Can you still be close to someone whose politics you despise?
When Kay’s two best friends — a married couple she met at work — told her they weren’t voting for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, she believed them. After all, Kay and her friends shared similar values; they all supported issues like reproductive rights and protections for LGBTQ people. But while she was scrolling on social media in July, she saw they had posted the same image to Instagram: the viral photograph of Trump raising his fist in defiance after the assassination attempt on his life, blood trickling down his face, American flag billowing in the background.
Kay, 27, sent her friends a message asking about it. Her friends admitted then that they were voting for Trump, because they thought he would better the economy. Kay was shocked: She decided she needed space to reevaluate the relationship and stopped speaking to them. “They’re gay,” she says, “but they were voting for what they think was best because of the media they consume.”
Over time, Kay, who declined to share her last name in order to speak about her friendships, grew to miss the couple. It was hard to avoid them: Not only did they all work together, but they were neighbors, too. They were the first best friends Kay made as an adult in their small California town. Although Kay says she cut other Trump supporters out of her life in the past, she ultimately didn’t want to sacrifice this relationship.
“Losing people like that, it’s hard.”
The trio agreed to avoid discussing politics in order to maintain the friendship and they’ve since reconciled, Kay says. She was willing to overlook what she considers a misguided decision in order to remain close to people with whom she otherwise agrees. Distancing herself based on their voting record seemed too painful, too shortsighted, she says.
“When it’s your family or your really close friends or your coworkers, it’s not that easy to just cut them off,” Kay says. “You have to think about how that impacts you emotionally. Losing people like that, it’s hard.”
Over the last eight years, many Americans have distanced themselves from their Trump-supporting loved ones. The Harris Poll recently surveyed a representative sample of Americans and found that 42 percent of adults said politics was the largest cause of estrangement in families. Ahead of the upcoming holiday season, 38 percent of respondents in an American Psychological Association survey said they planned to avoid family members they disagree with politically.
The underlying motivation for these estrangements seems to be self-protective: Many come to believe that a loved one who votes for a candidate who supports policies that endanger their — and others’ — rights is not someone worth keeping around. Some can’t reconcile the fact that relatives they thought they knew agree with such divisive rhetoric. For others, a vote for Trump was the final straw in an already fraying relationship.
While these estrangements are still happening — and with good reason — in the wake of the 2024 presidential election, some are taking an alternative approach. Amid an epidemic of loneliness, some may not have the luxury to cut off valuable connections. Others recognize they can’t change their loved ones’ opinions from afar. More still have wisened to the reality that avoiding varying viewpoints only fuels polarization.
Although we don’t know for sure yet whether more people are reconciling with their Trump-supporting friends and family, therapist Chanel Dokun has observed this shift among her clients. In 2016, Trump’s victory felt like a shocking anomaly, which made people believe they could be more dismissive of those on the alternate end of the political spectrum. Now, those she’s counseled are compelled to engage with these supporters head-on. “It’s not something where I can simply distance myself or cut people off,” she says of client sentiment, “because now I’m looking at a much larger percentage of the population is in favor of this candidate than I thought of before.”
In her practice, psychologist Vanessa Scaringi sees many of her clients — primarily women in their 30s and 40s — being more reluctant to turn away from aging relatives. Young women who originally disconnected from relatives in 2016 might have children now, Scaringi says, and they’d like conservative family members to be a part of their lives. “I do think generally the sense of time being lost is a motivator to maintain those relationships,” she says. Sometimes, those relatives are already an integral part of their lives and even provide child care, she says.
Mental health professionals stress the importance of safety within relationships and encourage people to set boundaries or create distance with loved ones who say hurtful things or espouse upsetting rhetoric. You do not need to maintain a relationship with someone who condones hate and bigotry. There are thorny moral and ethical questions at play here; the choice of with whom to maintain a relationship — and under what conditions — is an entirely personal one. But tolerating discomfort can help build resiliency, Scaringi notes, and estrangement as a default sidesteps this opportunity for growth and healthy conflict.
If you do decide to maintain a relationship with someone with whom you don’t see eye to eye and political talk does arise, avoid the impulse to try to change their mind. The goal of conflict isn’t to solve a problem, Dokun says, but to have empathy for the other side in spite of your differences. To help personalize what can be broad concepts, Dokun suggests sharing how you or people close to you were personally affected — or would be impacted — by specific policies or viewpoints. “When you speak to those more vulnerable places, using language around especially your emotions, that tends to de-escalate those conversations,” she says. “Family members also are able to see you in a new light and that’s much less of an argumentative space.”
In group settings, having a sympathetic ally to whom you can subtly share snide remarks or roll your eyes also helps eliminate tension, Scaringi says. For Bryan, a 29-year-old who lives in Florida, that family member is his mom, Donna, 64. (Both are using pseudonyms in order to speak about their family.) Their tight-knit extended family is largely conservative, and over the last eight years, political divisions have strained relationships. “Before Trump, I didn’t care who you voted for, it wasn’t a topic in our home,” Donna says. “But since Trump, watching my two siblings fall in love with this man to a point where my sister says, ‘I love him like an uncle and I would have him at my Thanksgiving table’ hurts my soul, because everything about him is not me.”
Donna and Bryan find it hard to reconcile their family’s beliefs with the realities of their experiences: Bryan is trans and his sister hopes to soon have a baby in a state with a near ban on abortion.
Before Bryan came out in 2022, he feared his family wouldn’t accept him based on their conservative views. While his aunt and cousins have been supportive in using his name and pronouns — even going as far to assure him that they’d find a way to source hormones if he was unable to receive gender-affirming care — Bryan says these same family members still express anti-trans views in front of him.
“When you speak to those more vulnerable places, using language around especially your emotions, that tends to de-escalate those conversations.”
Despite everything, Donna and Bryan don’t intend on cutting out their family — for now. Bryan doesn’t expect his relatives to change their mind, but he believes offering a trans perspective may give them an opportunity to learn. “I said to myself,” Bryan says, “that if something happens where my health care is taken away, whether it’s because I’m on an Affordable Care Act plan or because the Affordable Care Act stops providing gender-affirming care, and if something actually does happen that’s a direct result of Trump being elected, then I will definitely reconsider cutting these people off forever.”
Consistently exposing a loved one to alternative points of view can help to slowly shift their perspective, Dokun says, while estrangement may only push them further into their ideological silos. However, try not to exhaust yourself while championing your side. This might look like setting explicit boundaries like not watching the news together or limiting conversation to certain topics. “I work with a lot of folks who can berate themselves for not being enough of a social justice advocate,” Scaringi says. “I really work with them on trying to just plant seeds with their family.”
For others, there are no minds to change, simply resignation toward what’s already happened. While a few people close to him voted for Trump, New Jersey resident Morgan, 32, who declined to share his last name to speak about his relationships, believes they did so for economic and global policy reasons. He doesn’t agree with these motivations, he says, but it’s worth hearing them out.
“Now that he’s no longer a fluke, a glitch, some sort of national aberration that we can excuse away,” he says, “I hope the sides can talk more as Trump’s second administration wears on. Because what on Earth is the alternative?”