Jared’s eyes became erratic — completely different from the eyes of the man I’d sat down with at the beginning of the night. “If we lived in a different time, we would be hanging white liberal whores in the town square and dragging them through the streets for the lies they spread,” he roared. My immediate reaction was an attempt to de-escalate the situation.
“Let’s take a deep breath,” I suggested. I took one, then he took one, and we repeated it. He reset. Later, though, when I had my hand on the table, he grabbed my wrist and started ranting again about how liberal white women create witch hunts.
“They say horrible things about me and make everyone hate me and think I’m a bad person,” he said. He was staring at a point in the distance, speaking like he was in some kind of trance.
“What did they say about you?” I asked.
He snapped out of it. “Oh, not me,” he answered. “I meant
Donald Trump.”
Over the course of a few dates, he’d make this mistake often, where he’d talk about
Trump in the first person. And I came to realise that while I was trying to separate Jared from who he
voted for, he may have been personally struggling to do the exact same thing, just in a very different way. It became clear to me that he truly loved Trump not just because he identified with Trump the politician but because he identified with Trump the person being considered ‘bad’ by progressive standards.
