(Goodwin and others mentioned in this article were not comfortable putting me in touch with the friends and family members with whom they disagreed, so I was unable to hear the other sides of these stories.)īecause of the ways family members weave themselves into one another’s lives, political ruptures between them can be more world-altering than those between friends. “When he passes, I don’t know if I will even be informed, which really freaks me out,” Goodwin told me. Since then, they’ve had only occasional email contact. Corin Goodwin, a 53-year-old communications consultant in Seattle, hasn’t seen her dad since October 2016, when they had a falling-out over the presidential race, in which he supported Trump and she supported Hillary Clinton. Four years later, many such relationships are still in disrepair. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted a couple of months after Trump’s 2016 victory, 16 percent of respondents said they had stopped communicating with a friend or family member because of the election. “I will miss the old person, not the new one.” Over the past five years, many other Americans have found themselves in a similar position, measuring the gap between what a relationship was like before Trump entered politics and what it was like after. During the Trump presidency, “she had crossed over to a side I had never known or seen before,” Luna told me. Luna was sad about losing a long-standing friendship but has come to accept what happened. The last text Luna sent to her friend was in November, following a rare month-long silence between them: “I am sorry that your guy lost, but let’s leave politics out and just be friends.” She never heard back. Their communication didn’t get confrontational until last year, when, among other things, her friend sent her a prayer for Trump, which upset Luna because her friend knew Luna didn’t like Trump. As her friend kept this up, Luna often tried to gently redirect the conversation. Politics wasn’t something they talked much about until the 2016 election, when Luna says her friend started parroting Trump in daily conversation, making racist remarks and questioning Luna’s news sources. They ate lunch with each other every workday for about 15 years and once went on vacation together when Luna’s daughter got married, her friend hosted a celebratory brunch. By the time their relationship ended, after disagreements about Trump and the severity of the pandemic, Luna, a 74-year-old who lives in Gilbert, Arizona, and her friend had three decades of shared history. One of those silences formed between Mary Ann Luna and a dear friend of hers from her federal-government job. What’s called the national conversation is really just millions of people communicating with each other, and if you could tune out all the yelling, you might be able to detect some of the silences that have arisen when two people stopped talking entirely. American political discourse was not exactly harmonious five years ago, but over the course of Donald Trump’s presidency, it corroded even further.
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