DEBORAH: I’m writing this on January 7, 2025. Four years and a day ago, I stared at my television all day, watching the events of January 6th, 2021 erupt at the U.S. Capitol. One day ago, I watched Kamala Harris, the candidate I voted for, peacefully certify the 2024 electoral college results in favor of the man who defeated her. As I watched her fulfill her duty as vice president, I thought of a woman I’ve known most of my life, someone who is in her 80s and helped plan my wedding day nearly 40 years ago. From 2016 on, she has pledged her life to the MAGA agenda. Shortly after this past November’s election, I found her clutching her proverbial pearls and looking ahead with grave concern to Jan. 6th. 2025–to yesterday. She felt certain that “the she-devil and her cohorts on the left” were plotting to overturn the election “again” by refusing to certify the results. It was too much for me and I replied, “No, that’s what your side does.” For that I was unfriended and blocked, something I find sadly amusing in light of a more recent conversation I had with another Republican woman, this time in my LDS congregation, about a month after the election. In tears, she asked if I would intercede with a mutual acquaintance, a lifelong Democrat who had told my emotionally fraught friend that she didn’t think their decades-long friendship could continue because her Trump vote demonstrated a clear difference in their value systems.
The woman had been flabbergasted. “How could she say our values are different?” she exclaimed. “She’s known me for decades!”
It took everything I had to hold my tongue because the reality is, I, like so many others who would not vote for Trump felt the same way. How could people who professed to have the same values as mine ever vote for that man? I reached the identical conclusion: if they shared my values, they wouldn’t have voted for him. But I saw this woman’s pain and wanted to respect it.
I wanted her to understand that this same conclusion had been independently reached in homes all across the nation on the morning of November 6, 2024. Trump loves to call his opposition “woke.” Well, that day, what half the country woke to was the painful realization that our Trump-voting friends and families do not share either our American values or our sense of morality. The emotional pain was intense; our sense of safety, gone. There was nothing orchestrated about the conclusion that bared its teeth at us that morning after.
I felt badly for the emotional suffering my LDS friend was experiencing at the loss of a friendship. I told her there are things she needs to hear and understand if she hopes to re-establish her friendship. We agreed to meet after the holidays. That hasn’t happened yet, but I want to talk about our different values now, something the SQ staff will be joining me in over the coming days or weeks. Maybe it’ll help someone else understand better.
I begin with my own journey. I had to leave the Republican party in 2016 when it elevated Trump to the candidacy for the presidency. I’d been watching him behave corruptly for decades and take pride in it, call himself smart. I couldn’t remain a Republican when it became apparent the party was full of sycophants who’d give him little to no in-house push back. My illusion that the Republican party has a moral, or principled, core shattered long before “fiscal conservatism” supported tariffs on foreign imports. I left over moral and ethical issues. I haven’t had a political home ever since, but more importantly, because I left and let it be known why, my friendships with church members took a hit. I realized the intersection of Mormon and political thought is so tightly knotted as to be nearly impossible to untangle. After all, the Book of Mormon, the keystone of the religion, is hyper-focused on politics and humans tend to cast themselves as the good guy. I was no longer part of the good guy team.
In general, religious Republicans (who I refuse to call conservatives any longer) have been pressured by persistent messaging from the Trump camp into accepting that his opposition is the literal embodiment of evil and that they intend to destroy freedom in this country. He reinforced the good guy team/bad guy team paradigm, playing on the established identities of evangelical Christianity, a group into which, on this issue, LDS fit. It’s bizarre to me that someone’s identity as a person who is “for God” is so intense that they would give their sacred vote to a man who has lived as unprincipled and as dishonest a life as has Donald Trump. He used their identity to empower himself and, at the same time, abused the identities of people who, on ethical grounds, resisted him.
But let’s get down to it. The first value difference between the Harris voter and the Trump voter is in our relationships with truth. Don’t misunderstand. The Democrat and Republican parties both spin facts in ways favorable to their positions and obfuscate that which isn’t. Then they bark that the other is lying when it’d be more accurate and honest to state they hold differences of perspective, emphasis, and approach. A lie is a very specific thing, not a difference of perspective. A lie is an intentional deception. Donald Trump intentionally deceives. It has been demonstrated over and over, first in the court systems and then, to all of us, through the bipartisan Jan. 6th Committee Hearings, that Donald Trump fabricated the claim the 2020 election was stolen, a lie he still asserts today. This makes Donald Trump a liar. When a voter shrugs that off, or worse, when they opt to help spread that lie, that voter has a vastly different value system than I have.
The usual MAGA cry after someone calls out the election fraud lie is a doubling down on that lie. They assert that no president has been more greatly maligned than Trump and that “the deep state has it out for our tell-it-like-it-is guy!” The poor little rich boy has played the conspiracy theory game so very well that the descendents of Americans who denounced Nixon a short 50 years ago now excuse Trump. That’s not a moral upgrade.
I want to specifically address the values of LDS Trump voters. You assert (because prophets teach) that the US Constitution is a sacred document, and yet, in 2024, you voted for the man who wrote:
“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude [referring to the 2020 election] allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
To clarify, he has all the evidence before him that proves there was no “fraudulent election” in 2020. This means that, in order for him to continue to benefit from the “fraudulent election” lie, he’s willing to “terminate” the Constitution, which is exactly what he planned to do on Jan. 6, 2021. Even if you want to believe he didn’t instigate that day’s violence, you must recognize he urged Pence to “stop the steal,” through the unconstitutional act of certifying a false slate of electoral college votes instead of the genuine slate. His willingness to do that runs contrary to my values as an American but it apparently is not contrary to the values of Trump’s 2024 Republican voters. That’s a significant value difference that scares the hell out of me and compels me to distrust MAGA Americans. It’s hard to be friends with people you can’t trust.
Frankly, I can’t for the life of me comprehend why every American didn’t become a Never Trumper on Jan. 6, 2021. But I remind myself that Trump and the Republican media urged people not to listen to Liz Cheney or watch the Jan. 6 hearings, telling them it was full of lies, which was another of Trump’s lies. Trump had seen the evidence and knew it revealed him, once again, as a manipulator and scoundrel who had no interest in truth telling.
Trump voters, if you don’t know the evidence that demonstrates the 2020 election was fair, please read or listen to Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, by Liz Cheney, because, in it, the “she-devil” lays it all out plainly. Or finally watch the Jan. 6 hearings. It’s ok to change your relationship with truth, moving it from “I believe this” to “the evidence shows that.”
Oh, I know. “It’s the economy, stupid.” That’s the justification for a Trump vote. Your pocketbook, your portfolio… I’m not going to argue who’s to blame for inflation, etc., because I’m talking about value differences between Harris and Trump voters and don’t think the different economic approaches between the left and right are relevant here. But to be transparent, it’s my perspective that they both had problematic economic plans: his tariffs and her price caps would each be counterproductive and unsustainable. What’s at issue for this conversation is that Trump voters were willing to put aside the amorality of Donald Trump and his weak commitment to upholding the Constitution in order to improve their financial standing. The accusation that Republicans put their portfolios over people isn’t new, but what is very new is that Republicans now put their portfolios over the Constitution. That’s exactly what happens when a voter ignores that Trump urged his own vice president to ignore his constitutional duty to certify the genuine slate of electoral votes so that Trump could retain the power he’d legitimately lost the right to.
In other words, it’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the Constitution. Or it should’ve been. And if you helped re-elect him, you and I do not share the same respect for the U.S. Constitution.
So do Trump voters share my value system? Hell, no. If I hear one more Trump voter say they held their nose and voted for him, I promise I will say the truth back: you didn’t hold your nose. You closed your eyes and turned off both your brain and moral compass and voted for your pocketbook. Money must be your primary moral compass.
You don’t believe in American values. You believe in a morally reprehensible human being who uses people, yourself included. Some of you even pretend he is a modern Savior sent to end the separation of church and state, a concept that is constitutionally protected in the First Amendment. However, Christian Nationalism, LDS-style, is a discussion for another day.
Here’s the thing. If you voted for Trump, thinking he’ll make America great again, you’ve been duped into selling your birthright for a mess of pottage.
I can forgive that. But you also sold my birthright. You made all Americans into fools. Donald Trump takes office soon. You already know he’s the guy who lies about elections and admits he’d ignore the Constitution to advance himself. I haven’t touched his pattern of sexual abuse and misconduct, something that, on its own, should have made a vote for him impossible for any morally in tact human being. (Read Pilar’s post on this here.) And today, Trump introduced you, once again, to who he is–a power hungry imperialist willing to use both military and economic force without compulsion to annex Panama, Greenland, and Canada. If these are things you value, spare me your tears over lost friendships because you’ve risked all of us losing a lot more than just that. You’ve helped to make America the enemy of the world.
I know you’re mourning the loss of friendship, but I’m mourning too. And I should be angry enough at what you’ve done to American democracy and to undermine American moral authority to put some distance between us until you find a way to prove yourself again, until you get back on the symbolic white horse to save that which Trump hung by a thread.
Trump voters, you must hold Trump accountable from here on out instead of making his lack of character excusable. Watch him. Distrust him because that’s what he’s earned. Broaden your news media consumption. America is not at risk because it is split in its political perspective. There’s strength in that diversity and there always has been. It’s at risk because too many Americans sloughed off their value system, tricked into thinking doing so wouldn’t matter. But it matters greatly.
Mark my words. An immoral president will never lead a nation toward morality, and moral citizens don’t and won’t follow where he leads.
~Deborah~
Watch for upcoming articles from SQ writers on other ways value systems between voting blocks differ, including:
Post-Election Thoughts of an Abuse Survivor, by Pilar
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