My parents are the same way…all in for Trump. But I know my parents and know they have good hearts. They’ve just been saturated in the right-wing media ecosystem that’s been peddling pro-Trump propaganda for years…to the point where they live in a completely different reality. And they’ve invested so much into it emotionally, they just can’t see it any other way.

Without the far right media and the complicit right-wing politicians enabling him, Trump is nothing. They’re the ones I blame for the damage done to the country, to my relationship with my parents, to my parents’ worldview and their mental health.

I’m not saying the average Trump follower is blameless, but most of them were completely unprepared and ill-equiped to handle the level of propaganda thrown at them from every angle (right-wing news, social media, & way too many enablers in the GOP).

I’ve had to try to talk my parents down from so many conspiracy theories. All of a sudden, the ones who taught me as a child to not believe everything I saw on the internet were latching on to anything that supported what they’d been told to believe. But I have to remember that they didn’t grow up with the internet, with having to evaluate credibility of sources, and filter out misinformation the same way I did. They lacked the experience and the tools to do that properly.

All that to say, it’s a weird mix of things going on. It’s complex. And again, while I don’t consider the average Trump supporter to be blameless (certainly not the ones acting in violence or criminally), we need to remember that they are still human. So many of them are good people who’ve just been fooled into believing things that are not true. We should be angrier at the ones who fooled them than at the ones who were fooled.

I know a guy that openly ignores the sexual abuse because he “doesn’t care about his personal life” so long as he “makes the country better”. He has also whined incessantly about Hunter’s laptop.