I Lied To My Family About My Vote For President In 2016. What Will Happen When I Tell The Truth?

I received the text on Election Day 2016.

Mom: You voted for Trump, right?

My fingers hesitated over my phone screen. I’d known her message was coming, but reading it made my stomach lurch.

Me: Yes

I hit send, even though it was a lie.

Watching Donald Trump once again become the Republican nominee this year feels like a time-warped fever dream. One minute, I’m cooking dinner in my Brooklyn apartment. The next, I’m 21 years old again, home from college and sitting in the living room of the house where I grew up. Fox News blasts from the TV. My parents are pleased to show me what they call a “different” perspective. Only it’s not 2016. It’s 2024 and, yet, it’s as though nothing has changed. The person I’ve become over the last eight years is gone.

My parents today are under no delusion that I’m a registered Republican. They know I voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and I suspect they no longer believe I voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. I lied because it seemed easier than confronting the fault lines shifting beneath us. We were already a fractured family, in part because my younger brother was struggling with what we’d later understand to be addiction. I’d wanted to keep from making things worse. I thought it better to stifle myself than to pour gasoline over an open flame. Politics were not our biggest problem.

In the years since, I’ve debated with my parents countless times about abortion rights, wealth disparity, taxes, police brutality — the list goes on. As a queer, white, cis woman living in New York City, my views have become increasingly liberal, and thus, the differences between myself and my more traditional, Republican parents have broadened. While we typically begin at odds, I find we can often