Before You Read This
Friends,
This piece began as something personal.
For several years, I have been grieving the loss of closeness with some of my extended relatives. I still love them, tremendously in fact. I believe they still love me. But something between us has changed since Donald Trump’s corrosive politics crept out of the shadows and into our family.
Ordinary political disagreement did not do this. Families have disagreed about presidents since there have been presidents. This became far more consuming. It changed what could be discussed, what had to be excused, and what we began to learn about one another.
I want to be honest about my own heart. I detest Donald Trump’s lies, his works, and his empty promises. I mourn the damage he has done to our country, our churches, and people who were already vulnerable.
I also mourn what his rise has revealed in some people I love. Cruelty became easier to express or dismiss. Dishonesty became easier to excuse. People who taught me that character mattered began defending or encouraging conduct they would once have condemned without hesitation.
Honestly, that grief has been harder to carry than my anger at Donald Trump. A politician was never supposed to possess enough power to change how I saw people I had loved and respected my entire life.
I began writing because I kept imagining what I would say if I could speak to them without being interrupted by cable-news slogans, partisan defenses, or another argument about whatever outrage happened that morning.
At first, I thought I was creating a letter that other people could send to their own relatives. I even produced a shorter version for that purpose. The more I worked on it, however, the less comfortable I became.
Sending a letter like this to someone you love can carry enormous risk. It can provoke anger, deepen an estrangement, or place someone in genuine danger. I have no right to tell another person that they should assume that risk. I cannot promise that the right combination of evidence, psychology, theology, pastoral care and carefully chosen words will repair what years of propaganda and political obsession have damaged. If there were some kind of psychological tool that could simply snap our loved ones out of it, someone far smarter than myself would have produced it years ago.
Once I stopped trying to turn this into a family intervention and allowed it to become an open letter, I could breathe again.
I suspect most of the people who read it will already understand much of what I am describing. So yes, in the familiar phrase, I may be preaching to the choir.
Perhaps that’s a good thing.
The choir has been grieving and needs my attention too.
Some of you have watched parents, siblings, children, spouses, and lifelong friends become absorbed into a movement that seems to require ever more anger, fear, cruelty, and excuse-making. Some of you still gather around the same tables, but carefully avoid entire portions of your lives. Some carry a heaviness knowing that every minute you aren’t in the room, Fox News is. Others have already endured the final argument, the blocked phone number, or the empty chair at a family celebration.
You may need language for what happened. You may need confirmation that ordinary political disagreement does not adequately describe it. You may need to hear another Christian say plainly that loyalty to a politician should never require the sacrifice of conscience, faith, truth, or family.
That is reason enough for this letter to exist.
It is addressed to people who have allowed devotion to Donald Trump to damage their closest relationships. It is written in the presence of everyone who has loved them, argued with them, prayed for them, and wondered whether the person they remember is still reachable.
You are free to share it if wisdom tells you to. You are equally free to read it for yourself, recognize your own family within it, and leave it here. I am not asking anyone to jeopardize their safety or carry responsibility for another person’s awakening.
I have decided to leave the comments open because this has become a genuine community. You may want to talk about what this movement has cost your family, minister to someone carrying the same grief, or simply discover that other people understand why the holidays have become so complicated. You may also want to tell me I have lost the plot, and that is fine too.
You guys have helped me through this dark age more than you know. This open letter is my best effort to offer some of that help in return.
It begins below.
Your Brother in Christ,
For the Love of God, Please Don’t Lose Your Family Over Donald Trump
An open letter to the people whose devotion to one man is costing them the people who love them.
Donald Trump will never know what you gave up for him.
He will not remember the argument that ended your relationship with your daughter. He will not notice that your son stopped calling, that holidays became strained, or that your grandchildren grew up without you. He will not lie awake wondering when affection turned into courtesy and conversation became a careful exchange of hellos and goodbyes.
But you will know.
This article, my friend, is a lifeline. Someone who loves you is throwing it across the distance between you, hoping you will reach back before that distance becomes permanent. Please do not mistake it for an attack.
The person who sent it probably hesitated. They may have opened the message, closed it, and returned later. They know what can happen when Donald Trump enters a family conversation. They know the familiar arguments and the long silence afterward. Sending this risks another wound, and they sent it anyway.
That is how much they still want you.
You may disagree with much of what follows. You may feel angry with them and with me. You may decide that I have misunderstood your faith, your politics, or the reasons you supported Donald Trump. Read to the end before deciding. If the relationship were already beyond hope, nobody would have taken the risk.
I am also not arguing that families must remain close at any cost. Nobody is required to endure contempt, threats, racial hostility, cruelty toward LGBTQ people, or the repeated degradation of someone they love or communities they care about. Reconciliation cannot mean asking the wounded person to return for more wounding. Some boundaries are necessary. Some distance protects life and sanity.
Still, there are families in which love remains on both sides and nobody knows how to cross the distance anymore. This is written for them.
This Comes From a Real Family
This piece comes from a real family in my own life. None of this is abstract to me.
I will not provide details that identify the people involved. Their lives do not belong to the public. I am sharing only what is necessary because this family’s experience is being repeated in homes across the country.
Grandparents have been left without contact with grandchildren. Think about what those words mean in a life. A child gets taller, loses teeth, learns to read, develops a personality, and you encounter it through a photograph posted on Facebook. Birthdays pass. Christmas comes and goes. The absence becomes part of the family calendar.
Nieces and nephews who were once close have created distance. Family gatherings still happen, but some relationships have been reduced to polite conversation and an early departure. Daughters remain in contact while grieving the loss of the esteem they once held for their parents. They still say “I love you.” They mean it. The harder sentence is the one they rarely say aloud: “I do not see you as I once did.”
The people at the center of this are, deep down, very good people. I want to say that clearly. They are not the most theatrical MAGA supporters. They do not arrive at Thanksgiving in cartoonish campaign outfits. They do not spend dinner trying to provoke their liberal relatives. In mixed company, they may not mention politics at all.
Their restraint may be one reason they do not understand what is happening. They seem to regard their votes, donations, media habits, and political loyalties as private conduct. They may believe that because they are not arguing about Donald Trump at the dinner table, Donald Trump is not present at the dinner table.
Families do not work that way.
Private choices still teach the people around us what we value, what we will tolerate, whose suffering we consider important, and whose suffering we are prepared to explain away. A daughter remembers the lessons her parents taught her about character. A gay grandchild notices which insults receive laughter and which receive objection. An immigrant relative hears how people like him are discussed when politicians want applause. An assault survivor pays attention when powerful men are granted exceptions that would never be extended to anyone else.
Distance usually accumulates. Calls become shorter. Visits happen less often. A daughter stops asking for advice because she no longer trusts your advice. A nephew decides it is easier to skip the gathering than spend the drive home angry. Certain subjects are avoided, followed eventually by the people most closely connected to those subjects. Trust weakens before anyone announces that it has gone.
Anyone who has lived in a family affected by addiction may recognize part of the pattern. A person can believe that what happens behind a closed door is nobody else’s business. The family still lives with the consequences. Political allegiance is not an addiction or a clinical diagnosis, but private conduct can reshape an entire family.
The people creating distance may be described as intolerant or punishing. Some may have handled their anger poorly. More often, what I see is heartbreak mixed with self-protection. They miss the parent, aunt, uncle, or grandparent they remember. Sometimes that person is sitting in the same room, which makes the missing worse.
Everyone else can feel the relationship changing, while the people at its center seem to believe that because nobody is shouting, everything is basically fine. It is not fine. Love remains, along with a fading hope that they will understand before the losses become permanent.
This article is part of that hope.
How the Movement Keeps You From Hearing Us
There was a time when much of what is happening now would have been immediately disqualifying to you.
You did not wake up one morning and decide that lying no longer mattered, cruelty had become strength, public humiliation was leadership, or the Constitution should bend around the desires of one man. Nobody sat you down and asked you to abandon those convictions. Had anyone tried, you probably would have told them exactly where they could go.
The standards moved by inches while your attention was fixed on the next emergency.
That is one of the cruelest achievements of the MAGA movement. It has not merely persuaded decent people to defend Donald Trump. It has separated many of them from their own memory of what they once believed.
You can hear the separation in a phrase that has probably already entered your mind while reading this article: “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Think about what happens when those words are used inside a family. Someone who loves you works up the courage to say that your political choices have frightened, disappointed, or wounded them. They may have rehearsed the conversation for days. They may be trying desperately not to sound angry because they already know anger will be used against them. They finally speak, and before one concern is weighed, the whole burden of their experience is reduced to three letters: TDS.
If your daughter speaks calmly, she is obsessed. If she becomes angry after years of feeling unheard, her anger proves she is deranged. If she stops trying and creates distance, her withdrawal becomes further evidence that politics has ruined her. The label can absorb every possible response.
Once criticism of a leader is treated as evidence of mental illness, no evidence against that leader is ever allowed to count.
Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton encountered this kind of language while studying other totalistic movements. He called it a “thought-terminating cliché”. The phrase supplies a ready-made answer before thought has a chance to begin. “Fake news.” “Witch hunt.” “Deep state.” “RINO.” Say the words, feel the relief, and move on.
Some criticism of Trump has been exaggerated. Some of his opponents have behaved as though every awkward gesture threatens the republic. I have rolled my eyes too. But unfair criticism does not make fair criticism disappear, and it does not make the pain in your family a psychiatric disorder.
There is another part of the strategy, one its architects have discussed openly. They call it “flooding the zone.”
Imagine a smoke alarm sounding in your home. The first piercing blast sends you running. Your body responds before you have time to think because the alarm may mean that the people you love are in danger.
Now imagine that it never stops.
It sounds while you eat, while you work, while you try to sleep. Sometimes there is smoke. Sometimes someone burned toast. Sometimes there is no apparent reason for the alarm at all. Nobody can remain at full alert forever. Eventually, you pull out the battery so you can get through the day.
That is what has happened to our moral attention.
There is another accusation before the last one has been investigated, another threat before the previous threat can be understood, another firing, another lie, another executive order, another vulgar post, another constitutional boundary tested, another spectacle designed to consume the day. By evening, the story that frightened you at breakfast already feels old.
Steve Bannon described the strategy in characteristically vulgar language. The way to defeat the media, he said, was to “flood the zone”. The volume is not accidental. The exhaustion is part of the result.
The strategy does not need to convince you that every incident is acceptable. It only needs to prevent you from caring about any one incident long enough to judge it.
The first scandal shocks you. The tenth irritates you. The hundredth earns a shrug and the words, “That’s just Trump being Trump.” Conduct that would have ended another politician’s career becomes part of the scenery.
Take one day’s verified headlines about Donald Trump. You do not need four years of them. Choose several from one ordinary day and replace his name with Joe Biden’s. Then listen to your own reaction.
Would you have called Biden strong? Would you have said that everyone lies? Would you have told your children to ignore his character and concentrate on grocery prices? Would conservative media have dismissed each story before dinner, or would the country have been told that the republic itself was in danger?
Do not answer as a Republican or a Democrat. Answer as the person you were before Donald Trump became the exception to nearly every rule.
This is how a moral standard disappears. It is exhausted and contradicted so many times that applying it begins to feel futile. No stupidity is required. Ordinary human exhaustion is enough. The rest of us are vulnerable to the same machinery. Human attention was not built for a political emergency delivered into our hands from waking until sleep.
Your family may see what this exhaustion has cost before you do. They remember what once offended you. They remember the standards you taught them. They have watched one exception become a hundred, and they do not understand why the person who taught them right from wrong now seems unable to remain troubled by conduct they know you would have condemned in anyone else.
Their alarm is still sounding.
Calling it derangement may make the house feel quieter. It does not mean there is no fire.
The person who sent you this does not expect you to carry every headline in your head. They hope you will recover the ability to care about one thing long enough to judge it. Choose one verified act. Turn off the commentary. Read the original statement, the court decision, or the complete government record. Ask what you would have thought before Donald Trump taught an entire movement to answer every moral question with his name.
The standards you once held have not vanished. The people who love you are hoping you will reach for them again.
What Your Support Communicates
A vote does not reveal everything about a person’s character. People vote for a tangle of reasons, and I know people who supported particular policies while disliking the man.
Your family cannot see the private calculation you made in the voting booth. They see the choice that came out of it.
They do not know how you weighed grocery prices against January 6, judicial appointments against cruelty toward immigrants, or abortion against the treatment of women. They know only that none of it was enough to cost him your support.
That conclusion may not feel fair. It is still part of what your support communicates.
Sustained allegiance tells the people around us more than a single vote. They listen when we say, “I don’t approve of everything he says, but…” We hear a qualification. Our families hear everything after the word “but” as a statement of priority.
An LGBTQ child hears that their dignity entered the calculation and lost. An immigrant relative hears that their safety ranked below another concern. A daughter hears that contempt toward women remains tolerable when the right man displays it. An assault survivor hears that even an adjudicated finding can be set aside for political advantage.
You did not enter the voting booth intending to say those things. They heard them anyway.
You may be tempted to say that both parties are equally willing to excuse this kind of conduct and that Donald Trump is simply better at surviving it.
The events of this election cycle suggest otherwise.
In April 2026, four women accused Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell of rape, sexual assault, and sexual misconduct. He denied the allegations. Within days, Democratic leaders called for him to withdraw from the California governor’s race, every Democratic member of Congress who had endorsed him withdrew that endorsement, and his campaign ended.
In July, Graham Platner withdrew from Maine’s United States Senate race after a former partner accused him of sexual assault. He also denied the allegation. Prominent Democrats withdrew their support, and within days he was no longer the nominee.
Neither man was entitled to a presumption of political power while serious allegations were examined. Their careers were not treated as more important than the women who came forward.
Now consider the standard applied to Donald Trump.
Donald Trump maintained a well-documented social relationship for roughly fifteen years with disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who sexually exploited underage girls. The full extent of that relationship, including what Trump knew and when he knew it, deserves rigorous investigation and complete public disclosure.
But the country does not have to wait for that investigation to determine whether Trump deserves a position of public trust.
A civil jury heard testimony and examined evidence before finding Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and defaming her. Trump appealed. The United States Court of Appeals upheld the verdict and declined to rehear the case. The Supreme Court then declined to hear Trump’s challenge and later denied rehearing, leaving the judgment intact.
That should be enough. Period.
No one possesses a right to public power. We do not need a criminal conviction before concluding that someone is morally unfit to exercise it. A jury determined that Donald Trump sexually abused a woman and then defamed her. If that finding does not disqualify a man from the presidency, particularly in the judgment of Christians who have spent decades insisting that character matters, what possibly would?
We also have Trump’s own words. He spoke cavalierly about entering pageant dressing rooms while contestants were changing. He described kissing women without waiting and grabbing them sexually because his celebrity allowed him to do it.
We do not need to invent allegations, infer crimes that have not been established, or wait for one more file to be released. The record already before us is enough to exclude Donald Trump from positions of public trust.
None of this ended Trump’s political career. It did not end his control of the Republican Party. It did not prevent millions of Christians from supporting him. Many of the same people who would demand the immediate removal of a Democrat facing similar facts have instead spent years explaining why Trump’s conduct should not count.
This should not be normal.
Your daughters see the double standard. They see which men are granted limitless benefit of the doubt and which women are expected to carry the burden of that generosity. They remember every lesson you taught them about dignity, character, modesty, responsibility, and the kind of man who could be trusted around women.
When you continue supporting Donald Trump, they may reasonably wonder whether you would recognize danger if it came closer to them. They may wonder whether you would believe them, protect them, and stand beside them if doing so required you to confront a powerful man you admired.
You may consider that interpretation unfair. Before rejecting it, please understand that this is not an abstract political disagreement to your daughters. It touches one of the most basic questions a daughter carries into her relationship with a parent:
“If something happened to me, would you choose me over him?”
You are likely answering, “Of course I would.”
I believe you. Your daughter probably believes you too. But she is left wondering why the protection you would offer her does not extend to other women.
Sons notice too. A father or grandfather can spend years teaching a boy to respect women, control his temper, tell the truth, and accept responsibility. The boy will still notice the powerful man who is exempted from every lesson.
Jesus said, “By their fruit you will recognize them” (Matthew 7:16, NIV). It is worth asking what our choices have taught the people we love about what we value, what we will excuse, and whether they are safe bringing their full lives into a relationship with us.
You May Be the One Who Taught Them to Follow Jesus
There is a good chance that you helped give the person who sent you this their Christian faith.
You may have carried them into church before they could walk. You folded their small hands and taught them words they did not yet understand. You stood beside them at a baptism, bought their first Bible, helped them dress for Christmas Mass, or listened from the driver’s seat while they asked the wonderfully inconvenient questions children ask about God.
You taught them that Jesus loves the poor, welcomes the stranger, and confronts those who use religion to protect their own power. You expected them to tell the truth, apologize when they hurt someone, and understand that character is revealed by what we do when nobody is watching.
Passing faith from one generation to another is among the most beautiful and loving things a family can do. Children may question parts of what they were taught, but the moral imagination formed in childhood often remains. The stories stay. The words of Jesus stay.
That may be part of what is happening in your family now, and it contains a painful irony.
The person who sent you this may not have rejected everything you taught them. They may have taken it seriously. They learned from you that truth is not negotiable, cruelty is not strength, power does not make a person righteous, and every human being possesses dignity before God. They learned that Christians are responsible for what we say and do, along with what we permit, excuse, and fail to confront.
Now they are trying to reconcile those lessons with your support for Donald Trump.
They remember what you taught them. That is precisely the problem.
They remember being disciplined for lying, mocking another child, blaming someone else, or refusing to apologize. Then they watch behavior you once taught them to reject become defensible when Donald Trump does it. They hear moral outrage directed at his opponents and elaborate explanations offered for his own conduct.
When they ask how this can be reconciled with following Jesus, they are not necessarily mocking your faith. They may be appealing to it.
Some have raised these contradictions with parents or grandparents and received a lecture about Democrats. Others asked a pastor, learned which questions were welcome in their church, and eventually stopped going. The empty pew is then blamed on secular culture or a younger generation that does not want God.
We should at least consider another possibility. They looked at the faith we proclaimed, looked at the power we excused, and could no longer make the two belong to the same moral world.
That is a terrible thing for the Church to place on the shoulders of its children.
Jesus said, “By their fruit you will recognize them.” We should be willing to examine the fruit of this alliance. Has it made Christians more truthful and compassionate? Has it made us more attentive to suffering and more capable of admitting when we were wrong? Can our children recognize more of Jesus in us than they could ten years ago?
Or have our words, our deeds, and what we have failed to do taught them that Christianity’s moral demands can be suspended whenever political power is at stake?
Jesus also asked, “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:36, NIV).
What good is it for Christians to gain the White House, Congress, or the Supreme Court if we make the character of Jesus harder for our own children to recognize?
Your loved one may be disappointed in you because you taught them to take Jesus seriously. They learned from you that faith must be visible in the way we treat other people. Your witness took root. It formed a conscience. Now that conscience is asking why the person who planted it appears willing to set it aside.
Please do not punish them for remembering what you taught them.
He Has Used You Too
I want you to understand something that may be difficult to hear: you have been used too.
That does not relieve you of responsibility. It means I do not see you merely as the cause of someone else’s pain. You were also targeted by a political project that understands loyalty, fear, grievance, and belonging very well.
Donald Trump has asked people to give him their trust, money, reputations, careers, freedom, votes, and sometimes their families. He gives something in return: a sense of belonging, a common enemy, the thrill of being part of a movement, and the promise that he alone is fighting for you.
Then the bill arrives, and it rarely arrives at his door.
People are praised while they are useful, attacked when they become inconvenient, and sometimes restored when they can be useful again. Loyalty tends to move in one direction. The consequences do not.
Look at what happened to some of the people who served him most closely.
Rudy Giuliani put his wealth, international respect, and legal career behind Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. He was disbarred in New York and Washington, held liable for defaming two Georgia election workers, and financially devastated. Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, went to prison and was disbarred. John Eastman was disbarred in California. Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty to a felony and received a three-year suspension from practicing law in Colorado. Steve Bannon served federal prison time for contempt of Congress.
These were educated, accomplished adults. Several knew the law better than most Americans ever will. They believed they could remain close to Donald Trump without being consumed by the consequences that follow him.
They were wrong.
Mike Pence may be the clearest example because the final betrayal happened in public. Pence had spent four years defending Trump through scandals that would have sent most vice presidents running for the nearest exit. He offered loyalty again and again. On January 6, he refused one demand: he would not interfere with the certification of an election he had no constitutional authority to overturn.
While Pence was being rushed to safety beneath the Capitol, Trump attacked him. The House January 6 Committee documented that Trump posted his condemnation of Pence at 2:24 p.m., after the violence had begun and after learning that Pence had been evacuated from the Senate chamber. Rioters were chanting for Pence’s death. Trump watched television. The official report makes grim reading.
Four years of loyalty came down to one refusal, and one refusal made him disposable.
People give more and more because admitting the cost would force them to reconsider everything already given. Another defense, another donation, another damaged relationship. Surely, after investing so much, the loyalty will eventually be returned.
It will not.
Donald Trump does not know your name. He does not know which child stopped calling, which holiday became unbearable, or which grandchild is growing up outside your life. Your loyalty may help him retain power. His loyalty will never rebuild what you lost.
You may answer that he does not need to know your name because his policies are helping you. Then look closely at the ordinary life those policies were supposed to improve.
Presidents do not control every grocery price, mortgage rate, medical bill, or economic turn. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something. Donald Trump did, however, promise to bring prices down, reduce the debt, make the country safer, protect your freedom, and restore an American life in which an ordinary family could afford a home, see a doctor, go out to dinner, travel, raise children, and grow old without being crushed by the cost.
Where is that life?
By July 2026, consumer prices were 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier, food cost 3 percent more, and energy prices were up 14.7 percent. The average thirty-year mortgage rate stood at 6.67 percent, placing homeownership further out of reach for many families. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office projects a $1.9 trillion federal deficit for 2026 and estimates that the 2025 reconciliation law increased projected deficits by $4.7 trillion before higher tariff revenue was counted.
These numbers do not prove that every family is worse off or that Donald Trump caused every hardship. They do make one fact difficult to escape: the promised rescue has not arrived.
You may never hear those figures placed beside his promises on your preferred news channel. They are not Democratic talking points. They come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Freddie Mac, and the Congressional Budget Office.
He asked for your loyalty by promising to make ordinary life freer, safer, and more affordable. Instead, ordinary life remains painfully expensive, the national debt continues to climb, and the movement demands that you treat every failure as someone else’s fault.
So I am asking you to consider the bargain in full. What has Donald Trump asked you to excuse? What has your loyalty cost your family? And after all of that, what has he actually given you that was worth the price?
He will not sit beside you when your grandchild no longer recognizes you or repair the relationship that broke while you were defending him.
The person who sent you this cares deeply about what happens to you.
You Are Allowed to Leave
Leaving MAGA does not require you to become an enthusiastic Democrat. I am certainly not one.
Leaving may feel as though it requires an explanation for every vote cast and every warning dismissed. You may imagine Trump’s opponents waiting to gloat. You may fear losing friends, a church community, or the place where you have felt politically at home.
That is a heavy price. But you do not owe anyone a theatrical confession or the humiliation of crawling back. You can begin with one sentence spoken to yourself: “I will no longer defend what I know is wrong.”
I have serious concerns about the Democratic Party’s willingness to confront corruption and governmental overreach, the money it accepts from interests it should resist, the private conduct it sometimes overlooks, and its seemingly endless capacity for talking when people need it to act. Democratic politicians are also far too comfortable with many of the corporate interests that leave American workers and consumers paying the consequences.
You do not have to pretend those problems are insignificant. You do not have to trust Democratic leaders who have not earned your trust. You do not have to exchange unquestioning loyalty to one party for unquestioning loyalty to another.
You remain free. No politician, party, television network, church leader, or movement has an unlimited claim on your loyalty. They are not entitled to your vote, your money, your attention, your conscience, or your relationships simply because you once supported them.
Those things belong to you. You may withdraw them whenever the person demanding them has abused your trust, violated your principles, or failed to earn them. You do not owe lifelong allegiance to a political decision you made years ago. Changing your mind in response to what you have witnessed is what free people do.
Donald Trump speaks constantly about loyalty, but the loyalty he demands travels in only one direction. You are expected to defend him, excuse him, finance him, vote for his candidates, purchase his schlock, distrust anyone who challenges him, and sometimes sacrifice relationships with people who have loved you for decades.
That is an extraordinary amount to surrender to a man who would not recognize you if you passed him on the street.
You are free to say that the price has become too high. You are free to stop paying it.
You may remain conservative. You may vote candidate by candidate, support an independent, leave a race blank, or decide that a particular Democrat is the more responsible choice without adopting the Democratic Party as your political home. Your conscience does not need a party’s permission to function.
Occasionally, I am asked why I seem to direct most of my criticism toward the Republican Party. The answer is simple. I have been writing here for about a year, during which Republicans have controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, while six Republican-appointed justices form the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. When the pendulum swings, as it always does, I assure you that I will be right back here, agitating for the Gospel.
There are worse things than being politically homeless for a while. One of them is remaining in a political home that requires you to surrender your conscience as the price of belonging. The wilderness can be lonely, but at least you can hear your own thoughts there.
You may have said, “I support his policies, not his personality.” Presidents are not pastors, and nobody expects moral perfection from a public official. Character, however, is not decorative. It determines how power is exercised, how truth is treated, who becomes expendable, and whether constitutional limits are respected.
A policy preference cannot absolve every means used to achieve it. I would say this about any political leader who required me to deny what I could see, excuse what I once condemned, or sacrifice people I love. No politician receives a blank check on my conscience. My faith will not permit it.
Some Democrats are corrupt, compromised, cowardly, or incompetent. Their wrongdoing does not make Trump’s conduct moral. You do not have to trust Democrats in order to stop giving Donald Trump control over your conscience.
My concerns about Democrats do not require me to support a movement that carries the cross around like a campaign prop while becoming increasingly unrecognizable from the Gospel it claims to defend.
The cross is not a mascot for American power. It is the sign of a Savior who rejected domination, identified himself with the least powerful, told the truth before rulers, welcomed the despised, and gave himself away rather than demanding that others sacrifice themselves for him.
No political movement is entitled to use that cross as cover for conduct that contradicts it.
Conservatism existed before Donald Trump and will outlive him. Christianity has survived empires, kings, dictators, parties, and presidents. Your love of country does not require loyalty to one man.
Changing your mind does not mean that you were stupid. It means you are willing to make today’s decision with today’s knowledge and stop paying for an old decision simply because you have already paid so much.
The people who love you do not need to hear that they were right about everything. They need to know that you finally understand why they were hurt, and that their place in your life is no longer subordinate to a politician who will never know your name.
You can leave MAGA without abandoning your values. You may discover that leaving is how you begin reclaiming them.
Reach Back Before It Is Too Late
You have reached the end of a long and difficult article. The easiest thing now would be to close it, tell yourself that you will think about it later, and allow ordinary life to cover the discomfort.
Later is how years disappear.
The phone may feel heavier than it should. The person who sent this may be guarded, angry, or unwilling to answer immediately because hope has disappointed them before.
Make the call anyway, or send the message that opens the door.
Ask them, “What has my support for Donald Trump communicated to you?”
Then do the harder thing. Do not explain your vote, defend the president, mention Democrats, or correct their interpretation. Listen until you understand what they have experienced. Allow the person you love to tell you what has happened inside them without forcing their words through the political vocabulary you have been given.
You may disagree with parts of what they say. Some of it may feel unfair. You may also hear what no television host, politician, pastor, or social-media personality could tell you, because none of those people knows your family.
If you do not know how to begin, send this:
I love you more than I love any politician or political movement. I know my choices have hurt our relationship, and I want to understand how. I will listen without arguing. If you are willing, I would be grateful for the chance to begin repairing what has been damaged.
One sincere conversation will not restore everything. The other person has lived with this longer than you have understood it. Listen without preparing a rebuttal. Acknowledge specific harm. Apologize without attaching an “if” or a “but.” Respect boundaries, change the behavior that caused the damage, and allow trust to return at the pace established by the person who was hurt.
Forgiveness does not guarantee immediate access. A grandparent who makes one sincere phone call cannot demand the return of a grandchild as proof that the apology was accepted. The first call does not erase the years. It changes what may still be possible.
The midterm election will take place on November 3, 2026. Before you vote, think about the conversation you had. Set aside the party labels long enough to ask whether the candidate tells the truth, accepts the legitimate result of an election, and treats vulnerable people as fully human. Then ask the question that reaches beyond politics: Would I want my child or grandchild to imitate this person’s character?
Or, to put it more bluntly: Am I about to vote for a dirtbag who should not be trusted with any form of power?
“Dirtbag” is not a sophisticated political category, but sophistication has helped us excuse an astonishing amount of rotten behavior. We call habitual lying “messaging,” cruelty “strength,” fraud “disruption,” and religious extremism “faith.” A wealthy huckster who would not be trusted alone with the church collection plate is somehow entrusted with the power of the state.
Every party has produced abusers, fraudsters, liars, hypocrites, and people elevated by nepotism or cronyism. The ballot asks whether you are willing to hand power to someone you know should not be trusted with it.
Character is not an inconvenience to overlook after the policy questions have been answered. Character tells us what a person will do with the power those policies give them.
Carry the answer into the voting booth.
Donald Trump will never know that this article was sent or what it cost you to read it. He will not be present for the next birthday, wedding, funeral, Christmas dinner, or ordinary Sunday afternoon when the empty chair becomes difficult to ignore.
Your family will be there, or they will not.
The person who sent you this has not given up. Beneath the anger, disappointment, and distance, there is still enough love to make one more attempt. They do not need you to become a Democrat. They need to know whether any politician will be allowed to cost you this much.
Someone who loves you has thrown the line.
For the love of God, reach back.
And Now It’s Your Turn
Has Donald Trump’s movement changed a relationship in your family?
Perhaps you still love one another, but conversation has narrowed to a few carefully protected subjects. Perhaps you have established boundaries that made some kind of relationship possible. Perhaps the distance has become much greater, and you are grieving someone who is still alive.
If you are comfortable, tell us what this has looked like in your family. What has helped you preserve your conscience without surrendering your love? What have you tried that did not work? What would need to happen before trust could begin to return?
Please protect the privacy of the people involved. You do not need to identify anyone or disclose details that could place you at risk.
My hope is that these comments can become a place where we listen carefully, share what we have learned, and minister to people carrying the same grief.
The choir has been grieving. Let’s take care of one another.
If this gave words to something you’ve been carrying, please share it with someone who may need those words too.
Help Me Keep Showing Up for the Choir
Message From the Margins exists to provide the pastoral care, serious theology, moral clarity, and honest conversation that too many people have struggled to find elsewhere. I want nearly all of this work to remain freely available because the person who most needs a pastor may not be able to afford to pay.
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To everyone who makes this work possible, thank you. I am deeply grateful.