My son was struggling – then he fell for Trump’s toxic brand of ‘masculinity’. I’m heartbroken

I didn’t get a call from my son on Father’s Day this year. Our political disagreements have made things hard.

I’m a 59-year-old progressive and a special education teacher, and I’m voting for Kamala Harris in November. Nick* is 21, and he would say that he holds traditional, conservative values – but he’s conflating those values with radical Maga ideas, which correlate the right with patriotism, manhood, intelligence, independence and honesty. I understand where my son’s vulnerabilities came from, and why this rightwing posturing was able to seep into him. I understand it, but I still regret it.

Nick’s mom and I wanted to teach our son that democracy is an active sport. You don’t just sit back and watch. We lived in Houston, in the belly of the petrochemical beast, and I remember going to a demonstration against Halliburton, the Iraq war, and Dick Cheney’s role in the company. Groups brought puppets – it was almost like street theater – and we rolled Nick along in his stroller. That was the community we were plugged into: artists, musicians, teachers, writers. That’s how Nick came up.

Nick was a sweet kid. He was really quiet. He’s on the upper end of the autism spectrum, so he can have difficulty interpreting social cues. All he wanted to do was follow whatever the big kids were doing.

Nick never found a person that he could really link or vibe with. He loves animals, though. We let him get a dog when he was young, and that allowed him to be more than a follower. He was all about serving the dog’s interest. I’ve seen Nick’s heart melt – he can’t tolerate cruelty to animals or people who are vulnerable, which feels ironic, given his politics now.

Some of the older guys at school who Nick was trying to emulate were really into building computers, hacking and the dark web. He got online as a teen, joined some far-right message boards, and I think that’s where he got massaged into these rightwing positions. He started echoing those points, and then he got praise from whatever knuckleheads posted that crap – it became a spiral. Nick was kind of lost, but on the internet, he was able to be a different person, to have more confidence and show off how bright he is.

We had moved to the Bay Area in 2017, after Trump won the election. Nick was 15 or 16 when he said that he liked Trump. I can understand how Trump appealed to a childish sensibility: he’s this clownish figure who does whatever he wants.

I also know that when you come of age, you want to reject your parents’ beliefs. My father was a Reagan Republican who was really old school, values wise. A lot of my political development was a rejection of his values, so I wonder now how much of Nick’s fascination with Maga is a reaction against the way I brought him up.

I’ve never been a macho kind of man. To me, our biggest responsibility as humans is to look after each other. Men have been given places of privilege in society, so when people talk about being a man, to me that means: what do you use your privilege for? I worked at a pirate radio station in Houston, and we helped with emergency efforts during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. For me, manhood is all about using your energy to make life better for the person next to you.

But I think that Trump appeals to a perceived loss of masculine power: by his logic, because we’re treating LGBTQ+ people like humans, some men feel a loss over that, as their outrageous privilege has diminished somewhat, at least on surface level. Nick was vulnerable to that because he was becoming a man. I think he also naively thought, well, Trump’s a powerful person running for president; he can’t just get up there and spew bullshit.

Nick and I would get into arguments at the dinner table over things like immigration. He would say that there’s this invasion of people coming across the border, but I could usually move him when I got into the emotional, human thing. When I showed him photos of families being separated from their babies because of the Trump administration, he couldn’t tolerate that. Sometimes he might say, “Oh, that’s a doctored photo,” but I could see on his face that the photos had an effect.

It wasn’t enough. Nick posted a meme on some site – I don’t remember which one – of an orangutan riding a bicycle. It had some horribly racist caption relating Black women to monkeys. The other kids at school saw it and were rightly offended. When I spoke to Nick about it, he asked why it was racist. I said: “It’s because you’re depicting a human being as an animal, depriving them of their humanity.” I’m an educator, and my role is not to tell kids what to think, but to show them how to think. I felt this sense of failure. How is it that I have a son who was so incapable of critical thinking that he says he didn’t see anything racist in that meme?

My wife and I divorced in 2020, and Nick lived with me for six months in California after that, but he later went back to live with her in Houston, so I saw and heard less from him. I no longer have the same influence over him. I can’t be there to talk about the human cost of Trump’s policies, which might change his mind.

Nick started hanging out with guys in Houston who shared his beliefs or had even more radical ones. They started talking about what makes a man. They said men have to be strong, so Nick bought a bike and rides it around every day. That’s a healthy habit. But they also say things like “men smoke”, so now he does that too.

They introduced Nick to guns and started taking him to the shooting range. On his 21st birthday, his mother and I sent him money, thinking he’d spend it on a computer or something, but he went out and bought a gun. He didn’t tell either of us, because he knows how we feel about them.

One of his rightwing friends is really wealthy. It’s nice to have a friend who takes you out to dinner, but it also means Nick hears all this stuff about how people who aren’t rich are basically parasites. And he doesn’t want to listen to his mom or me, because I’ve been a teacher my whole life and we always scrimped by, so he thinks we’re lazy, stupid hippies. Why would he listen to anything we say, when his friend’s parents have a Mercedes in the driveway and live in a million-dollar house?

Nick has a girlfriend now, who he met online in one of his rightwing forums. My ex says that she’s a perfectly lovely girl and isn’t some sort of Marjorie Taylor Greene type, just a country Catholic kid. She’s also Latina, so his feelings on immigration have softened after he spent time with her family. He’s got something at stake now.

When Nick and I talk these days, it’s mostly over text. We barely speak on the phone. I hope that I’ll reach an economic status where I can fly to Texas more often. I just want to be physically present with him. If there’s a conversation going on, even if he’s just telling me to fuck off or calling me a libtard, that’s something I can work with. Even if we argue, I can always tell him that I love him.

• This story uses a pseudonym to protect the subject’s identity

Source: The Guardian