A Trump Supporter Walked Into the Bar

And what I’ve learned from the MAGA members that I once called friends

Photo by Aleksandr Popov on Unsplash

Venturing outside of the reaches of Philadelphia to meet my friend at a bar, perhaps I shouldn’t have been terribly surprised to learn that the venue would be populated largely by Trump supporters. The magnetism that it holds for my friend, though, has far more to do with the pool table centerpiece and the accompanying atmosphere than the politics of its occupants.

He and I are very much in agreement that what our country is facing off against is a swell of fascist authoritarianism. Neither of us have illusions about this fraught moment in American history and what it might portend.

As our conversation veered toward Charlie Kirk, it wasn’t long before one of the Trump-supporting denizens at the bar decided to insert himself into our conversation. His intrusion was civil enough. He had tan skin, white teeth, and a warm face that contorted with intermittent twitches.

Unlike myself, the friend I met there knows plenty of people who can proudly call themselves Trump supporters. In the years since the suspiciously orange despot entered our politics, I’ve tried to hold onto my connections with a few people on the opposite side of the aisle. But time and time again, I face off against the reality that to be a member of the MAGA movement is a far cry from identifying as your typical run-of-the-mill Republican.

It’s a shame that our two party system has forced Eisenhower-brand conservatives to vote for an increasingly far right series of politicians and celebrities in order to retain their status as so-called Republicans. To be on the left of fascism is to be labeled a “RINO,” or to some, something far worse — “a Liberal.”

Sunny, as he introduced himself, couldn’t be identified from a distance by a crimson red hat. But among the first things he said in our conversation was a non-sequitur about how he had not only voted for Trump, but recently purchased a Trump-themed calendar.

Sunny didn’t seem to grasp how another might read such a statement, but I imagine for most readers it goes without saying that I’ve never met a Biden or Harris voter who’s enough of a supporter to mark the passage of time with assorted pictures of their faces. Such a level of fandom is almost inconceivable coming from my side of the aisle. But for the leader who’s introduced a line of everything from Trump-themed teddybears to NFTs and cryptocurrencies, it’s scarily commonplace for his voters to buy into their support in this fanatical way. In Sunny’s admission, I quickly realized this conversation likely wouldn’t lend itself to an equal-footed exchange of ideas.

I think of myself as a pretty courteous debater, and more adept than most of my left-leaning friends at conversing with people I disagree with. But as the years have gone on and politics have seeped into each and every aspect of our daily lives, it’s been hard to resist the more fiery clashes that such conversations tend to elicit. I still believe — in theory — that it’s wise to keep an open line of communication with people whose ideologies vary so wildly from my own. But in practice, those connections have become increasingly difficult to maintain as the party of Reagan has morphed into the “Make America Great Again” movement.

I can’t fault victims for refusing to break bread with their aggressors. But as a white male, I have the luxury of holding onto a certain sense of security in Trump’s America. I don’t live in such a constant state of fear that it’s been imperative for me to excommunicate all MAGA members from my life.

Yet when I found out that my longtime friend, Adam, who’d swung for Biden in 2020 turned around and supported Trump in 2024, I quickly found our ideological differences had reached a certain threshold. Our differences had become irreconcilable. When asked about his decision, he was able to admit to me that he didn’t follow politics. He claimed his vote against Harris stemmed almost entirely from Biden’s handling of two key issues. Raising a six-year-old, he was so disgusted by the notion of his son asking him about trans people that he voted instead for their systematic erasure.

I told him that he invited the future where, instead of his son asking him about trans people, he’d question his father about why he voted for an adjudicated rapist and proud authoritarian. I pointed out that the non-binary community wouldn’t cease to exist simply because this administration is going to such dire lengths to disenfranchise them. That exchange was near the end of our decade-long friendship. He wasn’t the first friend I’d lost under comparable circumstances.

I’d known for a long time that Adam was religious and identified as a Christian. We’d sparred on the subject of religion before, but always managed to keep the discourse relatively cordial. Those conversations were mostly centered on whether a god that takes sides in wars and harbors opinions about our diets could exist. It had never occurred to me back then that his Christianity manifested as such a deep-seated hatred of embattled minorities that he’d be so blithely willing to abandon Christ’s most essential teachings in order to ensure that the LGBTQ+ community would live in fear.

The other reason for his vote was, ironically, because his fiancé had been taken off of food stamps during the Biden administration. Before casting his vote, he didn’t actually research whether Trump’s administration would improve her conditions. If he had, he would have known that there’s likely no president in our country’s history to be so flagrantly anti-poor. That a staple of his campaign was calling out those “freeloaders.”

As the Trump supporter at the bar entered our conversation, I sustained an air of openness. Much of the reason for this was that I didn’t want to stoke any hostility or bar fights in this venue full of people who felt similarly to Sunny. Another reason is that I often feel blindsided by the people who still stand in Trump’s corner. What can be said about him that hasn’t already been said? What argument against his authoritarian rule would they consider persuasive when all others have failed?

As with the fan who draws a blank when asked to name their favorite songs from a specific band or artist, I was so overcome by all of the Trump-induced ills of the past decade that I sat there in silence as Sunny delivered the typical talking points about everything Trump is doing right: he’s going after the freeloaders (like my former friend’s Trump-supporting fiancé), he’s cracking down on crime, and his late night Twitter ramblings are all for show — certainly not symptomatic of a deeply demented leader.

I felt so inundated by all of the objections I could raise to Trump’s bumbling, lawless, and iron-fisted rule that I hardly knew where to begin.

I generally try to broach such conversations with a few light concessions. In admitting that neither Biden nor Harris are perfect, I sometimes find that discourse can remain friendly enough for an exchange of ideas to take place. But when Sunny told me he was such a big fan of our president that he’d begun buying his merchandise, I sadly realized he was entrenched enough in Trump’s cult of personality that little ground was likely to be covered. When he announced that he was an immigrant, I felt more perplexed still about the Olympian feats of gymnastics it would require to remain such a staunch supporter in the face of so much anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy.

On one hand, I believe that our only path forward as a country may be in the ability to talk to one another about the issues that affect all of us. Among the most counter-productive things that any of us can do is to continue pouring gasoline on this inferno by hurling epithets and refusing to speak to these topics with substance.

I’ve been frustrated to learn that the most popular political voices on the left are the ones who’ve fully closed the door on the idea that a Trump supporter might one day read their work. They traffic in insults and presume inhumanity of everyone who was persuaded by Trump’s rhetoric and virulent campaign of misinformation. (I’m often guilty of preaching to the choir in my own political writing, but I can at least refrain from falling back on invective.)

I can’t deny that I see some sense in that more confrontational approach. I think it’s hard for many to believe that there’s a decent person left who managed to vote for Trump in three consecutive elections. It’s simplest to cast all of those voters in the same light and tell ourselves that it’s impossible that anyone could have seen all that we have from Trump and remain at his side.

But I have a hard time squaring the endurance of the Trumpian movement with the notion that people do leave cults. To be a Trump supporter for a decade is no guarantee that sense won’t eventually begin to seep in. In the wake of the Epstein scandal, we’ve begun to see more of his voters admit that their leader’s tacit condonement of pedophilia is a bridge too far for them to cross.

And yet, when I talk to Trump supporters like Sunny, I’m so often confronted by the hard truth that nothing that leaves my mouth truly matters. When people are so woefully closed off to a debate of ideas that they’re buying despot-themed calendars, I catch myself at a loss for words. Each statement I made about his authoritarian breaches and tariffs and dangerous ineptitude washed over him as though I’d said nothing at all.

Conversing with Trump supporters so often demands something of Democrats that most of us will have a difficult time offering. Guiding people out of the fog is a trying task when it’s thick enough to absorb millions. MAGA members are immersed in an ideology that may already have disintegrated if there weren’t so many people ready and willing to reel them back in. If there weren’t entire algorithms devoted to pulling them deeper and deeper into that pathological miasma.

But I don’t believe that means we should stop trying to speak reason to lunacy. I do my best to welcome these conversations even when I know they’re hard — even when I know they’re more than likely to be as fruitless as each other time that I’ve participated in them.

There’s strength in numbers, and if there weren’t, I don’t think the organized religions of the world would have persevered so far beyond all of the challenges to their most central tenets. The belief in gods made more sense when we understood ourselves to be the center of everything, when tides and volcanic eruptions and storm clouds were each impenetrable mysteries.

But in the era when science has given us so many answers to the questions that have long plagued our species, much of the reason for the lasting prevalence of religion is the millions of other people who’ve continued to believe in them. People are so fearful of death, and so umbilically attached to the idea of a heaven with pearly white gates that they resist sitting with the logical fallacies inherent in such a system of beliefs.

In many ways, the allure of religion helps us to understand just what an insurmountable foe we’re up against in our fight against Trumpism. When a belief system is so immune to reasoned debate, it complicates our path forward. But such complications are no cause for surrender. They only mean we have to marshal our efforts and keep trying our best to walk people out of this fog. Even if it’s so vast and oppressive that it’s consumed half of the voting public.

I try my best to remember that, even for voters like Sunny, to be a member of a cult isn’t necessarily an end state. People join cults, and people leave them. It just might demand more patience than many of us are willing to put forth.

It shouldn’t fall on the victims of this administration to reach out an olive branch to the people who still believe in it. But if none of us are willing to offer that hand, this storm might just rage on forever.

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