The American families torn apart by Maga

Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here. • $120,000 should be a great salary. In these US states, it isn’t• Maga’s worst nightmare: a child-free, unmarried female president• The more America spends on healthcare, the sicker it gets When visiting his wife’s Trump-supporting family, a healthcare worker who asked to be identified only as M has one basic rule: avoid politics at all costs. The man, who lives in the Midwest and is in his forties, believes this is common across the country, especially during holidays such as Thanksgiving. For M, differing political beliefs has meant losing touch with four of his closest friends. “It seemed benign at first, but then Jan 6 happened and they were convinced the election was stolen,” he told The i Paper. “They were cheering on the insurrection and hoping the people arrested got pardoned.” Experts say America has never been more divided, and worse, that it has lost the tools to cross the gulf and rebuild damaged friendships. Political scientist James Druckman, of the University of Rochester in New York, who has been tracking division since the 1970s, says the high point for partisanship came in 2020, when Donald Trump lost his bid for re-election to Joe Biden. “It has been fairly stable since,” says Druckman, co-author of Partisan Hostility and American Democracy: Explaining Political Divisions and When They Matter. “Part of the reason for the stability is that it’s so high, there is not a lot of room for more dislike.” While America has experienced plenty of crises in the past, including civil war, divisions over Iran and George W Bush’s decision to go to war with Iraq, what has changed is the rise of social media. A protest against Trump’s anti-immigration action, in Redwood City, California (Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Getty) In this ever more partisan media environment, people often seek out news that supports, not challenges, their world view and demonises the opposition. A 2022 survey by Pew, for example, found that 72 per cent of Republicans viewed Democrats as more “immoral” than other Americans – 63 per cent of Democrats had a similar thing to say about Republicans. Political division has seeped into all aspects of life. On the weekly podcast and YouTube show The Necessary Conversation, adult siblings Chad Kultgen and Haley Popp publicly battle to persuade their parents Mary Lou and Bob Kultgen that they’re making a bad choice in supporting Trump. The show came about after the children stopped speaking to their parents, something both sides found painful. “I was accustomed to speaking to my mother quite literally every day,” Haley, 45, told The New York Times. “To go from that to absolutely nothing was devastating.” The QAnon effect On Reddit there are communities for “QAnonCasualties”, where people share their experiences of falling out, and often completely losing contact, with friends and family after they began believing in the conspiracy theory based on the premise that the world is run by satanic forces engaged in child sex trafficking. In their view, Trump is the secret superhero battling these dark forces for the good of America. And Trump has been happy to exploit such beliefs, famously posting on Truth Social in 2022 an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin along with the words “The Storm is Coming”. This supposedly refers to the moment of Trump’s vanquishing of the dark forces. Intra-family division has reached the White House, too, where it emerged that Trump aide Natalie Harp, in the news recently after details of the 35-year-old’s close relationship with the President were revealed, had not spoken to her brother for years. Preston Harp, 38, who lives in Nicaragua and is a self-described “anti-imperialist”, told CNN his mother raised him and Natalie to believe “that American exceptionalism was the correct way of looking at things [and] that the United States is the boss of the world”. He added: “I think my sister, unfortunately, didn’t break out of that delusion that my mom raised us with, and Trump is everything my mom taught us to respect. I think that’s where her infatuation for Trump comes from.” Trump has been happy to exploit conspiracies, famously posting on Truth Social in 2022 an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin (Photo: Olivier Douliery/AFP) Wilk Wilkinson, director of communications for Braver Angels, which works to combat partisanship through outreach and public forums, says Americans have been at odds with each other before, but that the “visibility of the toxic division and polarisation” is a new thing. “The way it’s piped into the eyes and ears of everyday Americans on any given day is certainly higher,” he tells The i Paper. “We have more access to more media outlets and social media feeds and 24-hour news cycles and things like that.” Braver Angels advises local communities and schools to “become beacons of civil discourse where students can express their perspectives freely and fully while actively listening to others”. Asked if Trump has made divisions worse, he says he has been a factor but not the only one. “People who try to pin this on Trump or any other single singular figure within our political apparatus are doing a disservice to the bigger problem,” he warns. “And that’s the ‘us versus them’ tribalism and toxic polarisation, and the fact we’ve reached a point where we no longer see political opponents as wrong, we see them as stupid or evil.” Ryan Bernsten, of American Public Square, says communities and institutions have become more frayed and less able to handle division than two decades ago. His organisation, which is based in Kansas City, also works with schools and holds moderated, expert-led discussions that are streamed and accessible for free. Bernsten, a public speaker who travelled across the country to research his book States of Mind: A Journey to Rediscover American Democracy, tells The i Paper: “People are going to come and hear something they agree with or something they don’t. They might also hear perspectives from someone they’ve never heard from before, and a subject matter expert who knows more about something than they do.” A paralegal, who asked to be identified as A, is on the point of having no contact with her mother. She said of the emotional impact: “It’s kind of like grief in the sense that there are stages. I’ll cycle between radical acceptance to anger to heartbreak. It’s also a bit embarrassing.” She added: “I don’t want people to judge me for the heinous stuff my mom and some other family members believe in. Groups like QAnonCasualties have helped a tonne. No one really gets it unless they live it.” The 34-year-old said her mother’s interest in outlandish claims started in 2016, when she started believing what was known as “Pizzagate”, a viral falsehood that took hold during the 2016 election contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton. It was alleged that several high-ranking Democrats were part of a child sex ring that operated out of several establishments, including the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington DC. “She and I both started looking into it because my aunt was talking about it. I didn’t quite buy into it and kind of left it alone. She started looking into more QAnon stuff online and got completely sucked in,” A explains. “She’s gone further and further right politically since. I’ve gone further left so there’s no middle ground.” Like many people in such situations, A says she finds it is better to have no contact with her mother. “I have several friends who aren’t ‘no contact’, but who are having a hard time dealing with their Trump-supporting family members,” she adds. “No one wants to cut off family, but at the same time, this has brought a lot of ugliness to light. People are being openly racist, misogynistic, homophobic,, etc.” A 2022 survey by Pew found 72 per cent of Republicans viewed Democrats as more ‘immoral’ than other Americans (Photo: Ali Matin/AFP) Asked if she thinks she will be able to repair her relationship with her mother at some point, A adds: “I don’t think so. I don’t know how to have a relationship with someone who isn’t living in reality. Unless she gets serious help, it’s highly unlikely.” In a recent survey, psychologists at the University of California, Irvine, found a third of Americans had “lost relationships with friends, family, romantic partners and co-workers over political differences”. Among the respondents, 62 per cent had had fallouts – 40 per cent of them with a family member. The researchers believe the trend is accelerating. A Missouri-based college professor in his forties, who asked to be called IB, says his relationship with his entire family has become increasingly strained. “We just have come to a mutual truce that we do not discuss politics anymore.” He says the situation with his sister is the most difficult. They were never close, but it became worse when he told her he was bisexual. Now, he rarely gets to see his nephew and niece, and on the rare occasions he sees his sibling, she is “icy”. “My sister will not attend more intimate family events,” IB says. “[She insists] our parents schedule a separate session with her and her family alone, rather be around her brothers, or her brothers’ significant others – and mine is male, so that’s another thing she doesn’t like.” One 46-year-old woman from the Chicago area says she has little contact with her husband’s family because of political differences. Her husband now tends to speak to his father only when his mother isn’t around and her in-laws accuse her spouse of Trump Derangement Syndrome “if he mentions anything about actual events happening”. Weighed against the life experiences of those who say they see no way of reconnecting with people who are “lost” are those who argue common ground can be found. Mónica Guzmán, a liberal writer and podcaster, lives in Seattle with her two Trump-supporting parents. She studied at Bowdoin College, Maine, before pursuing a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. Her time was spent studying how journalists could be more helpful to society if they showed a broader curiosity towards different people and ideas. In a TED speech in 2022, the author of I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times said she had found a “perfect way to stop a conversation” with her liberal friends by telling them who her parents had voted for. “I waited to see if someone would turn to me and ask ‘why’,” Guzmán said. “Asking why shows curiosity, but not just any curiosity – a curiosity about people whose whole worldview is not just different from yours, but opposed. This is the kind of radical curiosity that’s going to save our relationships and eventually our whole society.”