On the Failure of Families, the Silence of Elders, and the Children Who Inherit the Lie
There is a particular kind of grief that comes from watching people you love teach their children something you know is wrong.
Not wrong in the way that differing political philosophies are wrong. Not wrong in the way that reasonable people can disagree about tax policy or trade agreements or the appropriate role of the federal government in regulating interstate commerce. Wrong in the way that a compass pointed at the floor is wrong. Wrong in the way that tells you something has broken inside the instrument itself.
I lost one of my best friends in 2016.
Not to illness. Not to distance. Not to the ordinary drift that sometimes carries people apart over years. I lost him to this. To the moment when I sat across from someone I had known for decades, someone I had laughed with and argued with and trusted, and I tried to tell him what I saw coming — and he laughed at me.
Not a dismissive laugh. Not even an unkind one. Just the laugh of a man who had decided I was being dramatic, that I was letting my politics get the better of my judgment, that my alarm was a kind of theater. I got irate. I pushed. I laid out what I knew about this man — about his history, his frauds, his treatment of women, his casual racism, the long New York record of who he actually was beneath the tabloid mythology. And my friend just smiled and shook his head like I was an interesting puzzle he’d already solved.
We haven’t really spoken since. Not in any real way. The friendship didn’t end in a fight. It ended in that laugh — in the specific moment when I realized that the person sitting across from me had made a choice about what to believe that no amount of evidence or anger or grief was going to touch. Some losses announce themselves loudly. This one arrived almost quietly and I only understood its full weight later, when I went to reach for something that wasn’t there anymore.
I grew up in and around New York in the late seventies. I know the city Trump came from. I know the culture he emerged from — the tabloid swagger, the gold-plated self-promotion, the Queens boy who needed Manhattan to take him seriously and never quite got over the fact that it didn’t. This is not a man who was misunderstood by the coastal elites. This is a man the coastal elites knew very well and, for the most part, correctly assessed. The New York press corps covered Donald Trump for thirty years before he ran for president. They knew what he was. The city knew what he was. The banks that stopped lending to him knew what he was. The contractors he stiffed knew what he was.
And yet.
There are families — good families, families with histories and traditions and genuine love for one another — who looked at this man and saw a patriarch. Who looked at his belligerence and called it strength. Who looked at his dishonesty and called it savvy. Who looked at his contempt for women and minorities and the poor and told themselves, or maybe just didn’t bother to question, whether that contempt was something they wanted passed down.
Generation to generation. Grandparents to parents to children to newborns who have no say in the matter yet, who arrive in the world clean and open and already surrounded by a mythology.
That’s the part that gets me.
The seniors who came of age in postwar America — who watched their parents work, who understood instinctively what it meant to sacrifice for something larger than yourself, who lived through civil rights and Vietnam and Watergate — some of them looked at everything they’d witnessed and landed on Donald Trump as the embodiment of their values. And maybe they can be partially forgiven for it, because the propaganda was sophisticated and the fear was real and old age has a way of narrowing the world to what feels familiar. But they could have said something. They could have looked at their children and said: this man does not represent what I actually believe. A lot of them didn’t.
My friend’s silence — his laugh — was a version of that same thing. Not the silence of someone who hadn’t thought about it. The silence of someone who had thought about it and decided that whatever I was feeling wasn’t worth the disruption of what he’d already concluded. You can argue with an idea. You can’t argue with a laugh.
And so the Gen Xers — a generation raised on the idea that they were tougher and more clear-eyed than the idealists before them, that they saw through the bullshit, that their particular form of ironic detachment was a kind of wisdom — some of them took the inheritance and ran with it. They watched Trump on The Apprentice and saw a boss. They watched his rallies and felt the electricity without examining the current. They made him a figure of admiration in their households. They did not hide it from their kids. Some of them actively celebrated it.
And now those kids are having kids.
There is a baby somewhere right now — maybe a lot of babies — who will learn to walk in a home where Donald Trump is a hero. Who will absorb, before they have language for it, that the way a powerful man treats women is acceptable. That the way a powerful man lies about everything — his wealth, his health, his relationships, his crimes, his motives, the weather at his inauguration — is not disqualifying but actually sort of impressive. That the way a powerful man talks about immigrants and Black people and anyone who disagrees with him is just how strong people talk.
These children will go to school. They will encounter people who don’t look like them and don’t think like them and weren’t raised on the same mythology. And they will carry into those encounters a framework that was handed to them before they could evaluate it, by people who loved them, which is the most effective delivery mechanism for a bad idea ever devised.
I am not making a partisan argument here. I am genuinely not interested, in this moment, in whether taxes should be higher or lower or whether the border should be managed this way or that way. I am talking about something more basic. I am talking about what it means to hold up a man — a specific, documented, adjudicated man — as a model for how to be human.
A man who has been found liable for sexual abuse by a jury of his peers. Who has been convicted of 34 felonies. Who has been sued by his own contractors, his own students, his own charity’s regulators. Who publicly mocked a disabled reporter. Who called countries with majority-Black populations “shitholes.” Who told four congresswomen of color to “go back” to countries most of them were born nowhere near. Who bragged, on tape, about grabbing women without their consent. Who has spent his entire public life treating the truth as a minor inconvenience and other people as props in his own story.
What, exactly, are we teaching when we teach this?
That strength means never admitting you’re wrong? That success justifies everything that preceded it, even when the success is largely fabricated? That women are for rating and ranking? That people who don’t look like you are inherently suspect? That the rules exist for other people?
These are not conservative values. I want to be clear about that because it matters. Plenty of conservatives — genuine ones, people with actual principles — are as horrified by this as anyone. What has happened is not conservatism. What has happened is the replacement of a political philosophy with a personality cult, and the cult’s values are not values at all. They are appetites dressed up as virtues.
I think about my friend sometimes. I think about the conversation we had and the laugh and the distance that opened up between us that I never found a way to close. I wonder occasionally whether he has moments of doubt — whether the last ten years have given him any reason to revisit that laugh. I don’t know. We don’t talk about it. We barely talk. And the friendship that was once one of the fixed points of my life is now something I navigate carefully around, like a room in a house where something happened that nobody wants to name out loud.
That’s what this costs at the personal level. One friendship, one conversation, one laugh that went on a few seconds too long and changed the geometry of everything after.
Multiply that by millions of families.
The children will figure it out eventually. Kids are resilient and curious and the world has a way of breaking through even the most carefully constructed mythologies. But it will cost them something. It always costs something to unlearn what you were taught before you had the tools to question it. To go back and reconstruct your sense of what strength looks like, what honesty requires, what it means to treat another person as fully human regardless of their gender or the color of their skin or what country their grandparents came from.
The people who could have intervened — who could have said, quietly, at a family dinner, I’m not sure this is the hill we want to plant our flag on — mostly didn’t. Whether from conflict-aversion or genuine belief or the particular exhaustion of old age, they stayed silent. Some of them laughed. And silence, when something wrong is being taught to children, is its own kind of teaching. And a laugh, when someone is trying to tell you something true and urgent and painful, is a door closing.
I grew up around this city and this culture. I watched Trump the way you watch a car driving too fast on a wet road — with the specific dread of someone who can see what’s coming and knows there’s nothing to do but get out of the way. I don’t feel vindicated by what’s happened. Being right about a disaster is not a comfort when the disaster is real and when it cost you something you can’t get back.
I just think about the babies.
Born into mythology. Handed a compass that points at the floor.
And the people who knew better — standing in the room, sitting across the table, laughing at the wrong moment — saying nothing.