My Mom's Support For Trump Divided Our Family. Then I Found The Crack In Her MAGA Armor.

The Trump presidency divided my family. The “Trump Effect,” as I called it, infected us shortly after he descended into the lobby of Trump Tower to announce his presidential candidacy. It ended seven years later, around my kitchen table, with three generations of my mother’s progeny mowing their way through Italian takeout. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My mother was a Reagan Republican and had voted along party lines since 1980. While none of her four children were fully aligned with her politically, the Trump Effect created the greatest distance between my mother and me.

We fought every time we talked. Before Trump secured the nomination, I argued that his morals were in direct conflict with those she and my father had been driving into my head for decades. Furthermore, I argued, he did not even embody conservative values. He twisted them into grotesque manipulations of what had been reasonably sound policy.

I pleaded with her not to vote for him. She wouldn’t budge. In the wake of his election, her choice took on the weight of a betrayal. Her blindness to Trump’s white nationalist tendencies was an affront to my wife, who is a proud Latina, and angered my biracial, high-school-aged children.

The more egregious Trump’s violation of social norms, the harder she dug her heels in. In Northern Idaho, her political views went largely unchallenged. It was her excursions into Eastern Washington that afforded her the opportunity to proselytize and be heard. Any poker table became her pulpit as she would expound on the virtues of the new savior of the GOP. Having earned respect with her poker skills, she changed peoples’ minds.

At some point, after the Mueller investigation, she was so self-assured that she stopped