On Friends Who Support Trump
Does it trouble you when a good friend—someone you admire, someone whose judgment you’ve long trusted—supports Donald Trump?
It troubles me a bit. Not because political disagreement is new, or even because passions run high. Those are constants of democratic life. What unsettles me is that the disagreement now concerns not policy but premises—about what kind of country we are, and what we are willing to tolerate in its name.
Trump has altered the national atmosphere in ways that would have seemed unthinkable not long ago. We now speak casually about dividing the world into spheres of interest rather than shared values. We accept, with alarming ease, the idea of people being asked for papers. We debate whether slavery was truly as severe as advertised. We scoff at diversity as if it were a parlor affectation. We routinely question the competence of women and Black Americans as if merit were a novelty recently invented to inconvenience the powerful.
And still—people we respect support him.
Why?
Perhaps they are consuming a different reality. Fox News and its cousins operate less as opposition media than as a parallel information system, one in which Trump’s lies are either softened, justified, or omitted entirely. Perhaps facts themselves have become optional, or tribal.
Perhaps some white men—despite dominating wealth, power, and opportunity—have been persuaded that they are the aggrieved class. That the Enlightenment asked too much. That equality went too far. That fairness became discrimination the moment it ceased to be effortless.
Perhaps it is religion. Trump, a man not conspicuously faithful to any biblical teaching, is cast as a warrior for Christianity precisely because he violates it so openly. The ancient trope returns: the deeply unholy man chosen to do holy work.
Perhaps it is deregulation, or resentment of the administrative state. Though what replaces it looks less like liberty than crony capitalism—tariffs that tax consumers, favors that reward loyalty, and power concentrated in fewer hands than before.
Perhaps it is money. Taxes are low. Markets are high. AI stocks are booming. Masked federal agents are regrettable but necessary. Immigration was out of control, wasn’t it?
Each explanation contains just enough plausibility to sustain belief—and just enough moral distance to make disbelief feel lonely.
That is what makes this moment so difficult. We want to believe in the good intentions of our friends. Many of them behave with decency in their own lives. Many would recoil at the cruelty Trump displays so casually. And yet they continue to support him.
Which raises the most unsettling possibility of all: that maybe he isn’t as bad as we think. Or that maybe we are the ones who have lost perspective.
But as the road narrows, as the rhetoric hardens, as institutions bend and norms dissolve, forgiveness grows harder. The gap between private virtue and public endorsement becomes harder to ignore.
It is a strange test of friendship—and of conscience.
And yes, in moments like this, one does briefly wonder whether Facebook’s “block” feature is not merely a technical convenience, but a small, melancholy concession to the age.