Member-only story
Did You Divorce Your Family Over Trump?
How many relationships have been destroyed by political rancor?
If I search for “How many families broke up over politics?” there are a stunning 2 billion results. Top articles from Time, The Atlantic, NY Times, Reuters, and then farther down … Deseret News, HuffPo. On and on, article after article.
In 2020, 53-year-old Corin Goodwin told The Atlantic she hadn’t spoken personally with her father since the 2016 election. If they’re still not talking, this will be six years.
In 2016, 73-year-old Gayle McCormick told Reuters that she had left her husband of 22 years because, “It totally undid me that he could vote for Trump.”
Almost universally, the articles interview people who cut family members or friends out of their life because they supported Donald J. Trump in 2016 or 2020.
Many of the 2020 articles were published on November 2, 2020. The lede for one of these pre-2020 election articles was “When lifelong Democrat Mayra Gomez told her 21-year-old son five months ago that she was voting for Donald Trump in Tuesday’s presidential election, he cut her out of his life.”
It’s not difficult to see a pattern. All the top-level national publications and wire services had in-depth stories interviewing family…
