reason brain surgery should take twelve hours if you ignore accuracy.”

Somewhere in my mind, a studio audience applauded. But I got only a few chuckles. Who chuckled in agreement and who—oh, never mind.

"As for California, there are 23 million registered voters here," I said. "We bend over backward to make sure every eligible voter has an equal opportunity to vote. We mail ballots to everyone, verify signatures, process provisional ballots, and accept ballots that arrive after Election Day if they're postmarked on time. It shouldn't be shocking that counting takes longer than it does in some other states."

The Hawaiian-shirt guy responded, "Yeah. But still."

One of the neighbors, a thirty-something father of two who had recently moved in and lowered the median age of the street, jumped in to bolster the argument.

“Everyone I saw on Instagram voted for Pratt.”

I gave him a look and attempted to raise a skeptical eyebrow. Unfortunately, I have never mastered the art of raising just one.

One of the men I didn’t know offered that his mother had received an absentee ballot in the mail a year after she died. “I could have filled it out and sent it in,” he volunteered.

Then one of the neighbors I recognized as having displayed a Trump-Vance 2024 sign on his lawn jumped in. He explained that receiving a ballot and successfully casting a vote are two very different things. Voter rolls are updated using death records, including Social Security data, and returned ballots still have to pass signature verification and other checks. Then he concluded with:

“Contrary to popular belief, election security is not built entirely on the honor system.”

Oh snap! Maybe I like this guy... despite the inconvenience he posed to my preconceived notions.

I wanted to capitalize on this unexpected opening by pointing out that a candidate losing a lead isn't evidence of fraud. It's evidence that additional votes were counted. The fact that the process takes time may be frustrating, but frustration and fraud are not the same.

But before I could press my advantage, the wife of one of the known Trump-house guys arrived bearing provisions: a loaded plate of food for her husband, including what appeared to be an outsized allocation of my wife's much-discussed California rolls, and, for herself, a plastic cup of rosé.

"You boys excited about the new Costco gas station?" she asked, steering us away from talk of the stolen election. Probably for the best.

(Our city was a few weeks away from opening the first stand-alone Costco gas station in the country—a forty-pump, Shangri-La for discounted fuel. For members only. This had been the buzz among nearby suburban males since it was announced the previous year. Or so I assume. I hadn't been speaking to nearby suburban males since, well, you know.)

Of course, this set us off talking about gas prices, the war with Iran, Trump's Historic Iran Deal, the collapse of the Historic Iran Deal, the replacement Historic Iran Deal, and whatever the current status of the Historic Iran Deal happened to be at that particular moment.

This changed the course of the conversation. The Hawaiian-shirt “Dumocrat” guy and the thirty-something Instagram guy fell silent. Then another neighbor—one whose lawn I recalled had hosted both a Trump sign and, if memory serves, one reading “Save America”—spoke up.

“I was done after the Epstein file cover-up.”

Another said, “I was done after gas hit five dollars a gallon.”

Apparently pedophiles and petroleum were the issues that finally broke the spell. (For the record, gas is currently six dollars a gallon in California. At Costco!)

One of the quieter guys in the group weighed in. I would later learn that he had spent twenty years in the Air Force as a munitions systems specialist and had served in the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Bosnia. “[The war with Iran] is pretty fucking absurd and just outright stupid. Israel found the perfect idiot in Trump. Real soldiers abhor violence. If boots hit ground, this will be our Vietnam except worse.”

Another guy, whose large pickup truck I seem to recall bearing both a Trump-Vance bumper sticker and a “Let’s Go Brandon” decal, offered his assessment: “Sending troops into Iran to grab uranium canisters sounds like the plot of a bad action movie. Glad somebody pumped the brakes on that one.”

I either literally or figuratively folded my arms and wore a self-satisfied grin as these guys did the work for me. Not only did I not have to talk much (always my preferred setting), but they were generating excellent material for an essay.

This essay.

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The membership of this Block-Party Think Tank ebbed and flowed as food, family obligations, and the beer cooler pulled people in different directions. But a core group of eight remained remarkably constant. Six of them had, at one point or another, decorated their homes, vehicles, or bodies with Trump-related paraphernalia.

And five of those six—83 percent, a statistically significant sample in the field of driveway sociology—said things like:

“I voted for cheaper groceries, not this.”

“Everything I believed was going to happen under a Trump presidency has since gone the opposite direction.”

“They gutted tons of programs and still managed to spike the debt.”

“And what is this crap about no IRS audits? The guy’s a billionaire. He should be audited like everybody else. I thought he was going to clean up corruption, not legalize it.”

“My mom called me panicking because she’s no longer covered [by Medicare].”

“They’d better not fucking bankrupt Social Security. I want to retire in five years.”

“My cousin lives in Florida and his Cuban fiancée got swept up by ICE. He says he’ll never vote Republican again.”

“I think the absolute worst is RFK Jr. If we have another global pandemic in the next five years, it’ll be because of that asshole.”

“In Trump world it’s only, ‘What can you do for me?’ Vance’s usefulness has been used up, so he’s been thrown away.”

“The dude [Donald J. Trump] can’t stay awake.”

One of the men warned that if Democrats regained power, they’d impeach Trump on day one.

“Good. That’s what we need.” He then added:

“It’s insanity that a president can take away your health insurance with the stroke of a pen.”

(“It’s also pretty great when a president can give you health insurance with the stroke of a pen,” I thought, briefly gazing into the middle distance as I remembered President Obama.)

For someone who had spent the previous two years silently sorting houses into categories like “Trump House” and “Not Trump House,” all of this felt encouraging. The complaints were specific, personal, and often entirely reasonable. These weren’t people celebrating the state of things. They were worried about groceries, health insurance, Social Security, corruption, war, and immigration policies that had affected people they knew.

What also struck me was what never came up. Nobody talked about DEI. Nobody brought up transgender people. No culture-war topics. I'm sure many of them have opinions on those subjects. But that afternoon they were far more focused on the problems actually affecting their lives than on the cultural boogeymen that politicians and media personalities endlessly invoke for ratings, clicks, and votes.

Still, I couldn’t help noticing where many of these criticisms stopped.

The prevailing sentiment was that Trump had failed. He’d broken promises. He’d surrounded himself with the wrong people. He wasn’t delivering the results they had expected.

What I heard much less often was the possibility that the results and the promises had never been quite as separate as they imagined.

In other words, many had lost confidence in the chef. They were less willing to question the recipe.

The lone exception, it seemed, was the potato salad. Nobody touched that.

So where does this leave our neighborhood cold war?

Will I start approaching them in their garages to borrow hedge trimmers? Probably not. Will I be inviting everyone over for game night? Also no. I remain deeply skeptical of many of their political judgments. I suspect the feeling is mutual.

But I will probably wave.

And maybe even smile.

At least until we see what happens in November.

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If you enjoyed this installment, the earlier entries are waiting for you on my homepage. And if you’re not already a subscriber, I hope you’ll consider it. My next Among the Believers adventure is already scheduled. With any luck, it’ll make for a good story—and subscribers will be the first to read it.

Check out my other publication, The Stranger’s Library, where I write about books, culture, and the occasionally bewildering business of being human.

The Stranger's Library

Books I'd save from the fire.

By Open Letters by Mersault

In my late teens and early twenties, I spent a good deal of time in gay bars, on gay beaches, and throughout the wider archipelago of gay life.

I was not gay.

Am not gay.

Then again, I have never found the available categories especially satisfactory. Sexuality strikes me as a spectrum, not a set of mutually exclusive boxes to check.

My immersion in this world came about for two reasons.

The first was Greg, my best friend. We attended the same college, made pizzas together at the same pizza place, and had been friends for a couple of years before it occurred to me to ask him.

“Are you gay?”

“Yes, I’m a gay man,” he replied with a straightforwardness and confidence that I have never forgotten.

The second reason was geography.

We lived near Laguna Beach, the once-sleepy artists’ colony that, in the 1970s and early 1980s, boasted one of the largest gay populations on the West Coast outside San Francisco. It functioned as the undisputed capital of gay Orange County—a place not otherwise known for its social liberalism. There was always something happening, and the scene was welcoming, vibrant, and genuinely fun to be around. For anyone growing up nearby, it was difficult not to be drawn into its orbit.

I look back on those days—the crowded bars and dance floors, the sunburned afternoons on the beach, the house parties overlooking the Pacific, and the seemingly endless calendar of occasions to eat, drink, laugh, and stay out too late—with tremendous affection. Those were among the happiest and most carefree days of my life.

Then came AIDS.

It is difficult to convey to younger generations how abruptly the mood changed. A community that had seemed perpetually in motion suddenly found itself keeping vigil at hospital bedsides and attending funerals. The epidemic was devastating enough. It became more devastating still when it was met with indifference, stigma, and political neglect. The Reagan administration's slow and inadequate response remains one of the great moral failures of the era.

Not long after college ended, Greg moved to San Francisco and I moved to Japan. We lost touch.

When I eventually returned to the United States, I settled in New York, where I spent more than twenty years building a career and raising a family. A few years ago, life carried me back to Southern California, where I walk the same beaches and wander the same streets I knew decades ago.

I still love Laguna Beach, but it is not the same place. The gay community is largely gone. The town is more crowded now, and the once-sleepy artists' colony has, in turn, been colonized by aspiring social media influencers, all of them seemingly engaged in the urgent business of photographing themselves.

It was there, amid the boutiques, tourists, and selfie-taking pilgrims, that I met two leaders of the Log Cabin Republicans.

Founded in 1977 and named in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s humble origins, the Log Cabin Republicans were created to advance gay equality from within the Republican Party. Their founders believed the GOP could be persuaded to become more accepting of gay Americans.

That project failed.

If anything, the modern Republican Party has moved in the opposite direction. As the party has become increasingly shaped by Trumpism, Christian nationalism, and culture-war politics, the Log Cabin Republicans have changed as well. A group once dedicated to reforming the Republican Party now spends much of its time defending it.

What began as an effort to make the Republican Party more accepting of gay people has, in many respects, become an effort to make gay people more accepting of the Republican Party.

I met the two men, whom I will call Anthony and William, at a middling Mexican restaurant in Laguna Beach. Anthony had sandy blond hair, a neatly trimmed beard, and the relaxed, upbeat demeanor of a young professional. William, older and more conventionally polished, wore a burgundy blazer and carried himself with the practiced ease of someone accustomed to working a room.

Decades earlier, the same building had housed one of the town’s most famous gay clubs. When I mentioned the building’s history, neither had heard of it. They were simply too young to remember the world that had existed there before.

In the email proposing the meeting, I explained that many of my readers found the Log Cabin Republicans difficult to understand. They viewed Trumpism and the modern Republican Party as fundamentally at odds with LGBTQ equality and wanted to understand how gay conservatives saw things differently. Where did they feel at home within the movement? What did they believe their critics were missing? And how did they navigate the obvious tensions between their identity and their politics?

I had promised there would be no gotcha questions. Unfortunately, my opening question turned out to be more difficult to answer than I had anticipated.

“Your organization takes its name from the humble origins of Abraham Lincoln. What do you think Lincoln would make of today’s Republican Party?”

William adjusted his blazer and sat up straighter.

“That’s... a really good question,” he said after a pause.

“I mean, obviously none of us can know what Lincoln would think about modern politics. A lot has changed. The parties have changed. The country has changed.”

He glanced at Anthony.

“But I think he’d still recognize a commitment to individual liberty. To... equality under the law. To opportunity. I think those are values that are still very much present in the Republican Party.”

The answer seemed sincere. It was also incomplete and oddly ahistorical.

The Republican Party has reinvented itself several times since Lincoln's death. The party of abolition became the party of Gilded Age industrialists. Later it embraced the Southern Strategy and built a coalition that included many of the fiercest opponents of the civil rights movement. Today it is increasingly defined by nationalism, cultural grievance, and a politics of exclusion that Lincoln would likely find difficult to recognize.

The Log Cabin Republicans still invoke Lincoln, though more as mascot than mentor.

In an effort to establish my LGBTQ bona fides with them (not that I really had to), I told them that during college I joined what was then called the Gay-Straight Alliance—a coalition of LGBTQ students and what we’d now call allies. We raised money for gay causes and pushed for equal treatment and practical rights on campus, such as allowing same-sex couples access to married faculty housing years before marriage equality existed. We opposed anti-gay legislation, including efforts to bar gay and lesbian people from teaching in public schools.

They reacted favorably enough, but it felt dutiful rather than heartfelt. The vanished world I was describing appeared to hold little significance for them.

Anthony, the younger of the two, interjected with a comment that neatly captured their worldview.

"We're accepted by most Republicans," he said. "We want the same things everybody else wants. We want to build careers, support our families, live our lives. We just want to be left alone. And Republicans are completely fine with that."

I had heard variations of this argument before. It rested on a simple premise: the fight had been won.

“If Republicans were as welcoming as he believed, why had LGBTQ voters overwhelmingly rejected Trump at the ballot box,” I asked.

Over the next several minutes, Anthony and William elaborated on a point that would surface repeatedly throughout our conversation. Conservative gays, they argued, feel sufficiently secure in their rights under Trump that their sexuality no longer occupies a central place in their political decision-making.

“We already have marriage,” Anthony said. “We can have families. We can work wherever we want. Nobody’s stopping us from living our lives.”

William agreed. “A lot of people don’t wake up every morning thinking about being gay,” he said. “They’re thinking about their jobs, their mortgages, their retirement accounts. They vote on the issues that affect them day to day.”

The same logic extended to transgender issues.

“Not every issue under the LGBTQ umbrella is the same,” Anthony said. “A lot of people feel those debates don't really involve them.”

As I listened, I realized that neither man viewed politics through the lens of solidarity. They viewed it through the lens of self-interest. The rights they personally enjoyed felt secure. The battles that remained were someone else's battles.

What surprised me was not merely their confidence, but their apparent lack of historical perspective.

Both men had come of age in a world where many of the major fights had already been won. They had never known a time when gay people could be fired for being gay, excluded from military service, denied housing, or forced to hide their relationships from employers, neighbors, and family members. They had not lived through the AIDS crisis, the struggle for marriage equality, or the long fight for basic social acceptance.

To them, these victories appeared less like hard-won achievements than the natural state of affairs. They had inherited the destination without taking part in the journey.

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That history seemed relevant when the conversation turned to transgender people.

A great many conservative gays distance themselves from transgender people, a group fighting many of the same battles for recognition, dignity, and legal protection. But this did not appear to inspire much sympathy. If anything, the subject seemed to produce irritation. The struggles of others were viewed less as a continuation of a shared civil-rights project than as an unwelcome distraction from issues they considered more important.

“Don't gay men feel some solidarity with trans people?” I asked Anthony. “A lot of the arguments being made against trans people today were once made against gay people. The accusations. Groomers. Threats to children. Dangers to society. Doesn't that all sound awfully familiar?”

Anthony took a sip of his margarita and glanced at William.

“I think a lot of gay conservatives don’t want to be lumped together with the TQ+ side of the community,” William said. “For a lot of us, those are separate issues. I’m a gay man. I’m comfortable in my biological sex. What they’re talking about doesn’t really have anything to do with my life.”

There it was. The same argument, stripped to its essence. The attacks were different because they were aimed at someone else. It was difficult to escape the conclusion that, having climbed the ladder, they saw little reason to keep it standing for those still below.

Then Anthony used a phrase that earned him a look from William.

“We represent the normal gay guy,” he said. “We’re the normal ones.”

William laughed—the sort of laugh one deploys when attempting to gently steer a colleague away from dangerous terrain. “We care about a broad range of issues,” he said, quickly changing course. “Crime, immigration, taxes, gun rights—”

“None of the crazy stuff,” Anthony interjected, apparently oblivious to William’s attempt at damage control.

The exchange lasted only a few seconds, but it was revealing. Anthony seemed eager to distinguish himself from other members of the LGBTQ community (one assumes the T and perhaps the Q), particularly those whose politics, activism, or gender identities might make conservatives uncomfortable. William, by contrast, appeared to understand that saying the quiet part out loud was unlikely to help their cause.

Up to this point, I had mostly listened. I had come to understand, not to argue. But this was where I felt compelled to push back.

"It seems to me," I said, "that once you establish that one group of LGBTQ people is undeserving of equal treatment, it's much easier to revisit the rights of everyone else."

I mentioned the latest Gallup poll. After decades of steadily rising acceptance, support for same-sex marriage and the moral acceptability of same-sex relationships had begun moving in the opposite direction. The decline was concentrated almost entirely among Republicans and had accelerated further during the Trump years.

Today, roughly two-thirds of Republicans oppose same-sex marriage and believe same-sex relationships are morally wrong. In other words, only a small minority of Republicans support the central legal and social gains of the modern gay rights movement. Those are not the numbers of a party that has made peace with gay people. They are the numbers of a party growing increasingly uncomfortable with them.

“Honestly, I think a lot of those poll responses are about religion more than gay people,” William said. “Someone can check a box saying they don’t think same-sex relationships are morally ideal and still have gay friends, gay coworkers, even gay family members they love.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But if someone believes my marriage shouldn’t exist and my relationship is morally wrong, I’m not sure how much comfort I’m supposed to take from the fact that they’re polite about it.”

“Touché,” Anthony conceded, lifting his margarita.

William, employing his committee-presentation voice once again, leaned forward and began itemizing what he saw as evidence of Trump’s support for gay Americans. He ticked off examples on his fingers.

“Scott Bessent. Ric Grenell.”

Bessent is Trump’s Treasury Secretary. Grenell served as Acting Director of National Intelligence during Trump’s first term and currently serves as a presidential envoy. Both men are openly gay and are frequently cited by the Log Cabin Republicans as evidence that gay conservatives have found a home within the modern Republican Party.

"But look at the judges he appointed," I said. "Look at the activists, media personalities, and culture warriors he elevated. Look at the people surrounding him."

I pointed to the Supreme Court, where conservative justices have made little secret of their desire to revisit the legal foundations of modern gay rights. Justice Clarence Thomas has openly invited challenges to Obergefell, the decision that legalized same-sex marriage. Across the country, Republican lawmakers continue searching for ways to roll back LGBTQ protections one exception, exemption, and loophole at a time.

I mentioned Pete Hegseth, who has railed against the integration of openly gay service members into the military and attached himself to a brand of Christian nationalism that views much of modern LGBTQ equality as a mistake.

Beyond any one individual, I saw an administration crowded with Christian nationalists, culture warriors, anti-LGBTQ activists, and politicians who had spent years opposing gay rights, questioning marriage equality, or treating LGBTQ people as a useful political target.

“These are not people who think the fight is over,” I said. “They’re people who think they lost the last round.”

Until this point, much of our conversation had focused on rights, laws, and political threats. But those topics alone did not explain the attraction. They explained why Anthony and William were not alarmed by the Republican Party. They did not explain why they were drawn to it.

The answer, it turned out, had less to do with policy than culture.

William, dispensing with his committee-presentation voice, leaned forward and lowered his own. He waited for a middle-aged heterosexual couple to pass our table and be seated before continuing.

“Can I be really honest?” he asked.

I assured him he could.

“I think a lot of gay men actually like traditional masculinity.”

Anthony nodded vigorously. “Absolutely.”

“The left just seems to have a problem with masculinity,” William continued. “A lot of us don't see it that way. We admire it. The idea that a man should be strong, dependable, take responsibility. Have a family. Build something. Be the person others can rely on.”

He paused. “I think that’s why we like Trump. He brought back masculinity. The protector. The guy who takes charge. The guy who doesn’t apologize for being a man.”

“Everything on the left is about toxic masculinity,” Anthony chimed in. “Any gay person who is threatened by Trump has been brainwashed by left-wing propaganda.”

William inhaled slowly through his nose.

“If you look at the gay MAGA movement, a lot of these guys are drawn to traditional masculinity,” William said. “They admire manliness. They’re attracted to it, and a lot of them want to embody it too.”

The right's fascination with traditional masculinity and conventional gender roles was not something they tolerated despite being gay. It was part of the appeal. That observation helped explain much of what had previously puzzled me. Progressives often assume that gay men will be natural critics of traditional masculinity. Anthony and William saw things very differently. To them, masculinity was not a social problem to be solved. It was something to be admired, desired, and, where possible, emulated.

When we stood to leave, I found myself thinking about the history of the building. Decades earlier it had been one of Laguna Beach’s most famous gay clubs. Neither Anthony nor William had known that. That small exchange lingered with me.

The vanished world the building represented contained multitudes: the music, the packed dance floors, the chosen families, the friendships and romances, and the exhilaration of finding one’s people; then came the grief of the AIDS years, the protests, the political battles, and the long struggle for equality. Much of that history felt strangely absent from the conversation we had just had.

Anthony and William inherited the fruits of those struggles. What I could never quite determine was whether they understood how recently they had been won.

Or how easily they might be lost.

After we said our goodbyes, I walked to the beach and sat for a while watching the waves. I found myself thinking not about Anthony or William, but about my daughter.

She is a transgender woman.

In many respects, her life resembles that of countless other young adults, with all the same hopes, ambitions, and uncertainties that tend to accompany one’s twenties. She’s building a career, hoping to find companionship, and trying to determine what kind of life will ultimately feel meaningful and fulfilling.

But there is another layer to her experience that most young adults do not have to navigate.

A substantial portion of the country regards people like her with suspicion, fear, or outright hostility. Politicians build careers attacking people like her. Media personalities turn them into threats, predators, or cultural villains. At an age when most young adults are already struggling to figure out who they are and where they belong, she must also carry the knowledge that millions of strangers have been encouraged to question her identity, dismiss her dignity, and even deny her right to exist as herself.

She lives in another city now, one far more accepting than many places in America. Even so, I worry about her every day. I worry about violence. I worry about discrimination. I worry about the cumulative effects of stigma. Most of all, I worry about what it does to a person to spend a lifetime hearing—explicitly or implicitly—that who they are is somehow unacceptable.

Fortunately, I have someone with whom I can share those worries.

A few years ago, Greg and I reconnected after decades apart. He is married now and lives in Arizona with his husband. We speak regularly, and when concerns about my daughter begin to spiral in my mind, Greg is often the person I call. He understands things I never will, and there is comfort in that.

Watching the shadows lengthen across the beach, what troubled me was not merely Anthony and William's lack of historical memory or their apparent indifference to those now experiencing many of the same forces once directed at gay people.

It was the larger ecosystem in which that indifference has become a political virtue.

An ecosystem populated by religious zealots, culture warriors, opportunistic politicians, and professional grievance merchants, all of whom benefit when LGBTQ people are transformed from neighbors into enemies. Such movements do not succeed through hostility alone. They depend upon otherwise decent people convincing themselves that the hostility is exaggerated, justified, or someone else’s problem.

Anthony and William did not strike me as hateful men.

That was precisely what made the conversation so unsettling.

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Check out my other publication, The Stranger’s Library, where I write about books, culture, and the occasionally bewildering business of being human.

The Stranger's Library

Books I'd save from the fire.

By Open Letters by Mersault

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In Part I of my ill-advised field study into America’s Christian nationalist movement, I attended my first-ever church service, a Sunday morning sermon inside a Calvary Chapel evangelical church where the teachings of Jesus arrived wrapped in the language of cultural collapse, political grievance, and low-grade civilizational panic.

What I encountered there did not feel like Christianity broadly speaking, nor even religion in the ordinary sense. It felt like a closed emotional ecosystem organized around fear, certainty, and the intoxicating pleasure of believing oneself persecuted while surrounded by hundreds of like-minded people inside a sprawling multimillion-dollar house of worship.

To my surprise, I largely managed to keep my composure through the sermon itself. Unfortunately, the sermon turned out to be the easy part. Because after the service came the Men’s Group. And somewhere between the conspiratorial panic and the relentless moral certitude, my already-fragile commitment to polite anthropological observation began to fail rather spectacularly.

So if you were hoping Part II might offer some reassuring glimpse of reconciliation, introspection, or common ground, you may want to stop reading now.

Yeah. I knew you’d keep reading. It’s the same reason people lean closer to the television when the news anchor says, “We want to warn you: some viewers may find what you’re about to see disturbing.”

I don’t judge you.

Unlike the congregation I had just spent the morning with, who somehow managed to transform Jesus’ teachings about mercy, humility, compassion, and moral responsibility into a theological rationale for viewing liberals, secular society, and anyone outside their worldview as agents of moral contamination and civilizational decline.

As I made my way toward the Men’s Group, I didn’t know what to expect. After spending the previous hour listening to a pastor explain how Jesus’ metaphors were meant to function within the political realities of modern America (i.e., the supposed collapse of traditional America), I half imagined I was walking into some kind of Christian masculinity support group for men emotionally devastated by pronouns.

I was greeted at the door by another pastor, our host — a physically imposing man enthusiastically glad-handing everyone as they entered. He was dressed casually but with obvious strategic intent: a much-too-tight black T-shirt designed to emphasize his thick forearms and unnecessarily large pectorals, faded jeans, heavy boots, and enough tattoos spilling out of his sleeves and above the collar line to suggest a colorful personal history. He had the sort of thick, rugged beard that suggested he could be equally at home hauling lobster traps off the coast of Maine or storming the Capitol on January 6.

Everything about him projected masculine certainty. The sort of rugged authority that suggested his garage was a highly organized shrine to power tools and firearms.

Look, I’m a few inches taller than the average American man, capable of growing a beard if desired, and able to manufacture confidence when the situation calls for it. But I’ve never been comfortable around aggressively macho men like this. Sure, some of it is intimidation. I do not consider myself an alpha male. I don’t own a truck, I don’t smoke my own meat, I don’t take gym selfies, I prefer indie dramas to action movies, I’ve read a Jane Austen novel, and the only sport I watch is the Olympics. (Even the events where America gets humbled by tiny Scandinavian countries.)

But I also think men like this are trying too hard. They often strike me less as naturally masculine than as men performing masculinity for one another. Like they’ve spent years carefully modeling themselves after a culturally sanctioned fantasy of toughness built from professional wrestling, military iconography, and protein powder advertisements.

Also, I think the guy may have sprained a few of my fingers when he shook my hand.

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I had entered the Men’s Group with little time to spare, having stood in line to get my fourth cup of coffee that morning. (Readers of Part I will recognize that as roughly 300% more coffee than I typically drink in a day.) The room itself was smaller and more intimate than the theater where the sermon had taken place. Folding chairs faced a microphone and projection screen, and the air carried the faintly musty, stale smell I have always associated with church basements, despite never having actually been inside one before. In total, around seventy-five men attended, ranging from what appeared to be their seventies down to their twenties. I slipped into one of the last available seats. Third row. Close enough to make eye contact. A tactical error that would soon prove costly.

I worried I was about to endure another lengthy lecture without the opportunity to speak, but the man beside me—an affable fellow with an endearing laugh and the sort of face that suggested we might have become friends under different ideological circumstances—assured me there would eventually be audience questions and discussion.

As I subtly opened and closed my hand a few times, flexing my fingers to make sure everything still worked, our tattooed facilitator strode to the front of the room, radiating such concentrated masculine energy that I could practically hear the testosterone pumping through his veins — not all of it necessarily his.

He began with a series of loud grunts and hollers that carried the unmistakable energy of a gorilla establishing dominance within the troop. I immediately heard David Attenborough narrating somewhere in the back of my mind: “Here we observe the mature suburban male attempting to assert status through ritualized vocal displays and inflation of the upper torso.”

I don’t know what the other guys in the room were feeling, but mentally I had already rolled over and exposed my soft underbelly to the dominant male.

He started with a booming albeit syntactically awkward announcement: “Alright brothers, we going to do this in a manfully way!” The room answered with approving hoots and barks before he launched into something that sounded like a Marine drill instructor leading marching cadences. He chanted. The room echoed him back.

“Hail Jesus, you’re my king / your life frees me to sing.”

He carried on for several minutes, eventually forcing rhymes with the reckless confidence of a man who had clearly spent far more time developing his physique than his ear for phonetics. “Lord” / “word.” “Judah” / “are.” “Lamb” / “land.” Nevertheless, I found myself clapping and halfheartedly chanting along, lest anyone begin to suspect I was not, in fact, there to reclaim biblical masculinity alongside the others.

He called himself Pastor Dan, a title that does not necessarily imply formal theological education. He got straight to the point.

“The Lord has laid it on my heart, dear brothers, to talk to you about identity.” He pronounced that last word slowly and heavily, as though unveiling some sacred and endangered concept. “Do you know who you are? There are traitors to the cause of Christ today trying to unhook men from the Old Testament, which gives us authority over women. To take away what God divinely ordained.” Then, lowering his voice into a low theatrical menace, he added: “I will tell you right now: they will be judged by the Lord Himself.”

Whoa. Blessed are the meek this was not.

His monologue lasted approximately twenty minutes and produced the following spiritual and philosophical insights:

“We’re supposed to be men. We are called to rule. Jesus was a man’s man. He would break the serpent’s head. And he will dash the nations in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” (Here he punched the lectern for emphasis. I instinctively opened and closed my hand again to check whether full mobility had returned.)

“God made men dangerous. We need to raise warriors, not soft men.”

“Men were built for battle.”

“The culture wants to feminize men. The church has become feminized.”

“Christianity is not a religion of weakness.”

“Biblical masculinity is under attack.”

He cited Scripture to justify all of these ideas. Whether the cited passages support his conclusions is a matter I leave to biblical scholars. I’m working from a clandestine iPhone recording, not a seminary degree.

“Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.” (Psalm 144:1)

“The Lord is a man of war.” (Exodus 15:3)

“Act like men, be strong.” (1 Corinthians 16:13)

“Endure hardship as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.” (2 Timothy 2:3)

Whatever else may be said, the man knew his Bible.

He did make me genuinely laugh once when he joked(?) that the only properly manly way to apply ChapStick was to have your woman apply it first and then “kiss it off her.” If nothing else, he was committed to the bit.

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Only an hour earlier, the church had been discussing the Beatitudes and Jesus’ blessings on the meek, the merciful, and the peacemakers. What followed in the men’s group went considerably further. This was not merely Christianity deployed in service of a culture war. It was a vision of militant masculinity organized around hierarchy, conflict, and the need for enemies.

What struck me was the enthusiasm. The men weren’t grim. They weren’t frightened. They seemed energized by the idea that they were living in a moment of civilizational crisis.

Having spent twenty minutes exhorting us to become dangerous warriors capable of ruling nations with rods of iron, he then invited the room to share their feelings.

“Where are you being challenged as a man?”

Silence. None of the warriors wanted to go first.

“Who’s got something they’re wrestling with?”

More silence.

“Who needs prayer today?”

The first brave soul was a man in his thirties who offered not a testimony but a tribute to Pastor Dan.

“I’ve been tired of not being able to speak my mind. Then I found somebody who knows how to say the things I want to say. I memorize what you say so I can repeat it to...” At this point the sentence wandered off into the desert and never returned.

Pastor Dan seemed pleased by this declaration of intellectual outsourcing.

Another man stood.

“I have tried to be the best man I can up to this point, but I am at a crossroads to whether I’m man enough in this fallen world.”

The response:

“Let me ask you something: Are you leading your family? Are you in the Word? Are you taking responsibility for your life? Are you standing firm when the culture tells you not to? Then you’re already on the right path! The question is whether you’re willing to stand up like a man, carry your cross, and do what God’s called you to do. Stop second-guessing yourself and start walking in the authority God gave you as a man.”

Over the next thirty minutes, the discussion yielded the following revelations:

“Public schools are government indoctrination centers.”

“Covid was tyranny.”

“The LGBTQ agenda is spiritual warfare.”

“People are being manipulated by empathy.”

“Untethered empathy” is a liberal tool designed to undermine authority and masculinity.

“Compromise is cowardice.”

“There is no such thing as toxic masculinity in men. The problem is not toxic masculinity. The problem is the absence of masculinity.”

“Feminism didn’t leave women free. It left women abandoned.”

“A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

“We are in a spiritual war for the soul of America.”

“The Constitution was written only for a moral and religious people.”

“We need to be taking America back for God.”

In the waning minutes another man stood.

“I feel so guilty and it’s been something I’m dealing with. I want to imitate Jesus, but I don't know if I'm becoming the kind of man He wants me to be.”

Now that struck me as an interesting question. Not whether he was strong enough. Not whether he was dangerous enough. Not whether he was masculine enough. Whether he was a good imitator of Jesus.

Alas…

“Brother, stop trying to act like a man and start being one. The Bible says, ‘Gird up your loins like a man’ (Job 38:3). It says, ‘Act like men, be strong’ (1 Corinthians 16:13). Stop staring into your own navel. Read your Bible. Take responsibility. Lead your family. Stop apologizing. Stop second-guessing yourself. The world has enough soft men already. ‘God didn’t give you a spirit of fear. He gave you a spirit of power’ (2 Timothy 1:7).”

I leaned to that guy next to me and whispered:

"I think the official answer is, lift more weights."

My neighbor laughed. Far louder than my quip deserved. It was not endearing this time. It was mortifying. I dared not look up. Then, against my better judgment, I looked up. The silverback pastor was staring directly at us.

“Have you got a testimony, brothers?”

My neighbor demurred. Then I could feel him looking at me, silently volunteering me to respond.

Judas.

Not wanting to look weak, I spoke.

“When a man says he’s trying to imitate Jesus, why is your first instinct to talk about strength rather than compassion?”

The guy next to me let out a nervous laugh. I swear to God, I wanted to punch him.

Pastor Dan’s expression changed instantly. His face reddened beneath the beard. Somebody in the room was not on the team.

“Brother, that’s exactly the question the culture wants you asking. Compassion is easy. Compassion gets applause. Compassion costs you nothing. The devil can counterfeit compassion just as easily as he can counterfeit kindness or mercy. That’s why we’re in the mess we’re in. People are manipulated by empathy every day. The Bible doesn’t say, ‘Blessed are the nice.’ It says there is ‘a time for war’ (Ecclesiastes 3:8). It says, ‘Be strong and courageous’ (Joshua 1:9).

You know what got us here? Men confusing compassion with surrender. Men who won’t confront evil because they don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Men who won’t lead because they’re afraid of being called controlling. Men who won’t speak truth because they’re afraid of being called hateful. Brother, when compassion becomes more important than truth, compassion becomes a weapon. That’s how churches get captured. That’s how nations fall. That’s how men become weak. Satan doesn’t show up with horns and a pitchfork. He shows up asking you to be reasonable. He shows up asking you to compromise. He shows up asking you to empathize with rebellion. That’s why the Bible says, ‘The fear of man lays a snare’ (Proverbs 29:25). The question isn’t whether Jesus was compassionate. The question is whether you’re courageous enough to do what compassion cannot.”

There was no turning back now. So I said:

“You say compassion is easy. I don’t know. Forgiving people isn’t easy. Welcoming outsiders isn’t easy. Refusing to judge people isn’t easy. Showing mercy isn’t easy. Washing other people’s feet isn’t easy. Most of the things Jesus commanded seem really hard. What sounds easy is finding enemies. What sounds easy is convincing yourself you’re strong because you’re angry.”

At this point I was having something of an out-of-body experience, but I pressed on.

“Frankly, if I brought a non-Christian into this room this morning and asked him what the central theme of Christianity was, I don’t think he’d say love. I don’t think he’d say mercy. I think he’d say power. He’d say domination. He’d say masculinity. He’d say battle. And that’s exactly what—”

Pastor Dan cut me off.

Smiling broadly at the audience, he said, “I think we do have a non-Christian here.”

The room exploded.

Pastor Dan beamed.

“Brother, you’ve got enough compassion for the whole room. What I’m not hearing is much conviction.”

More laughter.

Then came the coup de grâce.

“If masculinity makes you this uncomfortable, you’re in the wrong room.”

The room erupted again.

A perfect line. A perfect audience. A perfect ending.

At that point the meeting was running long. Men were beginning to gather their things. Wives were waiting elsewhere in the complex.

But Pastor Dan wasn’t finished.

“If the Romans had shown up to arrest Jesus, I suspect you'd have volunteered to carry their spears."

More laughter.

That last part felt a little sinister. I made my way to the exit. As I did, a man in his fifties or sixties delivered one final message directly to me:

“The liberal mind is at war with God.”

It was, in many ways, the perfect closing statement. The meeting had begun with masculinity under siege and ended with half the country enlisted in Satan’s army. The thematic arc was impeccable.

I realized something unsettling. Nearly every major theme that morning had revolved around enemies, decline, corruption, weakness, and threat. Very little of it had revolved around Jesus. The implication was extraordinary. Compassion itself had become suspect. Caring too much about the suffering of others was no longer a virtue. It was a liability. Empathy was no longer a moral strength. It was a trap. Mercy was no longer evidence of Christian character. It was a pathway to compromise.

In this worldview, the greatest danger was not hardness of heart. It was softness.

The church wasn’t far from the ocean. I always keep a bathing suit and beach gear in my car for occasions such as these.

To me, the ocean is spirituality. Not because it has answers. Quite the opposite. Because it reminds me how small I am. Because it makes answers seem less important. The ocean does not care about my politics, my tribe, my ideology, or my grievances. It simply exists—vast, indifferent, beautiful, terrifying, and impossible to control.

If God exists, I suspect They are more like the ocean.

So I drove to the beach.

I sat for a while listening to the waves collapse against the shore. Then I waded into the water until I was chest-high. Then I ducked beneath the surface. For a few seconds there was only silence.

When I came back up, exhilarated and shivering, it felt as though I had washed something off. Not sin exactly. More like residue. The accumulated psychic grime of spending three hours inside a room where everyone seemed furious at the modern world.

I suppose it felt a little like a baptism.

Oh wait. I think that’s a different denomination.

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In recent weeks, my Among the Believers series has chronicled my attempts to understand the psychology of committed Trump supporters by spending time with them in environments that would not normally qualify as emotionally healthy for me. The response to the first two entries in these journalistic adventures — I Lied My Way Into a MAGA Focus Group and A Funny Thing Happened Over Breakfast With Trump Voters — has been robust, and somewhat surprising.

Across both discussions, many readers found some small measure of hope in the moments where certainty among the Trump faithful began to crack. Not because anyone believed these voters were suddenly going to emerge from a Cracker Barrel reborn as democratic socialists, but because, for the first time in a long time, readers saw Trump supporters expressing doubt, contradiction, regret, loneliness, and flashes of genuine self-awareness instead of the usual performance of total conviction.

A lot of readers seemed moved by the possibility that beneath the slogans, Fox News diatribes, Facebook meme warfare, and tribal dogma, there might still exist actual people in there. Flawed people. Frustrating people. Sometimes profoundly misinformed people. But still people. And for many readers, that alone felt strangely hopeful.

Which is odd for me to process, because I never set out to become a supplier of hope regarding the demographic I have spent the better part of a decade despising. I do not want to romanticize these people. I do not want to excuse them. And I certainly do not want this mistaken for appeasement toward a movement that has inflicted enormous damage on the country, on families, and on objective reality itself.

But recognizing someone’s humanity is not the same thing as absolving them of responsibility. Sometimes it is simply acknowledging that some of the people helping create the nightmare are not movie villains. They are human beings. Which, unfortunately, may be even more disturbing.

Alas, dear reader, in my latest spelunking expedition into the Republican cave system of perpetual paranoia and provocation, I’ll be offering no such hope. This time, I did not encounter doubt, contradiction, or even the faint flicker of introspection that surfaced in some of the earlier conversations. I found no self-awareness there. No remorse. No reconciliation. Not even much curiosity. So for those who read my recent pieces and are hoping for another reprieve from partisan polarization, this article may not be for you.

Still with me? Okay.

I have a confession: I had never attended a religious service. Never been inside a church, synagogue, temple, mosque, or any house of worship for the reason those places were built in the first place: to search for God, forgiveness, meaning, salvation, or whatever else people seem to find there.

It’s not that I actively avoided such places. I simply never felt drawn to cross the theological threshold — neither physically nor spiritually. I am areligious in the purest sense of the word. Not angry at God. Not rebelling against faith. I simply seem to lack whatever internal mechanism makes belief possible, the way some people lack rhythm or the ability to digest dairy.

So it was with genuine trepidation that I stepped into a church one recent Sunday.

I should admit I remain deeply confused by the sprawling branches of modern Christianity. I don’t know a Pentecostal from a Presbyterian or a Baptist from a Methodist or a Lutheran from an Episcopalian. Scholars estimate there are tens of thousands of Christian denominations worldwide, which strikes me as a remarkable amount of sectarian fragmentation for a religion organized around one central character.

I mean no offense by any of this. I don’t know much about religion. Living in the United States while remaining largely unaware of the taxonomy of Christ’s followers probably means I’ve failed to pay attention to something culturally important. But then again, I’ve also never seen a Marvel movie, so clearly entire pillars of American civilization have passed me by unnoticed.

But for my latest excursion into the American electorate, I decided to focus on one particular branch: evangelicals. Why? Mostly because they seem to be the faction most associated with treating Trump like the Second Coming.

To be clear, I’m not talking about Christianity broadly here, nor the many Christians whose faith genuinely centers compassion, humility, service, and moral seriousness. I’m talking about a specific fusion of religion, political grievance, and cultural paranoia that has become deeply influential in American life.

As I’ve said before, I am indifferent to religion. But one thing I absolutely denounce, castigate, rebuke, repudiate, and subject to every available ecclesiastical condemnation is religious hypocrisy.

Jesus Christ, do I despise two-faced sanctimonious moralists!

Those performatively pious frauds who sermonize about salvation while practicing cruelty deserve eternal damnation in the deepest chambers of hell. (If I believed in such a place.) And oh, my brothers and sisters, let me testify: Last Sunday, I found myself in precisely the kind of sanctuary where my righteous indignation could rise up, speak in tongues, and pass the collection plate.

I chose to visit a nearby Calvary Chapel church. Not the one closest to my home, but one a few towns over because, first, the surrounding area has developed a reputation as a habitat for affluent, entitled, permanently aggrieved MAGA reactionaries, and second, because white evangelical culture — particularly the strain now subsumed by Christian nationalism — has fused religious identity with right-wing political grievance so completely that it is often difficult to tell where the sermon ends and the Fox News monologue begins.

The church itself had made headlines in 2024 when far-right agitator and full-time outrage entrepreneur Charlie Kirk (Rest in Perdition) received rapturous applause after declaring that “if you vote Democrat, you can no longer call yourself a Christian.” As if the evening still lacked sufficient spiritual toxicity, he also informed the audience that “the Democrat Party supports everything that God hates!” before warning that if “this election doesn’t go our way,” Christians should be prepared to “fight” and “take to the streets” the next day.

You know. Exactly the sort of humility, compassion, and peacemaking Jesus was always going on about.

Also, I saw the church was hosting a full day of events, including a sermon, a Q&A with a Christian attorney (Jesus’ Advocate?), and a Men’s Group. The following Thursday they would also be holding “Freedom Night,” featuring a carefully curated cadre of Christ-approved school board candidates. I was beginning to suspect I had stumbled into the Coachella of Christian nationalism.

Probably another reason I chose a Calvary Chapel church is that my research indicated most attendees dressed fairly casually compared to more traditional denominations. This appealed to me because I had little interest in squeezing myself into formal attire, particularly on what I generally consider my weekly observance of sloth. Besides, my closet is largely bereft of anything that could reasonably be described as Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.

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I arrived about fifteen minutes before the advertised start time to find a healthy crowd already assembled. The lobby was already in full operation: smiles, handshakes, hearty pats on the back, and the particular buoyant friendliness Christians deploy before discussing civilizational collapse.

And while I have never revealed what I actually look like to readers, I will tell you this:

I fit right in.

That is to say: a great many middle-aged white people.

There was absolutely no reason anyone would suspect I was secretly a godless left-wing malcontent whose worldview had been shaped by late-’70s/early-’80s punk records full of people screaming about Thatcherism and Reaganomics over distorted guitars.

While I had my hackles up from the moment I stepped out of my car, everyone there seemed perfectly pleasant. There was, as yet, no immediate reason to hate them.

In my research, I had learned that these churches are known for verse-by-verse “expository teaching,” where pastors walk through Scripture sequentially while blending theology, life advice, political commentary, and assorted culture-war anxieties. I also learned they had spent the previous few Sundays studying the opening section of the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew — specifically Matthew 5:3–12, better known as the Beatitudes.

You know:

“Blessed are the meek…”
“Blessed are the merciful…”
“Blessed are the peacemakers…”
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…”

This week, apparently, they would be moving on to something called “Salt and Light.” I had never heard of this before. To me, it sounded less like a foundational teaching of Jesus and more like one of Trump’s COVID treatment proposals.

The service began with roughly thirty minutes of soft-rock adult contemporary worship music. The less said about this portion of the morning, the better. Let’s just say it was no The Clash or Dead Kennedys.

Then, after some announcements and church business, the jeans-and-polo-wearing pastor made his entrance with the upbeat enthusiasm of a man about to demonstrate the miraculous versatility of non-stick cookware on a shopping network. The congregation watched with the eager attentiveness of a well-trained infomercial audience.

He began by recapping the previous few weeks’ teachings on the Beatitudes. On paper, at least, the themes were admirable enough: humility, mercy toward others, compassion for suffering, gentleness over domination, purity of heart and intention, reconciliation instead of conflict, sympathy for the meek rather than the powerful. Jesus’ message, stripped to its essentials, sounded like a warning against cruelty, arrogance, and worldly authority disguised as moral virtue. Good stuff.

In fairness, this is also more or less the ethical core of nearly every major religion ever devised — some variation of “try not to be an arrogant, selfish asshole to other people.”

And whatever my broader confusion about theology, I accepted the Beatitudes in the (holy) spirit with which they were intended. But having some sense of the congregation’s politics, class instincts, cultural anxieties, and social identity, I suspected the practical boundaries of all this mercy and compassion would reveal themselves soon enough.

Having already formed some expectations about how these teachings would likely be applied in practice by a congregation that leaned heavily MAGA, I could feel that familiar internal irritation beginning to build — that mix of skepticism, judgment, and creeping indignation I usually recognize in myself just before it spills outward.

It probably didn’t help that, breaking with my normal one-coffee-per-day rule, I’d already consumed one before arriving and two more in the lobby. The combined effects of caffeine and my own self-righteousness were beginning to create a noticeable psychic stimulant effect.

But for the moment, I maintained outward composure.

The morning’s actual sermon focused on the next section of the Sermon on the Mount: Jesus’ instruction that his followers were to be “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world.” For readers unfamiliar with the passage, as I was, the metaphors are fairly straightforward. Salt preserves what would otherwise decay. Light exposes what hides in darkness.

Around me, people nodded gently along.

Christians, according to the teaching, are meant to function as a visible moral force within society — resisting corruption, confronting moral decay, and publicly embodying a higher ethical standard.

In theory, it is a perfectly reasonable message. A call toward moral seriousness. Ethical visibility. The pastor framed it as a warning against spiritual passivity — against becoming so culturally comfortable that one loses the ability, or perhaps simply the willingness, to recognize vice, dishonesty, selfishness, cruelty, decadence, or moral cowardice when it appears.

The obvious complication, however, is that once a community begins imagining itself as society’s moral disinfectant, the next question becomes who exactly gets classified as the contamination. Which forms of corruption are treated as existential threats, and which are quietly tolerated, rationalized, or conveniently ignored?

And that, I increasingly suspected, was where this was headed.

Because while the sermon sounded admirable in the abstract, I doubted the illuminating power of all this spiritual “light” was going to be distributed with anything resembling consistency.

My annoyance had nowhere to go except inward, lest I sprint onto the stage and attempt an ill-advised coup of the microphone. That restraint became increasingly difficult as the pastor began explaining how Jesus’ ancient teachings were apparently intended to function within the political realities of America in 2026.

The sermon had begun conventionally enough. Christians called to be “salt” and “light” in a fallen world. At first, the metaphors retained some openness. One could imagine them pointing toward humility, compassion, honesty, charity, or moral courage — the difficult ethical obligations traditionally associated with Jesus’ teachings.

But as the sermon progressed, it became increasingly clear that the congregation was not being invited to reflect on these metaphors for themselves. The pastor intended to define them. And once he did, the range of acceptable interpretation narrowed dramatically.

“Darkness” did not appear to mean greed, cruelty, dishonesty, indifference to suffering, or the worship of wealth and power. It meant the sprawling inventory of modern conservative Christian panic: transgender teenagers, drag brunches, pronouns in email signatures, secular teachers, public school librarians, textbooks insufficiently deferential to biblical authority, diversity training seminars, vaccines, climate scientists, immigration, feminism, declining birth rates, childless women, environmental regulations, electric vehicles, weak men, “woke” corporations, pride flags in classrooms, and whatever else had most recently circulated through the Christian media ecosystem as evidence that America was entering some final stage of civilizational decline.

The shift was unmistakable.

“They want your children sexually confused, spiritually empty, chemically dependent, ashamed of Western civilization, alienated from God, and so completely absorbed into a godless culture that they will no longer be capable of recognizing truth, freedom, and morality,” the pastor warned, before spiraling into an increasingly frantic inventory of collapse: schools “indoctrinating children,” Christians being “silenced,” masculinity disappearing, the biblical family “under attack,” and entire institutions supposedly captured by activists determined to “erase God from public life.”

At another point, he described believers as “the last line of defense before total moral collapse.”

Several people around me murmured “amen.”

The congregation was no longer being asked to wrestle with the ethical demands of Jesus’ earlier teachings — mercy, peacemaking, humility, care for the vulnerable, love. They were being taught how to identify enemies.

That distinction mattered.

Because once “salt” and “light” were translated into the language of cultural warfare, the Sermon on the Mount ceased to function as a challenge to power or tribalism. It became a mechanism for reinforcing them.

The sermon sorted people neatly into categories of purity and contamination, righteousness and corruption, godliness and decay. Entire populations became symbolic evidence of civilizational decline.

Every modern anxiety eventually collapsed into the same narrative: Christians under siege. The language of persecution appeared constantly, despite being delivered through wireless headsets inside multimillion-dollar tax-exempt megachurches that together constitute one of the most culturally dominant and financially powerful religious infrastructures in American life.

The contradiction seemed invisible to those inside the system because persecution had become less a material condition than a psychological identity — a way of interpreting any erosion of cultural dominance as oppression.

What disturbed me most was how emotionally efficient the framework was. The connections between these anxieties were rarely explained because coherence was beside the point. Fear moved through the room more fluidly than logic. Once the congregation accepted the premise that Christianity itself was under existential assault, nearly any social change could be folded into the same moral emergency.

By the time the pastor closed by describing Christians as a righteous remnant standing between America and moral collapse, the metaphors of “salt” and “light” no longer sounded like invitations toward humility or compassion. They sounded like the branding language of a movement that had fused spiritual identity with a permanent sense of cultural siege.

Then it was over. Christian electronic dance music blared from the speakers.

“What the fuck?” I thought to myself.

A moment later, I realized I had apparently said it out loud.

The elderly woman beside me looked over in visible alarm and instinctively clutched the gold, diamond-bedazzled cross hanging from her neck. I offered a sheepish shrug and an apologetic smile before stepping out of the row to make my way toward the Men’s Discussion Group.

Finally, I would have the chance to speak my mind.

But first, another cup of coffee.

Having now survived my first church sermon, I found myself wondering whether what I had just witnessed was considered normal. Unfortunately, the day was only getting started.

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A note before we begin

This is the conclusion of A Funny Thing Happened Over Breakfast With Trump Voters, part of my Among the Believers series, where I attempt to understand the psychology of committed Trump supporters by spending time with them in environments that would not normally qualify as healthy for me emotionally.

This is the second installment in the series. The first can be found here: I Lied My Way Into a MAGA Focus Group.

Why am I doing this?

Because democracies don’t function especially well when millions of people are operating from entirely different emotional and factual realities, especially once those realities harden into identity.

But if there are still moments where certainty flickers, where someone unreachable today might think differently by November, then it’s probably worth studying how the machinery works from the inside. And even if nobody’s on the verge of a breakthrough revelation anytime soon, the least we can do is get a clearer picture of the landscape ahead of the elections.

My next right-wing event — and the next article in this series — is already on the calendar, and I’m more nervous about it than anything I’ve done so far.

If you’d like these pieces delivered to your inbox, subscribe for free. Paid subscribers get them a little earlier, because class systems persist even in independent journalism. 😉

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Breakfast With the Believers

In Part 1, I wrote about how my father briefly drifted into the post-9/11 fear machinery that eventually swallowed a large portion of his generation, and how I managed to pull him back out before Fox News could turn it into a permanent addiction. Many of his friends weren’t so fortunate.

Those friends became the subject of this article: ten retired Trump voters I met for breakfast one Saturday morning, all former coworkers of my late father’s, most now deep in the familiar rhythms of grievance, cable-news paranoia, and forwarded emails written entirely in capital letters.

Within the first fifteen minutes, it was obvious the table was far less politically unified than I’d expected. The three men in the MAGA hats projected total certainty. Nothing counted against him because the standards themselves kept moving. Every scandal became proof he was being targeted. Every criticism reinforced the idea that he alone was fighting for them.

But once they stopped talking, the mood shifted. Most of the others sounded less ideological than drained: frustrated about prices, wars, instability, and the lingering sense that life was supposed to feel better by now.

It also became clear that trying to moderate ten elderly men with decades of shared history, no fear of interrupting one another, and strong opinions about literally everything was going to be impossible. Every subject immediately collapsed into interruptions, side arguments, unrelated stories, and competing complaints.

So instead of trying to guide the morning issue by issue through the political news cycle, I changed tactics.

And that’s when things got personal.

What Dignity Means

The food arrived. A dizzying spread of carbs and cholesterol, much of it soon to disappear beneath layers of syrup and ketchup. The breakfasts suggested a level of cardiovascular optimism I found impressive. But just as I was judging their breakfasts, I’m sure my egg-white veggie frittata was inspiring its own reactions up and down the table. I could practically hear the phrase woke snowflake passing between them telepathically. I added a few extra shakes of Tabasco in an attempt to restore my masculinity.

Then, deciding to fully inhabit the role they probably already assigned me, I asked the most NPR question imaginable.

“What does dignity mean to you?”

I looked around the table. Everyone either took a bite or a sip, suddenly needing a reason not to answer first. There was no prefabricated talking point for this one. No Fox News chyron. No forwarded email. No familiar script to recite.

The one man I hadn’t heard from yet finally broke the silence.

“Being treated with respect.”

Unanimous nods around the table. The clearest consensus of the morning so far.

Then came more:

“Feeling useful. Feeling like you still matter.”

“Being left alone to live your life without everybody judging you. Not being criticized for what you believe.”

“Being able to take care of yourself and your family.”

“Having some pride in yourself. Being able to look yourself in the mirror.”

Everybody had a definition to share. What struck me was how ordinary the answers were. Just a group of aging men describing, in slightly different ways, their struggle to hold onto a sense of self-respect, usefulness, and identity.

And just like that, the conversation stopped sounding political. Then my next question:

“What do you think people owe each other in a society?”

“Respect. Common courtesy.”

“Personal responsibility.”

“Helping people when they need it.”

“I don’t want to be taken advantage of.”

“Following the rules.”

“Honesty. Not screwing each other over.”

“Pulling your own weight.”

“Looking out for each other.”

“Basic decency.”

Nobody said “owning the libs.” Nobody mentioned George Soros, drag queens, or migrant caravans. There were no references to global conspiracies involving Taylor Swift and voting machines. Just ordinary moral instincts. Respect. Stability. Fairness. Community. Dignity. Feeling useful. Feeling secure. Not being humiliated. Not being abandoned. These are not fringe desires. They are almost painfully universal.

I decided to keep going.

“How should America see itself? And how should the rest of the world see us?”

By now, the emotional geography of the table was becoming easier to map. The men in the MAGA hats still answered first and with the most certainty, but the others were beginning to separate into familiar strains of modern Republican voter. Less a coherent ideology than a loose collection of grievances, anxieties, instincts, habits, and emotional needs gathered inside the same political coalition.

“Strong,” one of the red hats said immediately. “Respected.”

“Feared again,” he added. “Not pushed around.”

The words came quickly and confidently, each answer less about policy than posture. Strength. Dominance. Restoration. The sense that America, and by extension people like them, had somehow slipped from the center of the world and deserved to be placed back there.

The man in the white Trump Was Right About Everything hat leaned forward.

“We’ve gotten soft. Other countries laughed at us under Biden.”

“You need strength,” the remaining red hat added, this time with the tone of someone ending a discussion rather than participating in one.

What struck me was how often “strength” was described not as confidence or stability, but as aggression. Punishment. The ability to impose consequences. For a few of the men, force itself seemed emotionally reassuring. Anger translated as leadership. Dominance translated as safety.

But once the hats stopped talking, the room shifted again.

“Stable,” one of the quieter men said.

“Affordable,” another added almost immediately. “A place where people could actually afford to raise a family again. People shouldn’t have to struggle this much.”

Another man spoke up between bites of pancake. “I’m just tired of everybody screaming all the time.”

“Professional,” someone else said. “We should look professional again.”

“United,” another added. “Less divided.”

The tension between the values some of them described and the politics they embraced was becoming difficult to ignore. Then came another voice from farther down the table.

“There used to be more community.” The table quieted slightly.

“People looked out for each other more,” he said.

Then one of the quieter men said, almost cautiously: “Compassionate.” A brief pause followed that word. “Fair,” he clarified quickly, perhaps sensing the need to masculinize the sentiment before the hats objected to it. “Taking care of people.”

One of the red hats immediately jumped in. “Well, people need to follow the law too. Too many illegals running around.”

There it was again: the reflexive pull back toward punishment, hierarchy, and enforcement. Some of the men seemed unable to let the conversation remain in the realm of empathy for very long before dragging it back into resentment and discipline.

So I pushed a little further.

“What kind of leader should represent America?”

The hats answered first again.

“Tough. A fighter.”

“Somebody who doesn’t back down.”

“Strength.”

But the rest of the table hesitated longer this time.

“Steady,” someone finally said.

“Honest.”

“Competent.”

“Professional.”

“Respectful.”

“A decent person,” another added.

Then: “Somebody who doesn’t need to insult everybody all the time.”

Silence.

A few coffee sips. Fork against plate. Nobody directly responded to the comment, but nobody challenged it either.

The Contradictions Begin

Listening to them describe the country they wanted and the kind of leader they admired, I could feel something subtle beginning to happen around the table. The farther the conversation moved away from cable news and back toward ordinary human values, the harder it became for the contradictions not to quietly reveal themselves on their own.

I asked more questions along those lines. If collisions existed between the values they claimed to hold and the politics, media, and leaders they supported, I wanted those disconnects to reveal themselves without me having to point them out directly.

Should a president represent our better instincts or our anger?

Can you demand dignity while denying it to other people?

Do you think your sources for news and social media are making you psychologically healthier?

Who benefits from keeping people angry all the time?

Why do powerful people always tell ordinary people to blame weaker people?

Do you think people sometimes support behavior politically they wouldn’t tolerate personally?

As their answers accumulated — dignity, respect, fairness, calm, community, steadiness, compassion — I started realizing the table had quietly separated itself into recognizable types of modern Trump supporter. Not just in what they believed, but in how they reacted when the conversation drifted away from slogans and back toward values. Some became reflective. Others defensive. Some seemed worn down. A few sounded almost trapped inside scripts they no longer fully believed but no longer knew how to leave.

The People Around the Table

The three men in the Trump hats were the clearest category: the True Believers. Their support for Trump was not connected to outcomes, contradictions, or even observable reality. Bad news became fake news. Failures became sabotage. Criticism became persecution. Questions about anger, media manipulation, or moral inconsistency barely registered because the movement itself had fused with identity. Trump no longer seemed to function for them as merely a politician. He had become a source of certainty, belonging, and emotional reassurance all fused together.

For these men, every conversation eventually bent back toward punishment, consequences, strength, and control. When I asked whether a president should represent our better instincts or our anger, one answered almost immediately: “Anger is good.” (I briefly thought of Gordon Gekko declaring “Greed is good” in Wall Street, except my septuagenarian power broker had simply swapped one deadly sin for another.)

Questions about dignity, compassion, or community seemed to make these men visibly uncomfortable unless those concepts could quickly be rerouted through discipline or hierarchy. Compassion had to be earned. Dignity had to be conditional. Community required enforcement. Empathy, by itself, appeared suspiciously close to weakness.

When I asked whether news and social media were making people psychologically healthier, one man blamed “the liberal media” without the slightest trace of irony. Years of grievance-driven media had shaped the way they interpreted nearly every social problem: through threat, humiliation, grievance, and cultural loss. Aggression itself seemed emotionally reassuring to them. Not a failure of leadership. Evidence of leadership.

There were the Overwhelmed Americans. Men who sounded less ideological than simply worn down by modern life itself. Inflation. Noise. Social hostility. Financial anxiety. When I asked whether news and social media were making people psychologically healthier, these were the men who laughed first because the answer felt too obvious to state aloud. These men weren’t searching for revolution. They wanted relief. Stability. Breathing room. Permission to unclench.

There were also the Order Seekers. These were the men using words like calm, professional, steady, respectful. When I asked whether a president should represent our better instincts or our anger, they hesitated before answering. They had voted for Trump imagining toughness, competence, and restored order. Instead they found themselves trapped inside a nonstop national nervous breakdown. Electing a man whose political rise was built entirely on public chaos, humiliation, and conflict and then acting surprised by the atmosphere afterward struck me as a fairly ambitious misunderstanding of cause and effect.

Then there were the Pocketbook Republicans. These men talked almost entirely in terms of prices, gas, Medicare, groceries, retirement accounts, and economic stress. When I asked what had actually improved in their lives, their answers were entirely financial (memories of Trump’s first term) and self-serving. None of them mentioned democracy, moral leadership, constitutional philosophy, or the soul of the nation. They sounded like men comparing lawn equipment warranties. Their mistake was assuming a party funded largely by corporations, billionaires, and investors had secretly been spending its free time worrying about the price of eggs and prescription drugs.

There were also the Disconnected Retirees. Men whose identities had once revolved around work, usefulness, routine, and responsibilities now drifting through retirement as cable news and political outrage occupied spaces once filled by their jobs. These were the men talking about loneliness, neighbors, community, and no longer recognizing the country around them. When I asked what people owed each other in a society, these were the men who answered most sincerely, and perhaps most sadly. Politics had become, among other things, a substitute for belonging.

And then there was what I privately started thinking of as the Conditional Humanitarian. Just one man, really. He repeatedly showed flashes of genuine moral discomfort with cruelty itself: the ICE raids, families living in fear, attacks on Medicare, anti-science absurdities, and the constant conflict and humiliation somehow repackaged as “strength.” When I asked whether you could demand dignity while denying it to other people, he paused for a long moment before answering: “You can disagree with people without trying to ruin them. I don’t know. I think people deserve a little grace.” Unlike the others, he occasionally allowed himself to follow his empathy all the way to its logical conclusion.

One person out of ten at the table. Not enough to fundamentally alter the movement itself, but enough to suggest that somewhere beneath all the conditioning, anger, and ingrained habits, a few people inside the movement still retain the ability to recognize suffering when they see it.

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Something Quieter

What made the morning feel worthwhile wasn’t that anyone dramatically renounced Trump. Nobody threw their MAGA hat onto the floor and announced a sudden conversion to democratic socialism. Nobody announced they were going to start phone-banking for AOC now. People rarely abandon identities overnight. Nor over sunny-side up eggs and OJ.

But something quieter did happen. The farther the conversation moved away from partisan politics and back toward questions about dignity, fairness, decency, leadership, community, fear, anger, and loneliness, the harder it became for some of the men not to hear themselves colliding with their own contradictions in real time. You could see flashes of it in the pauses. The hesitations. The nervous laughter. The sudden pivots back to familiar talking points whenever the conversation drifted too close to genuine self-awareness.

Some of them will likely leave those contradictions unresolved forever. Some will bury them back beneath outrage, Fox segments, forwarded Facebook memes, and the soothing narcotic certainty of tribal identity. Cognitive dissonance is incredibly durable. Most people become very skilled at protecting themselves from contradictions they don’t want to face. But a few of them (maybe more than a few) seemed to recognize, at least fleetingly, the widening gap between the values they claimed to hold and the emotional world they had attached themselves to.

And maybe that was the real value of the experiment.

Because sitting there with ten retired Trump voters, ranging from fully locked-in True Believers to exhausted skeptics to something approaching moral discomfort, it became increasingly difficult not to see the table itself as a rough microcosm of the larger emotional and political shift now unfolding across the country. Not one unified ideology, but a political identity held together less by coherent beliefs than by overlapping fears, habits, resentments, perceived losses, loneliness, nostalgia, economic anxiety, cultural displacement, and the deeply human desire to feel respected in a world that increasingly makes people feel invisible.

Some are unreachable.

Some are beginning to question.

Some may already suspect they were sold something hollow.

And a very small number may even be starting to wonder whether the anger they embraced ultimately consumed more than it solved.

Jerry

At some point before the dishes were cleared, I asked a question that led somewhere I hadn’t expected.

“Would you want your grandchildren behaving like modern politicians?”

Most of the men laughed softly at the obvious answer. One man (the one in the white hat) made a louder sound than the others. At first I assumed he’d laughed too hard or swallowed wrong. Then I realized he was crying. Not dramatically. Just tears suddenly gathering in his eyes while he stared down at the remains of his breakfast.

A couple of the other men glanced at him, then at me, with the sort of tight grimace people make when something private has accidentally been dragged into the open.

His name was Jerry.

I learned he had become estranged from his son and daughter and their family sometime during Trump’s first term, with Covid and the growing moral and political divide between them eventually hardening the fracture into something seemingly permanent. Her two children were adults now. He hadn’t spoken to them in years.

Recently, another relative told him that his grandson’s wife was pregnant. It would be a boy. Jerry was about to become a great-grandfather. He had learned this secondhand.

Staring down at his plate, trying to compose himself amid the noise of families eating breakfast around us, he admitted he was afraid he might never meet the child… or know whether the boy would continue the family tradition of naming first sons Gerald.

And sitting there watching this old man quietly grieve the loss of his family while wearing a hat defending the very movement that helped fracture it, I found myself wondering how many versions of Jerry now exist scattered across the country. How many friendships dissolved. How many marriages slowly unraveled. How many siblings stopped speaking. How many grandparents slowly disappeared from the lives of children they love because outrage, ideology, pride, media addiction, and political identity gradually replaced emotional space once reserved for love, patience, humor, and ordinary human relationships.

And for what?

Politicians who don’t even know — or care — they exist?

Cable-news hosts who monetize outrage between advertisements for gold coins and reverse mortgages?

Billionaires and strategists who will never sit alone in a diner at seventy-five years old wondering whether they traded away part of their family for a movement that promised dignity but delivered mostly agitation and isolation instead?

Maybe some people will eventually confront that trade honestly. Maybe a few will decide that being perpetually angry is not the same thing as being strong, informed, patriotic, or fulfilled. Maybe reconciliation — personal as much as political — remains possible.

Or maybe the psychological cost of admitting they sacrificed real relationships, core values, and pieces of themselves for something ultimately hollow will simply feel too painful to bear, and they’ll retreat even deeper into the outrage that helped create the loneliness in the first place.

By then, of course, the people waiting for them may no longer be waiting at all.

One Last Thing

After breakfast ended and everyone started drifting toward their cars, two of the men approached me in the parking lot.

“You know,” one of them said, lowering his voice slightly, “I voted for Obama. Twice.”

The other nodded. “Me too.”

I asked what it would take for them to vote for a Democrat again.

“Somebody normal,” one said. “Somebody who seems like they actually care about regular people.”

“The Democrats used to talk more about jobs and families,” the other added. “Now half the time I don’t even know what they’re talking about.”

I asked where he mostly heard Democrats speaking.

He hesitated, then smiled sheepishly. “Fox News, probably.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s probably not the cleanest information pipeline.” They both laughed at that.

And standing there in the parking lot, with shopping centers and traffic and ordinary Saturday life unfolding all around us, it struck me that there may still be some kind of opening with certain voters like these. Not the fully unreachable ones lost entirely inside conspiracy, cruelty, and permanent grievance, but the people who still seem dimly aware that something about the movement they attached themselves to no longer aligns with the values they claim to hold.

Because most of the values these men described over breakfast — dignity, fairness, stability, compassion, community, looking out for each other — are not extremist ideas. They are basic human ones. The disturbing part was watching how easily those values could coexist beside support for a political culture built so heavily on humiliation, fear, anger, and dehumanization.

And yet once the slogans, talking points, and tribal performance started falling away, several of the men occasionally sounded less like committed ideologues than people trapped inside emotional and media systems that had slowly pulled them somewhere they no longer fully understood themselves.

That doesn’t absolve them of responsibility for the damage those systems now produce. Plenty of harm can be caused by confused people.

But it does suggest something important and maybe slightly hopeful:

At least some portion of the country remains more persuadable, more internally conflicted, and more emotionally reachable than our simplified political narratives usually allow.

Driving home afterward, I found myself thinking about how shared human needs do not automatically produce shared humanity.

Still, it’s probably the only place worth starting.

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Third article in my Among the Believers series:

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THE STRANGER’S LIBRARY

It’s a late-night sort of place where I write about the books that have stayed with me—sometimes troubling the waters, sometimes steadying them.

The Stranger's Library

Books I'd save from the fire.

By Open Letters by Mersault

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Dear Reader,

I didn’t plan on sending this to you.

I try to respect your inbox. I know that when you clicked subscribe, you essentially agreed to let me into a strangely personal part of your life. An inbox feels intimate. People receive bank statements there. Medical information. Messages from relatives they’re avoiding. It’s private space. And I never want to overstay (or overuse) my welcome in it.

So it’s with some reluctance that I’m writing this today.

This message wanders somewhat outside my usual territory and into the deeply unfamiliar terrain of personal vulnerability. As a general rule, I avoid emotional openness even with people I know well, let alone thousands of strangers scattered across the internet.

But here we are.

So I want you to know that I’m usually pretty deliberate about what I send and how often I send it. I try to limit myself to once a week because nobody needs another person constantly appearing in their inbox demanding attention. I’ll return to my regular articles and cadence soon, so please don’t unsubscribe if this message feels self-indulgent or self-pitying.

In fact, I’m in the midst of writing the conclusion to my last post, A Funny Thing Happened Over Breakfast With Trump Voters, as well as a new essay for my other publication, The Stranger’s Library, where I write about books, culture, and the occasionally disorienting experience of being a human.

(See? I’m already promoting my own work. Not exactly a noble beginning. Somewhere, at least three of you are rolling your eyes.)

Okay, here we go.

I was laid off this week. And yes, I blame Trump.

I had been with the company for over 12 years in a senior role. When I started, it was a small startup and I was employee number nine. Eventually we grew to more than 300 people, with tens of thousands of clients in over 100 countries, including a rather large portion of the Fortune 500.

I’ve worked steadily since I was 13 years old, when I delivered newspapers on my bicycle. I worked through high school, through college, and then through a series of jobs and, eventually, a decades-long career in Japan, Los Angeles, and New York.

So sitting here in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon writing this feels deeply unnatural. My body still seems convinced there should be a meeting happening somewhere. A Zoom link. A spreadsheet. A Slack message marked “urgent” that absolutely is not urgent.

Instead, there is just me sitting here staring at my laptop in the middle of the day, with only the distant sounds of a leaf blower and a barking dog offering proof that the world outside still exists.

Anyway, why do I blame Trump?

Well, the obvious reason is the economy. We were a business-to-business company, and when businesses get nervous, discretionary spending is the first thing to disappear. Companies stop investing in anything that isn’t immediately tied to survival.

Over the past year and a half, since Trump returned to office, companies pulled back. Budgets froze. Contracts stalled. It turns out businesses don’t actually enjoy uncertainty. (Though the trillion-dollar corporations willing to flatter, fund, and orbit Trump like anxious courtiers seem to be doing perfectly fine.)

The company I helped build from scratch provided online leadership development courses for employees around the world. We partnered with elite business schools. And yes, I still instinctively say “we” even though I no longer work there.

You know the sort of schools I mean. The kinds of names people casually drop into conversation and then pause half a second too long afterward to make sure you heard them and are appropriately impressed.

Together, we created and delivered online courses taught by professors from those august institutions to people across industries, backgrounds, demographics, and countries.

Our goal was to democratize education. It was in our tagline, our mission statement, our vision statement, and all the other lofty corporate language companies love to produce about themselves. The difference is that we actually believed it.

We genuinely wanted to make the kinds of education and insights normally reserved for people able to spend tens of thousands of dollars at prestigious universities accessible to far more people. And judging from the enthusiastic testimonials we received from learners, we were getting there.

Unfortunately, once companies become anxious about inflation, tariffs, political chaos, and economic instability radiating out of Washington, they stop spending money on things like developing thoughtful leaders and healthy workplace cultures. Long-term thinking quickly gives way to corporate triage.

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But it’s not just the economy.

While our leadership development offerings included courses and coaching on the usual business obsessions — Strategy! Innovation! Transformation! — we also took pride in subjects that help people become better leaders, better colleagues, and, ideally, slightly better human beings.

Courses on fostering inclusion and diversity, empathetic leadership, women in leadership, inclusive workplaces, managing across cultures, psychological safety in the workplace, unconscious bias awareness, and emotional intelligence, all ideas now treated by conservatives as though they are ushering in civilizational collapse.

Now, these people-focused leadership courses were not about forcing white men to apologize for being white men, the way the right relentlessly portrays these efforts. No executives were being marched into conference rooms and forced to publicly renounce golf. They were about the value of bringing different skills, experiences, and perspectives into rooms traditionally dominated by the same types of people sitting around the same boardroom tables.

Yes, race and gender were part of it. But so were age, neurodiversity, physical ability, sexual orientation, class, nationality, language, cognitive style, and the simple idea that people lower on the corporate ladder should have the opportunity to contribute, instead of leaving every decision to executives who attended the same schools, read the same books, vacationed in the same places, and somehow still arrived at identical conclusions while believing themselves uniquely visionary.

And yes, there is a moral argument for fairness and equity. But there is also a practical one. Organizations that draw from a wider range of perspectives tend to make better decisions, avoid more blind spots, and adapt more effectively to an increasingly complicated world. It turns out treating people well and listening to perspectives outside the executive echo chamber is not, in fact, catastrophic for shareholder value.

But here’s the rub: when Trump returned to office, one of the first things his administration did (literally through executive orders) was declare war on anything that even vaguely resembled DEI.

Federal agencies were barred from supporting it. State and local governments risked losing funding if they embraced it. And private companies doing business with the government, no matter the industry, suddenly had reason to fear that anything remotely associated with diversity, equity, inclusion, empathetic leadership, or culturally aware management could jeopardize contracts, partnerships, and revenue.

Apparently, teaching people to work respectfully with human beings different from themselves had become a dangerous and subversive act.

As a result, many of the organizations we had spent years building relationships with quietly disappeared.

It wasn’t enough for companies to simply stop offering the offending courses. Any association with a company that had even brushed up against DEI suddenly became politically risky. So over the last 16 months, our revenue collapsed. And eventually, so did our workforce.

I don’t begrudge the company or its leadership for letting me go. Honestly, had they asked for volunteers, I probably would have raised my hand. Given the downturn, I understood the math. My team was talented, experienced, and fully capable of continuing without me.

Still, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sting.

Given the company’s financial condition, the severance was minimal despite the 12 years I spent helping build the company from the ground up.

My health insurance also disappears in a few weeks. And with healthcare costs continuing to rise while coverage becomes increasingly expensive and limited, a significant portion of my savings will now go toward insurance premiums that mostly buy me the privilege of paying several thousand dollars out of pocket in deductibles before the actual coverage even begins.

So yes, I place this squarely on Trump and the people who voted for him. Had he not been reelected, I would still be gainfully employed. I would not be writing this on a Wednesday afternoon. I’d be sitting in a meeting with colleagues, staring at PowerPoint slides and spreadsheets.

Obviously, no layoff is caused by one person alone. Economies are messy. Industries shift. Decisions compound. Companies struggle. But Trump’s return to office dramatically accelerated the political and economic conditions that made ours increasingly difficult to survive.

And yet, there is a strange upside to all of this.

Had Trump not been reelected, I probably wouldn’t have started this Substack, and we likely wouldn’t know each other. (Yes, I know I called you strangers earlier, but after months of writing into this strange little digital void and hearing back from so many of you, it no longer entirely feels that way.)

And now, somewhat improbably, this Substack appears to be my only source of income.

See? I warned you this might become self-pitying.

And I know I’m hardly alone in this. Millions of people are navigating layoffs, impossible healthcare costs, shrinking opportunities, and an economy that increasingly seems designed to funnel insecurity downward while concentrating wealth upward. But that’s also part of the point. An enormous number of Americans are one layoff, one illness, or one reckless political decision away from financial panic, even after years of doing everything they were told would lead to stability.

Below is an article I published earlier this year that now feels uncomfortably relevant. Take a look if you haven’t read it yet.

Anyway, thank you for reading this far. Regular programming will resume soon at Open Letters by Mersault and The Stranger’s Library.

In the meantime, I’m genuinely grateful you’re here.

Subscribe now

Buy me a coffee

Share

Join me in my other publication…

THE STRANGER’S LIBRARY

It’s a late-night sort of place where I write about the books that have stayed with me—sometimes troubling the waters, sometimes steadying them.

The Stranger's Library

Books I'd save from the fire.

By Open Letters by Mersault

Subscribe now

Buy me a coffee

Dear Reader,

I didn’t plan on sending this to you.

I try to respect your inbox. I know that when you clicked subscribe, you essentially agreed to let me into a strangely personal part of your life. An inbox feels intimate. People receive bank statements there. Medical information. Messages from relatives they’re avoiding. It’s private space. And I never want to overstay (or overuse) my welcome in it.

So it’s with some reluctance that I’m writing this today.

This message wanders somewhat outside my usual territory and into the deeply unfamiliar terrain of personal vulnerability. As a general rule, I avoid emotional openness even with people I know well, let alone thousands of strangers scattered across the internet.

But here we are.

So I want you to know that I’m usually pretty deliberate about what I send and how often I send it. I try to limit myself to once a week because nobody needs another person constantly appearing in their inbox demanding attention. I’ll return to my regular articles and cadence soon, so please don’t unsubscribe if this message feels self-indulgent or self-pitying.

In fact, I’m in the midst of writing the conclusion to my last post, A Funny Thing Happened Over Breakfast With Trump Voters, as well as a new essay for my other publication, The Stranger’s Library, where I write about books, culture, and the occasionally disorienting experience of being a human.

(See? I’m already promoting my own work. Not exactly a noble beginning. Somewhere, at least three of you are rolling your eyes.)

Okay, here we go.

I was laid off this week. And yes, I blame Trump.

I had been with the company for over 12 years in a senior role. When I started, it was a small startup and I was employee number nine. Eventually we grew to more than 300 people, with tens of thousands of clients in over 100 countries, including a rather large portion of the Fortune 500.

I’ve worked steadily since I was 13 years old, when I delivered newspapers on my bicycle. I worked through high school, through college, and then through a series of jobs and, eventually, a decades-long career in Japan, Los Angeles, and New York.

So sitting here in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon writing this feels deeply unnatural. My body still seems convinced there should be a meeting happening somewhere. A Zoom link. A spreadsheet. A Slack message marked “urgent” that absolutely is not urgent.

Instead, there is just me sitting here staring at my laptop in the middle of the day, with only the distant sounds of a leaf blower and a barking dog offering proof that the world outside still exists.

Anyway, why do I blame Trump?

Well, the obvious reason is the economy. We were a business-to-business company, and when businesses get nervous, discretionary spending is the first thing to disappear. Companies stop investing in anything that isn’t immediately tied to survival.

Over the past year and a half, since Trump returned to office, companies pulled back. Budgets froze. Contracts stalled. It turns out businesses don’t actually enjoy uncertainty. (Though the trillion-dollar corporations willing to flatter, fund, and orbit Trump like anxious courtiers seem to be doing perfectly fine.)

The company I helped build from scratch provided online leadership development courses for employees around the world. We partnered with elite business schools. And yes, I still instinctively say “we” even though I no longer work there.

You know the sort of schools I mean. The kinds of names people casually drop into conversation and then pause half a second too long afterward to make sure you heard them and are appropriately impressed.

Together, we created and delivered online courses taught by professors from those august institutions to people across industries, backgrounds, demographics, and countries.

Our goal was to democratize education. It was in our tagline, our mission statement, our vision statement, and all the other lofty corporate language companies love to produce about themselves. The difference is that we actually believed it.

We genuinely wanted to make the kinds of education and insights normally reserved for people able to spend tens of thousands of dollars at prestigious universities accessible to far more people. And judging from the enthusiastic testimonials we received from learners, we were getting there.

Unfortunately, once companies become anxious about inflation, tariffs, political chaos, and economic instability radiating out of Washington, they stop spending money on things like developing thoughtful leaders and healthy workplace cultures. Long-term thinking quickly gives way to corporate triage.

Subscribe now

Buy me a coffee

But it’s not just the economy.

While our leadership development offerings included courses and coaching on the usual business obsessions — Strategy! Innovation! Transformation! — we also took pride in subjects that help people become better leaders, better colleagues, and, ideally, slightly better human beings.

Courses on fostering inclusion and diversity, empathetic leadership, women in leadership, inclusive workplaces, managing across cultures, psychological safety in the workplace, unconscious bias awareness, and emotional intelligence, all ideas now treated by conservatives as though they are ushering in civilizational collapse.

Now, these people-focused leadership courses were not about forcing white men to apologize for being white men, the way the right relentlessly portrays these efforts. No executives were being marched into conference rooms and forced to publicly renounce golf. They were about the value of bringing different skills, experiences, and perspectives into rooms traditionally dominated by the same types of people sitting around the same boardroom tables.

Yes, race and gender were part of it. But so were age, neurodiversity, physical ability, sexual orientation, class, nationality, language, cognitive style, and the simple idea that people lower on the corporate ladder should have the opportunity to contribute, instead of leaving every decision to executives who attended the same schools, read the same books, vacationed in the same places, and somehow still arrived at identical conclusions while believing themselves uniquely visionary.

And yes, there is a moral argument for fairness and equity. But there is also a practical one. Organizations that draw from a wider range of perspectives tend to make better decisions, avoid more blind spots, and adapt more effectively to an increasingly complicated world. It turns out treating people well and listening to perspectives outside the executive echo chamber is not, in fact, catastrophic for shareholder value.

But here’s the rub: when Trump returned to office, one of the first things his administration did (literally through executive orders) was declare war on anything that even vaguely resembled DEI.

Federal agencies were barred from supporting it. State and local governments risked losing funding if they embraced it. And private companies doing business with the government, no matter the industry, suddenly had reason to fear that anything remotely associated with diversity, equity, inclusion, empathetic leadership, or culturally aware management could jeopardize contracts, partnerships, and revenue.

Apparently, teaching people to work respectfully with human beings different from themselves had become a dangerous and subversive act.

As a result, many of the organizations we had spent years building relationships with quietly disappeared.

It wasn’t enough for companies to simply stop offering the offending courses. Any association with a company that had even brushed up against DEI suddenly became politically risky. So over the last 16 months, our revenue collapsed. And eventually, so did our workforce.

I don’t begrudge the company or its leadership for letting me go. Honestly, had they asked for volunteers, I probably would have raised my hand. Given the downturn, I understood the math. My team was talented, experienced, and fully capable of continuing without me.

Still, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sting.

Given the company’s financial condition, the severance was minimal despite the 12 years I spent helping build the company from the ground up.

My health insurance also disappears in a few weeks. And with healthcare costs continuing to rise while coverage becomes increasingly expensive and limited, a significant portion of my savings will now go toward insurance premiums that mostly buy me the privilege of paying several thousand dollars out of pocket in deductibles before the actual coverage even begins.

So yes, I place this squarely on Trump and the people who voted for him. Had he not been reelected, I would still be gainfully employed. I would not be writing this on a Wednesday afternoon. I’d be sitting in a meeting with colleagues, staring at PowerPoint slides and spreadsheets.

Obviously, no layoff is caused by one person alone. Economies are messy. Industries shift. Decisions compound. Companies struggle. But Trump’s return to office dramatically accelerated the political and economic conditions that made ours increasingly difficult to survive.

And yet, there is a strange upside to all of this.

Had Trump not been reelected, I probably wouldn’t have started this Substack, and we likely wouldn’t know each other. (Yes, I know I called you strangers earlier, but after months of writing into this strange little digital void and hearing back from so many of you, it no longer entirely feels that way.)

And now, somewhat improbably, this Substack appears to be my only source of income.

See? I warned you this might become self-pitying.

And I know I’m hardly alone in this. Millions of people are navigating layoffs, impossible healthcare costs, shrinking opportunities, and an economy that increasingly seems designed to funnel insecurity downward while concentrating wealth upward. But that’s also part of the point. An enormous number of Americans are one layoff, one illness, or one reckless political decision away from financial panic, even after years of doing everything they were told would lead to stability.

Below is an article I published earlier this year that now feels uncomfortably relevant. Take a look if you haven’t read it yet.

Anyway, thank you for reading this far. Regular programming will resume soon at Open Letters by Mersault and The Stranger’s Library.

In the meantime, I’m genuinely grateful you’re here.

Subscribe now

Buy me a coffee

Share

Join me in my other publication…

THE STRANGER’S LIBRARY

It’s a late-night sort of place where I write about the books that have stayed with me—sometimes troubling the waters, sometimes steadying them.

The Stranger's Library

Books I'd save from the fire.

By Open Letters by Mersault

A note before we begin.

I’m undertaking a series, Among the Believers, timed to the run-up to the midterms, about climbing inside the Trump-supporter mindset while trying not to let it warp my own in the process.

This is the second installment in the series. You can find the first here: I Lied My Way Into a MAGA Focus Group.

It feels almost like a civic obligation to understand how these people are actually thinking. Because if those patterns go unexamined, they calcify. And if they calcify, nothing moves.

If there’s even a narrow window where beliefs can be unsettled, where certainty loosens its grip just a bit, where a vote might be reconsidered somewhere between now and November, then it’s worth understanding how these minds actually work from the inside.

Call it field research, if you’re feeling charitable. Call it something closer to masochism, if you’re not.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, my dad, then 65 years old, became a xenophobe.

“Islamophobe” is probably the more accurate term, though that feels too precise. What took hold of him was broader, blurrier: an unfocused hostility toward anyone he perceived as “Middle Eastern,” which turned out to include a surprisingly large portion of humanity. Arabs, South Asians, Sikhs… anyone who might, in his mind, have once been in the vicinity of falafel.

The towers fell. The Pentagon burned. A plane went down in a field in Pennsylvania. And something in him broke and reassembled.

This was not, until that morning, his default factory setting.

He had been reliably liberal. Born in 1936, he cast his first vote for John F. Kennedy when the voting age was still 21 and stuck with that identity for decades, voting Democratic in every election except for a brief lapse in 1984, when even some Democrats found themselves momentarily charmed by Ronald Reagan.

But that autumn morning, something in the circuitry shifted.

His anger needed somewhere to go. Not toward the distant architects of terror, who remained abstract and unreachable, but toward something closer. Something visible.

So, he told my mother she could no longer shop at the nearby Persian market for produce.

“She’s not going there,” my father told me, as though the market had recently begun selling grenades alongside the eggplants.

And just like that, in their quiet suburban tract home, this became an act of principle. A line drawn against a world that had suddenly become terrifying.

It was around then that he started watching Fox News.

It’s easy to forget now, but Fox was not always the high-potency, reality-bending propaganda machine it has become. When it arrived in the late nineties, it was a mild hit of validation for people who felt talked down to by CNN and The New York Times.

That was the starter dose.

After the September 11 attacks, the dosage increased. Fear became the active ingredient, laced with patriotism, and the world narrowed into something more manageable. Us and them. Loyalty and betrayal. The hit landed faster, stronger, and it felt like clarity. Not a drug. Oxygen.

And then, almost without noticing, it settled into the bloodstream.

By the Obama years, dependency had taken hold. Fox wasn’t reporting reality. It was dosing it. Preloading every story with meaning and telling viewers what to feel before they had time to think. You did not turn it on to understand. You turned it on because you needed it. You needed to be directed, to steady the craving, to feel that familiar surge of artificial clarity.

By the time Trump entered the system, Fox did not need to adapt. The dosage became constant, aggressive, unrelenting. Outrage delivered in rapid succession, each hit overriding doubt and rewarding anger. Facts became negotiable. Conspiracy moved to the center.

At that point, Fox wasn’t just the drug. It was the lab, the dealer, the entire supply chain, ratcheting up the potency and making sure you never went without.

He says something incendiary. Fox amplifies it. The audience reacts, and that reaction fuels the next escalation. A self-sustaining loop where reality is bent or discarded to keep the high alive.

It did not happen all at once. It happened slowly, deliberately, until the dependency was complete and the audience could no longer tell the difference between reality and the drug that replaced it.

My dad never made it that far.

I got to him early, before the habit hardened into need, before the craving took over, before the apparatus could turn him into another addict. Another Fox News junkie.

I saw early on what Fox News was doing and moved to interrupt it. I brought him articles, books, videos—anything that showed how Fox uses bombastic language, imagery, and sound to pull you in. How its false patriotism and manufactured fear made you need it. I did everything I could to dilute it so he was no longer under the influence.

I weaned him off.

He detoxed.

I got my dad back.

After that, he kept his streak of voting for Democrats, and from the moment Trump emerged from the pit, he despised him.

Oh, and my mom could buy fruit and vegetables at the Persian market again.

But millions of men like my dad, men of his generation, weren’t so lucky. They succumbed. Most still are.

One of them was my uncle, my dad’s younger brother. A former teacher, he moved with his wife to Nevada, bought guns, convinced that minorities were on the verge of overrunning his affluent suburban enclave.

He called my dad constantly, ranting, parroting what he had just picked up from Fox News talking heads, as if passing along urgent information. My dad tried, at first, to reason with him.

Eventually, it was too much. My dad stopped picking up the phone.

They died a year apart. They’d been estranged for two.

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It was with men like these, men still immersed in it, that I had breakfast recently.

My dad died a few years ago. He never experienced Trump 2.0. Small mercies.

In his later years, he didn’t leave the house much. Once a week, Saturday mornings, he went for breakfast at a local diner with a group of fellow retirees—men who had done their time at the grocery chain where he’d spent his career, each of them having climbed to some level of management. Every one of them, he told me, was a committed Trumper.

Knowing my dad’s opposing progressive perspectives, they had learned, over the years, not to talk politics at these gatherings.

This did not extend to group emails.

Those came regularly. Forwarded, then forwarded again, each one gathering a kind of momentum. Politically-themed racist jokes. Misogynistic memes. Doctored photos of the usual suspects—Obama, Hillary, Biden—plus whoever else had recently been promoted to villain status.

My dad hated those emails.

I’d ask why he associated with them.

“These are the only friends I’ve got,” came the reply.

A couple of weeks ago, I reached out to one of them. I still had his number from my parents’ anniversary party, and later, from my dad’s memorial. I asked if they still met for breakfast on Saturdays.

They did.

I asked if I could join.

I told him I write on Substack (he had no idea what that was) and that I was familiar with their politics, at least as they were when my dad last met with them in 2023, and how they differed from his and, as I confessed, mine. I said I wanted to hear how they see things now. I was completely upfront about what I write, that I hoped to record the conversation and turn it into an article.

Then I added that I’d pay for breakfast.

That clinched it.

I arrived at the diner that Saturday morning to find ten elderly men already assembled, many with coffee in hand. It struck me as a larger turnout than the usual Breakfast Club my dad used to describe, which I chose to interpret as enthusiasm for my project, though the offer of a free meal may have played a role.

I didn’t know any of them, but they knew me, or at least a version of me assembled over the years through secondhand updates. Several greeted me with a level of familiarity that suggested my life had been discussed more often than I’d been aware.

Two wore the classic Make America Great Again hats. Another had on a white one that read Trump Was Right About Everything. Had they worn them for my benefit, or was this their standard signature look? The sight of those hats produced the usual internal reaction—a small spike of cortisol and the urge to say something snarky and uncharitable. I didn’t. Diplomacy was key. Though I have to admit to being very self-conscious about being seen among those three. Would the other patrons in this bustling eatery assume I was simpatico with my tablemates’ ideologies and affiliations? Surely, something in the way I presented myself belied my lifelong liberal leanings. Alas, I knew this probably wasn’t true. But, self-consciousness be damned. I had come here for a reason.

Unlike my previous venture into the MAGA maw, this one was on the up and up. I was clear about where I stood politically and the fact that I would use their recorded conversation for an article. I noted that my readers span all fifty states and a hundred-plus countries—most of whom either never get the chance to meet their kind, or make a point, rather vehemently, of avoiding them.

As I found my seat amongst them, they offered their condolences, speaking of my dad with appreciation for their friendship and shared professional history, and with the particular respect reserved for someone who had been both older and, from time to time, capable of a well-timed off-color joke.

First, I confirmed that everyone at the table had, indeed, voted for Trump all three opportunities. It was clear, at least from the headgear, that three of them were still firmly Team Trump. (Which I quickly calculated to be 30%. Maybe having a crowd of 10 would work in my favor—while bad for my wallet, it simplifies computing statistics.)

I started with them.

“How do you think Trump is doing?”

One of the Red Caps blurted, “Best president in my lifetime!”

Laughter. Some of it tucked into coffee cups as they took sips.

The White Cap: “He may go too far, but the direction is right.”

I turned to the other Red Cap and raised my eyebrows, a silent invitation.

“I give him a B.”

Then I opened it up to the seven others. With no hats or clothing to signal tribal affiliation, I studied their faces for cues, something that might tell me where they stood. Nothing obvious presented itself.

So I chose one.

He started with something that sounded like Fox News talking points circa 2023. “Someone had to stop the flow of criminals coming into the country. Biden wasn’t doing it.”

I noted, silently, that he didn’t say “Sleepy Joe.” Maybe that moniker has been put to rest. It belongs to Trump now. I also noted that he hadn’t answered my question about how Trump is doing, only pivoted to an enemy no longer on the field. But I let it go. I wanted to listen.

The man next to him leaned in, but angled his words toward me. “Yeah, but he effed it up.” (He said “eff,” not the full expletive. This was, after all, a place that serves pancakes to children.)

That seemed to open things up.

Another man, further down, spoke. “I don’t know what happened to my housecleaners. They used to come every week, like clockwork. Either they’re scared or got shipped back to Mexico.”

Nobody laughed at this.

Then the others chimed in, nearly talking over one another.

“We were promised a better economy. I’m still waiting.”

“I voted for lower costs, not whatever this is.”

“Filling up my tank is brutal right now.”

A pause.

“This war is bullshit” another said. Full expletive this time.

“You want Iran to get the bomb?” a red hat fired back, sharply.

“Oh, it’s not about that and you know it,” another cut in.

“Here we go,” someone muttered, half amused, half resigned.

Here we go, indeed.

There wasn’t unanimity. Good. I hadn’t wanted to sit through a syrup-soaked MAGA revival. But whatever control I imagined I might have over the conversation was dissolving quickly. And if I’m being honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d come to take from them in the first place. Data? Confession? A clean, clinical specimen of belief I could dissect and label?

Over the next two hours we would move through the issues of the day. The economy, immigration, partisan trench warfare, the luxury experience otherwise known as healthcare, culture battles, habitual foreign entanglements, and the ongoing trust fall with democracy. The whole delirious zeitgeist, quietly devouring an unreasonable share of the American mind. I had facts for all of it. I had them cataloged, cross-referenced, ready to deploy. I could have corrected every claim, pried open every contradiction, tidied the whole conversation into something resembling reality.

But, I knew better.

Let me pause here to explain myself.

I oscillate daily (sometimes hourly) on how to think about Trump supporters. And those thoughts are not particularly noble. Quite the opposite.

I fucking hate Trump supporters. (And, yes, I wrote the full expletive.)

I have a deep, reflexive contempt for what supporting him represents. After everything we’ve seen, everything that’s happened, it stops being a difference of opinion and starts being a difference of humanity. About what you’re willing to excuse, what you’re willing to condone, what you’re willing to absorb into yourself.

And I know many of you don’t want me to pull that punch. You don’t read articles like mine for moderation. You come for the evisceration. To say things plainly, without anesthesia. I’ve written those pieces. Plenty of them. The kind that deliver a clean hit of catharsis, vindication, and schadenfreude. I’ve lived in that register. It feels like truth because it doesn’t hide the anger. It feels like justice because it names what’s ugly. I’m not immune to it. My mood shifts, as I said. I might very well write one of those pieces again tomorrow.

But contempt is easy. Contempt is efficient. It offers the immediate satisfaction of clarity: they’re wrong, you’re right, end of story. It feels like progress.

It just doesn’t do anything.

We keep thinking the right fact, the perfect comeback, or the devastating debate point will finally break through. It doesn’t. People don’t change their minds because they’ve been out-argued. They change when lived experience, trusted voices, and unresolved contradictions accumulate until the stories they rely on no longer hold.

I used to believe that if I lined up the facts cleanly enough, someone would look at them, sigh, and say, “Well, that settles it. I’ve been wrong.” This has never happened. Not once. What does happen is something else entirely. They get more rigid. Louder.

More facts don’t help. Public “wins” don’t help. Calling them out, mocking them, cornering them. None of it works. It just gives them something to defend, and they will defend it. Not because it makes sense, but because it’s become part of who they are. Suddenly you’re not discussing an idea. You’re negotiating custody of their very identity.

If there is to be a shift, it doesn’t happen in the moment, under bright lights with an audience. It happens later. Alone. When there’s no one to impress, no one to defend against. When something small refuses to settle back into place, no matter how many times they try to smooth it over.

So that’s what I set out to do. See if I could move them. See if I could plant a small, stubborn seed of doubt, something that might lie quiet for a while, take root, and eventually break the surface in a radiant bloom of rejection.

I knew it wouldn’t be all of them. Three of them, the red hatted and the white hatted, were already lost causes. Eff them. (Yes, just “eff” this time. The full word feels a little aggressive sitting next to men eating hash browns.) That was 30% of the table. Roughly Trump’s national approval rating.

But what about the other seven? What could I learn from them? When do I intervene? Who among them was already showing signs of doubt? How might I influence that without triggering their defenses?

And, most importantly, where is the server to refill my coffee?

The rest of what happened belongs in Part 2.

There were, unmistakably, moments of reckoning. Displays of emotion that caught me (and them) off guard. And by the time the dishes were cleared, a few people didn’t just get up and leave, they left altered.

READ PART TWO NOW ↓

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A note before we begin.

Part one of this article was among my most read to date, and I want to welcome the many new subscribers who found their way here.

However you arrived, whether by algorithm, accident, curiosity, or poor judgment, I’m glad you made it.

Feel free to explore the archive. Open Letters by Mersault lives at the intersection of rage, reason, and the occasional dose of righteous mockery.

I also publish short daily posts. If you subscribe or follow me, they’ll show up in your Substack feed, or you can find them in the Notes tab on my page.

And finally, I write another publication, The Stranger’s Library, where things turn more inward. Books, reading, and that strange, stubborn ache of inner life. Join me there.

And now, the conclusion of I Lied My Way Into a MAGA Focus Group.

If you’re just joining this, you should probably start with Part 1.

That’s where I explain how I lied my way into a MAGA focus group… and why I’m probably not supposed to be admitting it in writing.

It’s also where I explain how I managed to convince a moderator and eleven other participants that I was, in fact, a three-time Trump voter.

And that I did have a plan.

Not a good plan, exactly. More of a concept of a plan. The idea was to blend in, say the right things, earn a little credibility, and then, at the right moment, turn. Say what I actually think. Disrupt the room.

But once the conversation moved past why everyone in the room voted for Trump—the familiar grievances: the immigrants, the stolen elections, the belief that cruelty is somehow a form of patriotism—the room didn’t behave the way I expected it to.

So before we go any further, that’s where we are:

Twelve people.
One of them lying.
A plan to drop the facade for some cathartic truth-telling.

But then the conversation moved.

Into places I hadn’t anticipated.

Part 2 starts there.

As reported previously, the first question from the moderator was:

“Why did you vote for Trump three times?”

And, as expected, the MAGA greatest hits made their appearance. The pandemic. The border. The economy. Woke culture. The various Democratic alternatives, all described with varying degrees of contempt.

But more than any specific issue, it was the mood. The sense that something had been taken from them. Or was being taken. Or was about to be taken any minute now, unless someone stepped in and stopped it.

It all sounded familiar.

It was clear that the right-wing ecosystem (cable news, talk radio, Sunday sermons, podcasts, and the endless circulation of Facebook posts and forwarded texts) could rest easy. It had done its job. Thoroughly.

But then the moderator asked the next question.

“What letter grade would you give Trump?”

There was a pause. No one seemed especially eager to go first.

It was a simpler question. Not about explanation. Just an assessment.

The moderator adjusted.

“Raise your hand if you give Trump an A.”

Silence.

“Who gives him a B?”

Nothing.

“C?”

One hand. Raised slowly.

At that point, I quickly sized up the situation. My original plan to break character, reveal my true liberal self, and unload a decade’s worth of how could you possibly support this sociopath was not going to work. It was not necessary. More than that, it would not be helpful.

The moderator continued.

“D?”

Five hands.

“And who gives Trump an F?”

Six hands. Including mine, which I raised with the quiet satisfaction of no longer having to pretend.

Before you mentally calculate the final tally, it’s worth noting that the person who initially gave Trump a C asked to revise her answer.

She explained that, in her family, a C is considered acceptable. Not great, but not yet a problem. But after thinking about it, she decided that what Trump was doing did not meet even that standard.

So she corrected herself.

From a C to a D.

So, the final tally for our subject:

Six Ds.
Six Fs.

Well. This changed things. I no longer had to dismantle anything. They had already done that themselves.

I reasoned that the better approach was not to antagonize them, but to guide them. To affirm their dissatisfaction. To deepen the dissent already forming.

I would, in the language of improv actors, yes-and them. Meet their complaint with agreement and extend it. Make their discontent more concrete, more expansive, and harder to dismiss. Give it shape. Substance. Room to grow. More to be disillusioned by. More to be alienated from.

In other words, help them build a case against their past selves.

Then the moderator prompted each person to explain their grade.

Here’s what I heard, drawn from the transcripts and lightly trimmed for readability.

Economic Pain is Central

“When I see the price of groceries and gas, I want to scream.”

“Food and fuel prices are skyrocketing. Absolutely outrageous.”

“We go to Walmart every week. The exact same items increased exponentially every single time.”

“My main concern is inflation. The prices for food and gas.”

“We go to war in Iran and the prices just keep going up… but my bank account is shrinking.”

“It is affecting us personally.”

“I can’t even afford daycare.”

“I want to be a stay-at-home mom, but I have to work… how do you do all those things?”

“The job market… opportunities are very hard right now.”

“My mom’s on Social Security, and she worked for the federal government for 25 years. She does have Medicare and that doesn’t mean she’s a, what do you call it, freeloader. And Trump was like, oh we don’t have money. What did he say? We don’t have money for this anymore? I almost rolled over. I was like, are you kidding me? People pay into this so that they can retire… she’s 73, she can’t get a job now, you know.”

So, to yes-and them (accept their premise and build on it), I added the following:

“At this point there’s obviously no coherent economic strategy at all. You see major policy decisions being made… “big beautiful” budgets being passed… but there’s no serious explanation of how they stabilize prices or protect all of us. That’s a total lack of leadership.

They talk about putting the country first… You can’t launch a war in a region that directly affects global energy markets, and then act surprised when fuel costs explode. That’s on Trump and his cabinet. It shows a basic failure to understand or even care about how their own decisions drive up costs.

They’ve spent years preaching fiscal discipline, then turned around and blew out the deficit with nothing to show for it. And their supporters still call it success.

People are obviously freaking out, and instead of addressing that, the response is to tell them everything is fine. The Republicans tolerate ordinary people absorbing the damage… the only thing holding it together is a base that’s been convinced not to trust what they can see for themselves.”

I looked around the room. Heads were nodding.

We were in this together!

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The Iran War Is a Failure

What they said:

“The war in Iran is unnecessary. My brother was in the Marines. I wouldn’t want him to die for this… it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

“What happened to America first? Let’s take car of our own before we start blowing up other countries.”

“He actually said we needed to get over it… and he was very flippant… ‘we don’t have money… we’re at war’… I was like, are you kidding me?”

“First and foremost, I wholly 100% disagree with what’s going on with Iran… it’s been a disaster and completely contradictory to what he ran on… no more wars. Propaganda machine at its absolute finest…”

“I’m just intellectually insulted by being told… by Fox News… that this was justified.”

“It’s so much like a war for oil… like the speech last night said, if we’re producing all this oil and all this energy, so why do we care what goes on over there?”

“I’m very disappointed right now with the war in Iran… and how he treats our allies in Europe.”

“It’s about the integrity we used to have as a country… we used to be able to have diplomacy and negotiate and not bomb the negotiators… And I just kind of feel like we have slid… now we’re the country you can’t trust… we used to be the good guys.”

“All of the… foreign affairs… the way that he speaks and certain actions that he takes… in some senses, I regret my vote.”

And then I piled on.

I started by validating what they were already feeling.

The lack of justification. The contradictions with “America First.” The financial burden of the war being passed on to each of us. The reckless willingness to put American troops in harm’s way with no clear objective, no defined end.

Then I pushed it further.

I added that you don’t get to wave the flag and chant “Support Our Troops” while bypassing Congress on something this serious. If you actually respect the people you’re sending into danger, you do the basic constitutional work first.

(On this last point, one of the others pushed back. Presidents have done this before, he said. Obama in Libya. W. in Iraq. Clinton in Kosovo. I conceded the point, because this was true, and also because I did not want to argue about historical precedent in a room where everyone was already nodding along.)

So I moved on.

Because what hadn’t been talked about was the human toll. The part where people die.

Of course, the 13 U.S. service members killed. The hundreds more injured—traumatic brain injuries, shrapnel wounds, severe burns, amputations.

But also the thousands of civilians caught in it. The families erased in an instant.

Commence rant:

“We keep talking about this like it’s a video game. It’s not. It’s people. It’s ordinary lives getting wiped out.

You had a school. A school. A hundred seventy girls killed by a so-called precision missile. Kids sitting there, probably watching the clock, waiting for recess, thinking about who they would play with. And then they’re just… exploded. Torn apart by something launched from a continent away by people who will never see the devastation up close.

Thousands of civilians dead. People who had absolutely nothing to do with any of this… murdered. By us.

And honestly, ask yourself why we’re not seeing the Iranian perspective. Why we’re not seeing what these places actually look like after. The bodies. The bloody carnage in the streets. They’re suppressing it. We’re supposed to believe Hegseth at a podium to tell us how things are.

You can argue policy, poor communication from our leaders, the rising cost of gas, all of it. But at the end of the day, it’s dead civilians. Dead kids. Lives ended by people who will never have to feel that pain… never have to live with the consequences of what they decided.”

I like to think my diatribe drew a few welling eyes, though I wasn’t close enough to be sure.

After everyone had spoken, the moderator asked a follow-up question.

“If we hadn’t gone to war with Iran, would you still disapprove of Trump’s job performance?”

All twelve people raised their hands. Yes.

It wasn’t just the war.

That anger had been building long before.

Epstein Is a Moral Collapse

From the room:

“I not conspiracy-minded… but it’s plainly evident that he has been involved. It’s al n the DOJ files… numerous reports.”

“That stuff is heartbreaking… like the worst nightmares… and he says it’s boring? Get over it? That’s the scariest stuff I’ve ever read.”

“They think we’re so stupid… everything is redacted… who sent the email?… there’s just no answers.”

“I’m just at the point where I’m like… did you bomb Iran to hide what you were up to?”

“Those crimes are so horrific… it would be evil to ignore them… those people all need to be brought to justice no matter who they are.”

“Why the hell not? [Reacting to the DOJ saying they’re not expecting prosecutions related to Epstein.] If these kinds of crimes are happening, and we can’t even begin to imagine what’s actually happening, do something! It’s just being pushed side so we forget about it.”

“It does feel like a mockery… I voted Republican for Christian values… and now it’s turned into something completely different.”

I saw an opening.

A chance to expose one of the most grotesque contradictions in American society: the Christian right’s hypocrisy. Sort of a hobby of mine.

So I said:

“Yes, there’s the whole aspect of bringing people to justice. Jail. Accountability. Fine. But that’s almost beside the point.

What this actually exposes is something uglier. The people who claim to stand for ethics, morality, Christianity, contorting themselves to defend behavior that spits in the face of all of it.

Just yesterday, the White House faith advisor said Trump was like Jesus. Like Jesus!

You look at the record. The way he speaks. The way he treats people. The compulsive lying. The grift. The vanity. The cruelty. Deliberate. Repeated.

You can set the Epstein files aside entirely. You don’t need them. What’s left is still a man who embodies the exact opposite of what these people claim to revere.

So what are we doing here?

This isn’t faith. It’s not values. It’s not morality. It’s allegiance. It’s power. It’s deciding who you’re loyal to and then gutting your own standards to make it fit.

Call it what it is. If a man can violate everything you claim to believe and still be dressed up as righteous, as chosen, as something even remotely sacred, then those beliefs were never the point.

They were props. And that’s the part that should bother people.

Not just what he’s done. What people are willing to excuse. What they’re willing to sanctify.”

I paused, waiting for lightning to strike me.

It didn’t.

And that was the through line.

Dissatisfaction. Anger, even.

At the man they had voted for three times over eight years. The base.

And they were done pretending everything was fine.

And while the themes had been broken promises and failed execution, there was something else that caught me off guard.

They were sick of him.

His behavior. His character. The constant divisiveness. The everything-is-about-him fatigue. The social corrosion. The sense that the country just feels worse to live in.

“I think the biggest thing… is the level of divisiveness that we’ve reached in the country… every year there’s this increasing rift between sides… this sort of extreme language… people are turning on each other… that is the thing that I’m most concerned about… and it’s coming from the man in the White House.”

“I’m not a big fan of the way that he carries himself and speaks… he’s very kind of unpresidential… It’s terrible.”

“It’s all about him, basically… you know… I’m tired of him just talking about him…”

“It stinks that it’s all about him… like the whole thing is just about him instead of really what’s… how do we get back to… you know… figuring things out.”

“I’m tired of just talking about him… where I’m like, okay, what can we talk about to make things better?”

“He’s a buffoon… I mean, I could go on and on…”

“Some of the stuff that he’s doing is just so… shocking… seemingly out of nowhere… it’s bizarre… there’s not a whole lot of good stuff happening.”

“It just feels overwhelming and crazy… I don’t know… it just feels like everything is being blown up…”

More than anything, they wanted something radical:

Someone normal.

“I just want a normal Republican candidate and not a Donald Trump crony… just a normal human… that’s all I want.”

“I like someone willing to look across the aisle… and actually see that there’s a person over there instead of a rival.”

“If the Republican Party is going to follow this Trump trend… I would probably actually register as a Democrat… just to try to bring things back closer to the center.”

Honestly, I had nothing to add to any of this. It was a small but meaningful chorus in favor of collective sanity.

Then the moderator turned to the post-Trump future. Assuming, of course, we get one.

So who’s interested in seeing JD Vance run for president?”

No one.

“Anybody more interested in Marco Rubio for 2028?”

Still no one.

Here, a gentleman seemed to sum up the zeitgeist in the room.

“I think the well has been poisoned for me… I don’t want such a level of extremism. I just think MAGA is over. We need a broader political spectrum.”

And I took “broader political spectrum” to mean a version of politics that didn’t behave like a demented personality cult.

Or maybe a movement that could actually help make America, well…

you know…

Great.

If I ended the article here, it would be a neat little conclusion. Eleven Trump acolytes, finally turning on their once-savior… just several years and several disasters behind schedule.

That’s about as much character growth as one can reasonably hope for in a single evening.

But that’s not the end. Because even if this group reflects the broader MAGA electorate, we haven’t won.

Not yet.

So this is not the moment to exhale.

They hadn’t abandoned all their beliefs.

They still wanted hardline border crackdowns driven by exaggerated fears about who was crossing, repeating inflammatory claims about “rapists and murderers.”

They still clung to a “pro-life” identity while ignoring the very real human cost of Republican policies that erode care, stability, and survival for the very people they say they value.

They still invoked “freedom” to reject vaccines, masks, and other public health measures, elevating anecdote (“I know someone who had a heart attack a week after the COVID vaccine.”) over overwhelming scientific evidence.

They still gave oxygen to conspiracies about stolen elections and hidden cabals of Democratic elites running child-trafficking rings out of pizza parlors.

They still distrusted expertise and institutions, except when those same institutions confirmed their own biases.

And when those subjects came up, I didn’t confront them head-on or antagonize. I met them where they were, agreed just enough to stay aligned, and then introduced facts and questions that pushed their logic to its breaking point, unraveled their reasoning.

It sounded like agreement. It wasn’t. I was using their own framework to expose their contradictions and push them, however slightly, toward a shared humanity and a shared sense of civic responsibility. An obligation to something beyond themselves.

You see, many now see Trump as a failed instrument. He didn’t deliver what they believed he would.

So they’re disillusioned with him, and in some cases with MAGA itself.

But the underlying instincts haven’t gone anywhere.

They may be ready to fire the CEO, but not abandon the business model.

The worldview remains. Still there. Waiting.

For a more competent vessel. Someone else to carry it forward.

Someone who might manage to do the same things, just… better.

But then I wonder if that’s entirely true. Whether that outcome is actually inevitable.

Because for more than a decade now, we’ve endured his voice. Loud. Constant. Inescapable.

A bloviating, sociopathic wrecking ball spouting vulgarities and vitriol and making deviancy and divisiveness feel like the norm. Ever since that descent down the golden escalator eleven years ago.

A voice that forced an entire political party to contort itself. To abandon whatever principles it once claimed to hold, out of fear of the tantrums and vendettas of a man-child in the White House.

A voice that needed enemies. So it found them. Or created them. Out of the vulnerable, out of the unfamiliar, out of whoever couldn’t fight back. A voice that trained ordinary people to fear “the other.” Anything to keep them enraged enough not to notice their pockets being picked.

All the while, the harm was coming from the very man and party they empowered. Policies that stripped their livelihoods, hollowed out their towns, left them poorer, more brittle.

A voice that taught them to look anywhere but inward, anywhere but at the hands deliberately tightening the noose.

A voice that repeated the same distortions over and over until they stopped sounding extreme… and started sounding ordinary.

Until they just… were.

But what happens when that voice is gone?

Because maybe, just maybe, those beliefs aren’t as permanent as they seem.

Maybe they require constant reinforcement. Constant noise. Constant permission.

Maybe without that voice, those beliefs don’t hold.

Maybe without it, even the people in that room, or the ones outside it who would have confidently raised their hands to give Trump an A, wouldn’t have been pushed to this extreme to begin with.

Wouldn’t sound like this.

Wouldn’t have learned to excuse so much.

Normalize so much.

Accept so much.

And maybe what follows is something quieter.

Maybe it doesn’t snap back overnight. Maybe it takes years. Another decade, even.

For the voice to fade. For the temperature to drop. For the embers to burn out slowly, unevenly.

But maybe they do.

Not completely.

But enough.

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What you’ve just read is the first installment in my Among the Believers series. The next piece, where I sit down for a long, unfiltered diner breakfast with die-hard Trump voters, is available now! ↓

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By Open Letters by Mersault

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I like to think of myself as a basically decent person. Responsible. Honest. I pay my taxes without trying to outsmart the government. I pay for my own streaming accounts, even when the password field practically begs me to use a family member’s login. I rarely drive more than five miles over the speed limit. Heck, I return the shopping cart even when no one is watching.

So I had a system. A quiet agreement with myself: I am not the kind of person who does things that require a defense attorney.

And yet, this week, I committed an act, premeditated, sustained, and by any reasonable standard, unethical. Furthermore, what I am doing right now, writing this (publishing it) is, strictly speaking, illegal.

I offer no justification. I will not dress it up as journalism, civic duty, or performance art. I will simply ask you to hear me out (which is what people say when they have already done the thing they suspect you won’t approve of).

From time to time, I apply for paid research studies to earn a little extra money to fund things like a cup of coffee I could have made more cheaply at home or the occasional unnecessary book I will insist I need. Some of them align with my work: testing software, clicking buttons, pretending I don’t hate the interface. Other times, they ask me to evaluate a snack that has been engineered by a team of scientists to bypass the part of your brain that knows when to stop.

But one particular survey opportunity kept resurfacing, and it began to nag at me:

DO YOU HAVE OPINIONS ON POLITICS?

I had seen it before. I had completed the application before. I had answered honestly. I had been myself. I told them who I voted for, what I read, what I watched. My full, unremarkable self. And each time, the survey rejected me.

They were not looking for me.

They were looking for Trump voters.

And so, when it appeared again, I made a decision that can best be described as deliberate and poorly defensible.

I decided to lie. Just enough to become the kind of person they were trying to find.

I said I had voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. I said I consumed the expected programming and podcasts. The whole right wing ecosystem. I said I married my first cousin.

Okay. That last one is a joke.

But the intent was clear: I was no longer myself. I was a version of a person they were looking for.

And, like most lies that are built with just enough care, it worked.

I was invited to a live screener. A real conversation with a real person whose job was to verify that I was, in fact, the person I had just invented. They asked me to confirm my answers—including, of course, my voting history.

It’s unsettling to say a lie out loud. It acquires weight. It sits in your mouth awkwardly.

“Who did you vote for in 2016?” the researcher asked.

I paused, which is never a good sign.

“Um… Trump.”

It came out like a suggestion. As if I were offering it up for review.

“Who did you vote for in 2020?”

“T—Trump,” I said, introducing a stutter I do not normally possess, as though my body had decided to register moral objection.

“Who did you vote for in 2024?”

And here, something shifted. Perhaps repetition breeds confidence. I embodied my character.

“Trump,” I said.

Flat. Clean. No hesitation.

“That checks out,” the researcher said.

A calendar invitation appeared moments later.

The next evening, I would attend.

As myself, but not.

I hadn’t really thought through my motivation for this.

There was a vague notion of confronting Trump voters.

Not new territory for me.

I have, over the years, developed a reputation among friends and family as someone who will, sooner or later, get punched.

Possibly. But I’ve never been much for physical confrontation. I’m not built for it, temperamentally or otherwise. My weapon, such as it is, has always been language. Words, properly deployed, can do damage without leaving fingerprints.

So when I see people stationed behind folding tables collecting signatures to impeach a Democratic governor or “save democracy” by making it harder to vote, I stop. Engage. Sometimes it’s a quiet disruption. A comment. A question. Sometimes pointed. Or a more deliberate attempt to dissuade someone from signing by gently introducing the actual facts about the policy they’re seconds away from endorsing.

I’ve visited my Republican congressperson’s district office, which has the curious quality of always being open and never actually containing the congressperson. I’ve delivered my views plainly, unsupportively, to a staffer who looked like she had just realized she worked for someone who had quietly abdicated the job, opting instead to acquiesce to the president at every opportunity.

And then, in the lead-up to the 2020 election, I quite literally stepped into the fray.

I found myself at a roadside MAGA rally. Hundreds of people. Flags snapping in the wind, signs with fonts that seemed to be yelling, car horns contributing a kind of cacophonous soundtrack.

I walked in alone, carrying a sign.

On one side: KEEP WHITE POWER OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE
On the other: IF YOU VOTE FOR A RACIST, YOU’RE A RACIST

One person against a crowd like that doesn’t go unnoticed.

The response was immediate. I was screamed at. Called a baby eater—peak QAnon absurdity. Labeled with the F-word, for a sexual orientation I had apparently been assigned on sight. Branded a traitor, which, in this context, seemed to mean “white, but not cooperating.”

And then there was the bullhorn.

At some point, a man pressed it directly into my left ear and unleashed what I can only describe as a full-volume, free-form thesis on something, though coherence was not its primary feature.

The result, according to doctors, is permanent hearing loss. About forty percent in that ear, and tinnitus: a high, persistent ringing that never quite resolves.

(These days, I bring earplugs. Live and learn.)

The police, who had been observing all of this, eventually approached me and suggested (firmly) that I leave, lest I be charged with disturbing the peace or something along those lines. It was framed as a neutral application of the rules, which felt… curious, given the surrounding conditions.

So I relocated.

About a hundred feet away.

Close enough that my sign still functioned as a kind of visual rebuttal—a lone, coherent sentence facing down an unhinged stream of consciousness rendered in flags and banners.

That’s how I usually operate. Step in, say what I think is true, and let the consequences sort themselves out.

So when I entered the focus group, I wasn’t there to observe quietly.

I had a plan.

Blend in. Play along. Become, convincingly enough, one of them. And then, at the perfect moment, pull the pin. Rip off the metaphorical MAGA hat and reveal my true self: the woke, elitist, libtard villain of their shared mythology.

I know their talking points. I know the rebuttals. (Facts, mostly.)

I thought I could walk in, say the right things, and then, at the precise moment when everyone felt most comfortable, detonate it.

Just enough to crack the certainty in the room. Maybe even, if I’m being honest, humiliate them a little. Which, in my mind, was not cruelty. It was… corrective.

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First, here’s where I publicly confess to an illegal action.

I signed an NDA. A non-disclosure agreement.

Truth be told, I didn’t read it. But I did sign it. My legal consent that I would not, under any circumstances, disclose what happened in that meeting.

And yet, here we are.

In my defense (if that word still applies) I had already lied to get into the room. At that point, the seal of dishonesty was broken. One more step into ethical gray didn’t feel like a breach so much as consistency.

I captured the entire session. Two hours and ten minutes. I started with an AI transcription tool, which felt efficient and faintly futuristic, but about fifteen minutes in the host disabled it. Whether he noticed me or simply remembered a setting he meant to toggle earlier, I’ll never know.

So I adapted.

I recorded the rest on my phone, which felt less futuristic and more like being wired as an informant in a second-rate mob movie

So, the quotes you’ll see are verbatim.

(In reviewing the transcripts, it turns out I say “you know” far more often than I care to admit. Those have been quietly excised.)

I entered the room and counted. Twelve participants, including me. Twelve.

Which made the metaphor hard to ignore.

Twelve disciples for Trump. And me, I suppose, self-cast as Judas.

From what I could tell, the group was mostly white. Three women, seven men, along with one Hispanic man and one Black woman. The arrangement felt like a casting decision someone insisted was “representative.”

They were geographically dispersed: Pennsylvania, Texas, Minnesota, Michigan, Massachusetts, North Carolina, West Virginia, Ohio.

And then there was me. From California.

You know, the failed, apocalyptic dystopia as described nightly on Fox News.

Occupationally, they formed a tidy cross-section of normalcy: a contracts manager, a purchasing and accounting assistant, a nanny, a telecommunications director, a sheriff’s deputy, a tech employee, an attorney who also works in law school admissions, an e-commerce consultant, and a website administrator.

In other words, not caricatures. Not villains. Just people with jobs, schedules, inboxes, and, as it would turn out, a very particular relationship to reality.

And then there was me.

Playing a role.

Then came the first real question.

“Why did you vote for Trump in the last three elections?”

I froze.

For a moment, I imagine I looked like Kash Patel in that headshot—eyes too wide, like a deer with a slightly off-center gaze in the headlights.

If I was going to play along (build credibility, blend in) I needed a rationale. Not just plausible, but durable. Something that could survive contact with follow-up questions without collapsing.

Because I already knew where this was supposed to go.

At some point, I planned to turn. To challenge. To dismantle the logic I was about to construct.

And that created a problem.

How do you convincingly explain more than a decade of support for a man… and then, minutes later, begin methodically arguing against him, without sounding like something in my brain has just shorted out?

Fortunately, my turn would come last.

So I listened.

What emerged wasn’t ideology. Not really. It was something looser. More ambient.

A mood.

The pandemic surfaced immediately, and then repeatedly, as a grievance still resonating. Vaccines, masks, mandates. Spoken about less in terms of health than as personal violations. “Freedom” appeared often, doing a lot of work while remaining impressively undefined.

Immigration came next. Not specifics. Not policy. Just a persistent sense that the border is “out of control,” that something fundamental is being ignored or allowed to unravel. This is often paired with a vague but insistent feeling that things don’t feel safe anymore. More instinct than evidence.

There was also a broader distrust. Media. Institutions. Expertise. Anything that sounded official was treated with suspicion. A sense that information itself had become suspect, and that they were being misled, managed, or talked down to.

And then there was Trump.

Not so much as a leader, but as a tool. A blunt one. The appeal wasn’t governance; it was disruption. He says what others won’t. He fights. He retaliates. Outcomes felt secondary to posture, which was valued in a way that bordered on infatuation. Strength! Defiance! Revenge!

Around the edges, the ecosystem widened. Praise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came up. At least three participants were virulently “anti-vax.” DEI surfaced with a low, constant hostility. A broad sense of cultural displacement, that the country “isn’t what it used to be.”

Running through all of it was opposition. To Hillary Clinton. To Joe Biden. To Kamala Harris. For several, the vote didn’t feel like an endorsement of Trump so much as a rejection—of her, of him, of them.

Taken together, it didn’t feel like loyalty in the traditional sense.

It felt more like accumulation.

Grievances, layered over time. Distrust, calcified into instinct. A persistent sense (sometimes stated, often just implied) that something had been taken, that the system no longer works for them.

And that Trump, whatever else he is, offers a way to push back.

And then it was my turn.

This is what I told them:

“I voted for Trump three times.

Not because I admired him. Not because I thought he was principled or even particularly fit for the job. I had misgivings from the beginning… about his judgment, his morality, whether he believed in anything beyond himself.

But I voted for him anyway.

I approached politics transactionally. I’m in an income bracket where tax policy has a real impact, so I focused on rates, capital gains, and the economic conditions I believed would benefit me.

I told myself presidents are temporary. Personalities are noise. What matters is policy, markets, and, ultimately, my own financial outcome.

So when I saw the chaos, the vanity, the dishonesty, I overrode it. I said: I’m not voting for a moral example. I’m voting for an outcome.

And the outcome, as I saw it, was better for me.

That may not be admirable.

But it’s honest.”

Looking around the room, I got the sense I’d bought myself a certain amount of credibility.

I should pause here to be clear: these personal economic rationales are not my views.

They are what I said to gain entry. To justify my presence. To earn the right (later) to say what I actually think without being immediately dismissed as the enemy.

And if, reading that, you felt a flicker of agreement… if it sounded, even briefly, reasonable, that’s part of the problem.

Trump is not pro-business.

He is pro-chaos.

Markets don’t reward chaos. They price it. And they price it as risk. Investors pull back. Planning slows. Capital hesitates. His style (sudden tariffs, reversals, threats) turns the entire system into something reactive, jumpy.

Those tariffs aren’t strategy. They’re a tax. Costs go up. Businesses pass it on. You see it at the grocery store. At the gas pump.

He talks like a fiscal conservative. He governs like a spender. Tax cuts without discipline, deficits expanding, pressure building on rates while markets swing and confidence erodes.

He doesn’t reduce risk.

He is the risk.

And even if (hypothetically) his policies did build wealth for me, that cannot be the standard.

That’s not citizenship.

That’s self-interest elevated above everything else.

Democracy does not survive that trade.

Because the moment you decide your personal gain matters more than the system, and the people it’s meant to serve, you’re no longer participating in democracy.

You’re stripping it for parts.

But I digress.

And then came the next question.

And with it, something I hadn’t accounted for.

Up to that point, I’d been operating with a kind of internal script: blend in, establish credibility, wait for the moment to turn.

That plan ended there.

What followed over the next hour and forty-five minutes was not a continuation of what came before. The conversation moved. Quickly. Into places I hadn’t anticipated.

It wasn’t what I expected.

And more to the point, it’s not something I can compress into a few quotes or a neat summary at the end of this piece.

It needs more room than that.

That’s Part 2.

Next week.

So keep an eye out for the conclusion… or subscribe for free and have it delivered to your inbox. Paid subscribers get early access.

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PART 2 – The Conclusion – is available now! Look below for the link!

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THE STRANGER’S LIBRARY

It’s a quiet, lamplit corner where I write about the books that have stayed with me—sometimes troubling the waters, sometimes steadying them.

The Stranger's Library

Books I'd save from the fire.

By Open Letters by Mersault

Dear Barron,

There was a time when I felt something like sympathy for you.

Not an abundance of it. Not the kind that asks me to forget who your parents are or what they chose to build. But enough to recognize that growing up inside the Trump family may have been a fraught childhood.

You were a child, and children should not be made to carry the full moral debt of their parents’ sins.

You were raised under klieg lights. In a house that managed to be both ostentatious and airless, gold trim on the surface, decay underneath. In a family where ethics were eschewed, morality mocked, and entitlement mandated. On that much, you were owed some grace. Any childhood lived in public is a distortion. Yours was something more extreme, a performance you did not choose, inside a machine that rarely distinguishes between a person and a prop.

But you are now 20.

You are no longer a child drifting through your father’s spectacle. You are a grown man making choices, attaching your name to ventures, moving through political and media ecosystems, and benefiting, materially and reputationally, from a presidency your family treats less as public office than as a franchising opportunity.

The grace afforded to children no longer applies.

You are now judged by the company you keep, the schemes you join, and the systems you help legitimize.

So let us speak plainly.

This is not about whether you seem awkward in public, or tall, or camera-shy, or any of the trivialities used to fill magazines. This is about what surrounds you, and what you have chosen to step into: the grift, the access-peddling, the donor-adjacent ventures, the loud misogyny of the spaces you move through, and the increasingly familiar Trump family instinct to stand within arm’s reach of something indecent and foul while insisting, with feigned indignation, that no one can prove the smell.

The Company You Keep

If you want to understand the kind of man you are becoming, start with the company you keep.

During the campaign, you helped guide your father toward a very specific media ecosystem. Not policy thinkers. Not serious interviewers. A circuit of internet personalities whose entire appeal rests on outrage, grievance, and a warped vision of masculinity.

So let us be clear about who these people are.

They are the most notorious names in the so-called manosphere.

Not thinkers. Not leaders. Performers of resentment. They tell young men they have been cheated, disrespected, emasculated, and that the cure is dominance. They peddle a worldview where empathy is weakness, cruelty is honesty, and women are reduced to prizes, props, or problems to be managed.

They divide the world into “high-value men” and “low-value women,” as if dignity were a marketplace.
They reduce relationships to transactions, where people are assets to be acquired or discarded.
They turn humiliation into entertainment and cruelty into a revenue stream.
They rebrand domination as discipline and call it confidence.
It is not strength. It is insecurity, weaponized and sold back to the lonely.

And you routed a presidential campaign into it.

That is not media savvy.

That is alignment.

You knew the terrain. You knew exactly who these figures were and what they represent. You understood that their audiences are built on anger, and that their influence depends on feeding it. And you chose to enter that space, to amplify it, to legitimize it with proximity to power.

That choice has consequences.

Because once you step into that world, you are not just using it.

It is using you.

The same ecosystem is filled with opportunists who orbit power looking for a way in. Influencers, self-branded “alpha” entrepreneurs, men who monetize misogyny and call it advice. They attach themselves to proximity the way barnacles attach to a hull, hoping that if they cling tightly enough, they will be carried somewhere useful.

And they are already using you.

They are in your orbit. They have access. They use your name, your status, your proximity to power, and convert it into attention and money.

You are in those rooms, in that company, around men who treat women as disposable and cruelty as an aspirational trait.

You chose that.

This is what your father’s world has always done at its worst: elevate dominance, excuse degradation, and reward those ruthless enough to thrive inside it.

And you are not resisting that inheritance.

You are stepping into it.

This is not edgy. It is not rebellious. It is not even particularly clever.

It is small. It is mean. It is adolescent.

And if this is the world you are choosing to move through, to amplify, to legitimize, then that is not something being done to you.

It is something you are doing.

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The People Who Smell Opportunity Around Your Name

Then there is Sollos Yerba Mate, because your family looked at the wreckage they are making of America and decided what it needed was another branded caffeinated drink.

You were named a director. And almost immediately, $1 million in private capital appeared.

That is not coincidence.

It is not because of the tea.

It is because of access.

Investors are not funding a beverage. They are buying proximity to power, and in your case, proximity to the President of the United States. Putting money into something with your name on it is a way in, a way closer, a way to be seen, heard, and remembered in a system where access to your father becomes advantage.

This is how influence is bought in corrupt company: not as a bribe, but as an “investment.”

The product is incidental.

The access is the business.

And there is little evidence this is even a serious market-facing company. No visible rollout. No consumer presence. No indication that the goal is to compete on the strength of the product itself.

The money arrived anyway.

That tells you what this is.

You are not building something that attracts capital. You are lending your name to something designed to attract people who want something in return.

Your proximity is the asset.

The investment is the price of entry.

You are not being pulled into this.

You are choosing it.

The Family Trade: Turning Power Into Revenue

And then there is the larger structure.

You are tied to World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture—a project that has raised more than $550 million, with roughly $400 million flowing back to your family. As a listed founder, your net worth is estimated at around $150 million, making you the richest 20-year-old in the world.

That is not entrepreneurship.

That is proximity monetized.

The old Trump instinct, updated for the digital age: if the presidency cannot be sold outright, it can be wrapped in a token, branded as innovation, and converted into cash.

And the ethical problem does not merely persist.

It escalates.

World Liberty introduced a “Super Node” program. Invest $5 million, and you are no longer just a participant, but someone granted access to your family, including your father. At the same time, the company is pursuing a U.S. banking license while operating in a regulatory environment manipulated by his administration.

The lines are not blurred.

They are erased.

You may not be sitting in a room making business decisions.

You do not need to be.

You are part of the structure itself, financially tied, publicly attached, and valuable because of what your name represents. Your role is not to build the enterprise, but to be part of what it sells: proximity to power, packaged and priced.

This is something you should be ashamed of.

Not because crypto is inherently sinister, though it reliably attracts unprincipled opportunists, but because this venture is something more precise and more troubling:

A conflict-of-interest machine.

You have chosen to stand inside it.

The Choice

Barron,

None of this is complicated.

It only looks complicated because the system you are operating inside depends on confusion, distance, and plausible deniability.

Strip that away, and what remains is simple: proximity to power becomes money, access is sold without being named, and a predictable class of opportunists gathers around it.

You did not have to guess how this story unfolds.

It was already playing out in front of you: a family model built on self-dealing, brand monetization, and the steady conversion of influence into income. A pattern of entitlement dressed up as business, of proximity mistaken for achievement, of inherited status passed off as earned success.

You did not build that system.

But you are choosing to inhabit it.

Your wealth is already secured. Your status is already guaranteed. There is no need to monetize, no need to attach your name to speculative ventures, no need to move through ecosystems built on grievance and access.

And at a certain point, participation is indistinguishable from endorsement.

That is the point you have reached.

There is always an impulse to soften this. To say you are young. To say you are shaped by your environment. To say that anyone raised in that world might struggle to see it clearly.

Those explanations may be true.

They are no longer relevant.

Because the pattern is already established.

The company you keep.
The ventures you attach yourself to.
The people who find your orbit useful.

None of it is accidental.

That is the lesson your family has perfected.

And it is the lesson you are now practicing.

So the question is not whether you understand what you are part of.

You do.

The question is whether you intend to continue.

Because the trajectory from here is not ambiguous.

It is continuation.

And eventually, that will be the only thing anyone needs to know about the man you are.

—Mersault

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THE STRANGER’S LIBRARY

It’s a quiet, lamplit corner where I write about the books that have stayed with me—sometimes troubling the waters, sometimes steadying them.

Choose a chamber below. Step inside.

The Stranger's Library

Westerns for People Who Don’t Like Westerns

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6 months ago · 18 likes · 4 comments · Open Letters by Mersault

The Stranger's Library

The Dangerous Desire to Know

Welcome Strangers…

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6 months ago · 17 likes · 5 comments · Open Letters by Mersault

The Stranger's Library

The Room, The Rice Fields, and the Books

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6 months ago · 21 likes · 6 comments · Open Letters by Mersault

The Stranger's Library

The WISDOM of PLAGUES

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7 months ago · 23 likes · 5 comments · Open Letters by Mersault

The Stranger's Library

Three Books on Resistance

Dear friends…

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7 months ago · 20 likes · 7 comments · Open Letters by Mersault

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I was born in Iran in 1951, the same year our people elected Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister. He was not a king, not a cleric, but a civilian chosen through democratic elections. His great offense—at least in the eyes of distant powers—was believing that the oil beneath our soil should belong to the Iranian people rather than the British company that had controlled it for decades. I did not know any of this as an infant wrapped in my mother’s arms. My earliest memories are simpler: the smell of ghormeh sabzi simmering in our kitchen, the clatter of tea glasses on a brass tray, the dusty courtyard where my cousins and I chased one another through long golden afternoons. Adults spoke of politics in low voices I could not yet understand. Only later did I learn that when I was two years old, the United States and Britain helped overthrow our elected prime minister in a covert operation and restore the Shah—the monarch—to full power.

A child does not recognize the moment history bends.

But somewhere between the scent of herbs and the echo of my mother calling me inside for supper, the course of my life quietly changed.

I grew up under the Shah without really understanding what that meant at first. To a child, the world is measured in smaller things: the sound of classical Persian music drifting from the radio in the evenings, the samovar quietly steaming in the corner, the call to prayer floating over rooftops at sunset, the thrill of flying kites in the dry wind of late summer. My father ran a small neighborhood grocery shop and believed in quiet work, quiet prayers, and quiet opinions. Under the Shah, quiet was the safest way to live.

After the Americans and the British restored him to power, the Shah ruled as an absolute monarch, determined to modernize the country quickly and keep it firmly aligned with the West. Tehran filled with new highways, glittering hotels, and soldiers with American weapons.

But beneath that modern shine was fear.

The Shah’s secret police, SAVAK—trained and assisted by American intelligence—were everywhere. People learned not to speak politics in cafés, not to repeat jokes in public, not even to trust the walls of their own homes. I remember the way conversations would suddenly stop when a stranger entered the room. A child notices these things even if they cannot name them. Freedom, I would learn later, is not only the right to speak. It is the absence of that silence.

By the time I reached adulthood in the 1970s, that silence had begun to crack. The Shah’s Iran looked prosperous from the outside, but many ordinary people felt something deeper was broken. Oil money flowed into grand projects and glittering celebrations while villages remained poor and dissent was crushed. Religious leaders, students, shopkeepers, and workers—people who otherwise had little in common—began to share a single feeling: that our country did not belong to us. I remember the winter mornings when the streets filled with people carrying photographs of exiled cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a man who had been forced from Iran years earlier for opposing the Shah. The demonstrations grew larger each month. What began as murmurs became chants, then waves of humanity moving through Tehran like a tide that could not be turned back. In 1979 the Shah finally fled the country, and many of us believed we were witnessing the rebirth of our nation. For the first time in my life, I felt something like open air in my lungs. We thought we had pushed aside a king. We did not yet understand that another kind of ruler was already on his way home.

Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran in the winter of 1979 to crowds so vast they seemed to swallow the city. I stood among them, pressed shoulder to shoulder with strangers, all of us carried by the same fragile hope. For many people he represented justice after decades of monarchy and repression.

But revolutions, like storms, rarely stop where the people imagine they will.

Within months the new Islamic Republic began reshaping every corner of our lives. The language of the state shifted from the Shah’s talk of modernization to the clerics’ language of religious purity. New authorities appeared—revolutionary courts, morality patrols, committees of young men who suddenly had power over their neighbors. Music disappeared from the radio. Women were ordered to cover their hair. Universities closed for what was called a “cultural revolution.” Some of the same friends who had marched beside me in the streets began to disappear again, this time accused of betraying the revolution itself. I had been a child under a king and now an adult under clerics, and already I understood something that would follow me through the rest of my life: when powerful men fight over the destiny of a country, it is ordinary people who live inside the consequences.

The new government had barely taken hold when another catastrophe arrived.

In 1980 Saddam Hussein, the ruler of neighboring Iraq, invaded Iran. He believed our country was weak after the revolution and hoped to seize territory while the world’s attention was elsewhere. The war that followed would last eight long years. For us it did not feel like strategy or geopolitics. It felt like sirens in the night and the steady disappearance of young men from our streets.

My generation married, buried parents, and raised children beneath the constant shadow of that war. I remember evenings gathered around the radio listening for news from the front, the announcer’s voice reading the names of the dead with the dull rhythm of rain. Later I would learn that while our country bled, the United States quietly tilted toward Saddam Hussein—sharing intelligence with Iraqi forces and shielding his government diplomatically because Washington feared revolutionary Iran more than it feared the dictator in Baghdad. Even when Saddam’s army used chemical weapons—gas that blistered skin and lungs and suffocated soldiers and civilians alike—the world looked away.

In 1988, near the end of the war, tragedy arrived from the sky in another form. An Iranian passenger plane, Iran Air Flight 655, lifted off from Bandar Abbas on a routine commercial flight carrying families, workers, and children on their way to Dubai. Minutes later it was struck by missiles fired from an American naval cruiser operating in the Persian Gulf. The aircraft fell into the sea, killing all 290 people aboard, including sixty-six children.

I remember the shock that moved through our neighborhoods as the news spread. The explanations that followed spoke of radar screens and confusion. But to those of us living beneath the consequences of powerful nations, it felt like something more familiar: another moment when ordinary lives were crushed beneath decisions made far above our heads.

History books call it the Iran–Iraq War. For us it was simply the years when lives vanished.

When the war finally ended in 1988, the country felt like someone who had survived a long illness but could not yet stand. Cities were scarred, families were missing children, and an entire generation had learned to measure time by funerals. I was no longer young. I had children of my own by then, and like every parent I tried to give them the ordinary life that history kept postponing. But the war’s end did not bring peace so much as a different kind of pressure. The United States and its allies tightened economic sanctions year after year, punishing the government in Tehran but pressing down hardest on people like us. Medicine became harder to find. Prices rose. Opportunities shrank. My children grew up in a country that felt sealed off from the rest of the world, as if invisible hands had placed a lid over our future.

Still, life continued in the stubborn way it always does. We celebrated weddings. We planted gardens. We recited poetry. Iranians have always been good at surviving long winters. What we were less prepared for was how many seasons of winter history would give us.

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Then, late in my life, something unexpected happened. In 2015 the world’s great powers—including the United States, Europe, Russia, and China—reached an agreement with Iran about our nuclear program. The American president at the time, Barack Obama, chose diplomacy over bombs. The deal was complicated, negotiated over years, and built on careful verification: Iran would drastically reduce its nuclear capabilities and open its facilities to international inspectors, and in return many of the crushing economic sanctions would finally be lifted.

For the first time in decades, it felt as if the future might loosen its grip on our throats.

That was also the year my granddaughter was born. I still remember the morning her mother placed her in my arms—small, warm, blinking into the light as if the whole world had just been created for her. That spring we planted a pomegranate tree in the courtyard, the two of us together, my hands guiding hers into the soil. The sapling was thin and uncertain, but its leaves were bright and stubborn. Every morning after that, when I walked her to school, we would stop beside it and look for new growth.

A tree and a child, both beginning at the same moment.

For the first time in many years, I allowed myself to believe that perhaps her life would be gentler than mine.

But hope, in my lifetime, has rarely been allowed to grow undisturbed. In 2018 a new American president, Donald Trump, withdrew the United States from the agreement. The decision stunned much of the world. International inspectors had repeatedly confirmed that Iran was complying with the deal, and even many American diplomats who had helped negotiate it warned that abandoning it would bring instability rather than security. Yet Trump dismissed the agreement as weak, speaking about it with the easy certainty of someone who had never bothered to understand the years of diplomacy that had made it possible.

The sanctions returned immediately, harsher than before, closing the small window that had briefly opened. Our currency fell. Businesses collapsed. Medicines once again disappeared from pharmacy shelves.

Through all of this, my granddaughter continued to grow beside the pomegranate tree. Each year it grew stronger, pushing deeper roots into the soil, surviving dust storms, heat, and winter frost. Some mornings, as we walked to school, she would reach up to touch its leaves and ask when the fruit would come.

“Soon,” I would tell her. “Some things take time.”

I said it for the tree.
I said it for her.
And perhaps, in some quiet corner of my heart, I said it for our country too.

By the time the tree began to bear fruit, my granddaughter had grown tall enough that her hand fit comfortably in mine when we walked. Those mornings became the quiet center of my days. The city would still be waking—the smell of bread drifting from the bakery, the low murmur of shopkeepers lifting their metal shutters, swallows stitching quick patterns across the pale sky. We would pause beside the pomegranate tree before leaving, examining it.

Two gardeners tending the same small tree.

Its branches had thickened, its leaves darkened, and each autumn the fruit appeared like small lanterns among the branches. She loved to split them open and marvel at the bright red seeds inside, as if they were tiny jewels hidden by the earth. Sometimes she would ask about my childhood, and I would tell her pieces of it—the courtyard games, the radio music, the strange way the world had always seemed to shift around us. But I never told her everything. Children deserve mornings that belong only to themselves. So instead we walked to school together beneath the trees that lined the street, her backpack bouncing lightly behind her, the future still wide and unwritten.

The morning it happened began like all the others. The air was cool, the kind that carries the promise of heat later in the day. My granddaughter chattered beside me about a poem she had been asked to memorize for school. She had been practicing it for days, reciting the lines to the pomegranate tree as if it were a patient teacher. We paused, as always, to look at the fruit swelling along the branches, their skins darkening toward that deep crimson that comes just before harvest. She reached up and brushed one lightly with her fingers, proud of how large it had grown.

At the school gate she turned back once to wave, the way she always did, her smile quick and bright. I watched until the door closed behind her and then began the familiar walk home. I remember thinking, as I often did, how strange it was that after so many decades of upheaval, life could still contain such small, perfect moments of peace.

Only minutes later, the sound came—a violence in the sky that split the morning open.

At first there was only confusion—the echo of the blast rolling across the city, car alarms crying out, birds scattering wildly into the sky. People began running toward the school, pulled by that terrible instinct that tells a parent or grandparent when something has gone wrong. I found myself running too, though I cannot remember deciding to do so. The street that had been so ordinary minutes earlier was now choked with dust and shouting. The front wall of the school had collapsed inward, and the air smelled of smoke and broken stone. Someone said the strike had come from a missile, one of the American-guided weapons that fall from a sky so distant it might as well belong to another world. Names were being called out. Children’s backpacks lay scattered in the courtyard like small abandoned shells. I searched the faces being carried past me, hoping not to recognize the one I feared most. But a grandparent learns quickly how fragile hope can be.

I do not remember leaving the school. At some point my feet carried me back through the same streets we had walked together that morning, though now they felt strangely unfamiliar, as if I had wandered into a city that no longer belonged to me. The courtyard gate creaked when I pushed it open. The pomegranate tree stood where it always had, its branches heavy with fruit. One had fallen. It lay split open on the hard earth beneath the tree, its dark red seeds scattered across the dust, their crimson juice slowly darkening the thirsty ground.

I stood there for a long time looking at it.

For seventy-five years I have tried to live an ordinary life—first as a child beneath a king restored by foreign hands, then as an adult beneath clerics, then as a parent raising children through wars and sanctions and the endless calculations of powerful nations far away.

I never asked for any of it.

I only wanted mornings like the one I had just lost.

Somewhere beyond our sky, men will speak of strategy and security. But here, in the quiet of a small courtyard, a grandparent stands beside a broken fruit tree, listening to the place where a child’s voice once lived.

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Author’s Note

From time to time I write in the voice of an imagined person. It is a way of exploring the human side of events that are often treated as distant, political, or purely academic. The narrator in this story is fictional, but the history—and the human consequences behind it—are very real.

Join me in…

THE STRANGER’S LIBRARY

Step inside. It’s a quiet, lamplit corner where I write about the books that have stayed with me—sometimes troubling the waters, sometimes steadying them.

The Stranger's Library

Books I'd save from the fire.

By Open Letters by Mersault