I Don’t Want To Understand Trump Voters
By: Nicole Chardenet
Tags: Politics, Election 2020, Trump Supporters, Buddhism, Morality

So far, I’ve lost one friend over the election. I defriended, then blocked her. I didn’t want to be friends with someone who supports Trump.

Ironically, she was a Canadian, and a Pagan. No, she couldn’t vote in the American election, but I suspect she might vote for a future Canadian Trump.

Sometimes middle-aged people go off the rails emotionally, and switch political sides, turning almost overnight from decent human beings into lunatics. I don’t know why.

Jamie wouldn’t stop privately messaging me her nutty outrage and conspiracy theories on Facebook one night so I defriended, then blocked her when she persisted.

How could she have turned so? I thought she was a decent human being? She’s a Pagan, for Goddess’s sake! She’s supposed to know better than some idiot evangelical who voted for Trump while holding her nose solely because he paid lip service to the unborn. About a week later, Jamie called a few times from a blocked number with threatening messages in a poorly-disguised witch’s voice (Oh, that was clever). I reported her to the police just to be on the safe side, but she’s about as terrifying as a tantruming toddler.

“Gad, these Trumpers are the friggin’ Mafia,” a friend commented when I told him about it.

I’ve thought a lot about how I defriended her. She hit me at a very bad time, shortly after the election, when American nerves were bleeding raw over what had happened, how it happened, what would happen next, and how Biden and Harris weren’t much of a victory when the country was too damn broken for any new administration to fix. It was absolutely the worst time to say stupid shit about Donald Trump to an American who’s been posting her loathing for him and his followers for four years.

I made the right decision, I believe, in light of the phone calls, which were annoying rather than frightening. It exposed a craziness in her I hadn’t known existed — how much she cared about defriending by someone she barely knew.

She’d called us ‘friends’, but we were acquaintances. I’d met her through a ‘girls group’ years ago. We got friendly as fellow Pagans, but we never hung out or talked much. Sometimes I’d invite her to a party — especially to a Pagan ritual when I held one. She always got excited and wanted to come, then couldn’t at the last minute.

“You’d recognize her in your neighborhood if you saw her, right?” the police officer asked.

“I couldn’t pick her out of a lineup,” I said. “I think I’ve only met her once in my life.”

“ONCE?”

“Yeah, we managed to get together for dinner about five or six years ago.”

I understand why the abrupt cutoff upset her; it’s happened to me too. But the only time I ever got angry was when someone close defriended me. I hadn’t realized she’d done it until she called to apologize and asked me to accept her new friend request, but I hit the roof because she was a good friend.

I got over it, once we hashed it out.

Six weeks after the election, I remember Jamie and think: If she hadn’t made those stupid phone calls, I might have reached out to her again. Had I initially overreacted?

My Crappy Buddhist debates with my Inner Buddha, which Buddhism teaches is in all of us. (Yes, even Donald Trump.)

I don’t want to be friends with people who can make excuses for a moral degenerate, or be drawn into his hateful lies and conspiracy theories. I like my friends with critical faculties.

But while I never knew Jamie well, I knew her to be, until now, a decent human being.

Phone calls aside, I wonder if I was too hard on her. Whether I reacted in anger and didn’t stop to wonder, What’s really driving this? I know we’re all slaves to our unconscious. As a couple of social scientists once put it, we think we’re driving ourselves, when in fact we’re the person on top of a large elephant, our unconscious, the one running the show.

How’d I get here? Image by Andy Bay from Pixabay

I have a friend who’s turned into an Angry (left-wing) Grandpa, triggered by everything, and I’m quite sure his anger is driven less by Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben advertising, and more by his and his wife’s health problems.

I might have reached out to Jamie again, especially when I’m feeling a little squishier at Christmas, except for one thing: The crazy.

We might have come to an understanding about politics. What I don’t want to deal with, though, is someone who was crazy enough to react that strongly to someone she barely knew.

After the election, when many writers debated whether we could permit Trump voters to remain in our lives after crossing an unthinkable moral boundary, I visited the Facebook pages of other friends who’d supported Trump in the past. None of them had posted anything particularly pro-Trump leading up to the election. I didn’t quietly defriend them as I’d considered I might. I knew some former Trump supporters came to realize how toxic he was and they abandoned him.

People can learn from their mistakes. ‘Forgiveness’ isn’t the dirty little F-word it is for many on both the left and right.

But you can’t be my friend if you’re a ‘good little German’.

There should be consequences for bad choices. Jamie lost someone she considered a friend, at least, because of her choice to choose the wrong side of Hitler. And make some immature phone calls.

Moral decency and Donald Trump aren’t rocket science.

She’d posted anti-mask crap before we parted ways. And if it harm none, do what thou wilt, I wanted to tell her.

I wonder what her body count is.

I may be a crappy Buddhist, but I still aspire to be a much better one.

It’s why Thich Nhat Hanh’s a Buddhist Master, living out his last days in his home town of Hue, Vietnam, and I’m some shithead banging out the battle between my ego and my Inner Buddha in my artist’s hovel in the sky.

I suspect the answer to the moral question Should we allow Trump supporters to remain in our lives? lies somewhere between banishing them like a miscreant from an insular community and Thich Nhat Hanh’s level of compassion.

There must be consequences to crossing the moral boundary as they have. But we shouldn’t shut the barn door. People can change.

We can’t allow ourselves to fall prey to the hatred and intolerance consuming so many on both far ends of the political spectrum, even as we draw a line and say, ‘Enough is enough.’ Unchecked, and with too much compassion and not enough tough love, Trumpers may well push us into Nazi Germany Part Deux. Trump was a trial balloon. Terrifying but largely impotent. The next one will be more Hitler than Histrionic.

I don’t know where the ‘right’ place to be with Trumpers is yet, but I know where I don’t want to be: On the wrong side of genocide, however passive.