My son was struggling – then he fell for Trump’s toxic brand of ‘masculinity’

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I didn’t get a call from my son on Father’s Day this year. Our political disagreements have made things hard.

I’m a 59-year-old progressive and a special education teacher, and I’m voting for Kamala Harris in November. Nick* is 21, and he would say that he holds traditional, conservative values – but he’s conflating those values with radical Maga ideas, which correlate the right with patriotism, manhood, intelligence, independence and honesty. I understand where my son’s vulnerabilities came from, and why this rightwing posturing was able to seep into him. I understand it, but I still regret it.

Nick’s mom and I wanted to teach our son that democracy is an active sport. You don’t just sit back and watch. We lived in Houston, in the belly of the petrochemical beast, and I remember going to a demonstration against Halliburton, the Iraq war, and Dick Cheney’s role in the company. Groups brought puppets – it was almost like street theater – and we rolled Nick along in his stroller. That was the community we were plugged into: artists, musicians, teachers, writers. That’s how Nick came up.

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We had moved to the Bay Area in 2017, after Trump won the election. Nick was 15 or 16 when he said that he liked Trump. I can understand how Trump appealed to a childish sensibility: he’s this clownish figure who does whatever he wants.

I also know that when you come of age, you want to reject your parents’ beliefs. My father was a Reagan Republican who was really old school, values wise. A lot of my political development was a rejection of his values, so I wonder now how much of Nick’s fascination with Maga is a reaction against the way I brought him up.

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I’ve never been a macho kind of man. To me, our biggest responsibility as humans is to look after each other. Men have been given places of privilege in society, so when people talk about being a man, to me that means: what do you use your privilege for? I worked at a pirate radio station in Houston, and we helped with emergency efforts during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. For me, manhood is all about using your energy to make life better for the person next to you.

But I think that Trump appeals to a perceived loss of masculine power: by his logic, because we’re treating LGBTQ+ people like humans, some men feel a loss over that, as their outrageous privilege has diminished somewhat, at least on surface level. Nick was vulnerable to that because he was becoming a man. I think he also naively thought, well, Trump’s a powerful person running for president; he can’t just get up there and spew bullshite.

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My wife and I divorced in 2020, and Nick lived with me for six months in California after that, but he later went back to live with her in Houston, so I saw and heard less from him. I no longer have the same influence over him. I can’t be there to talk about the human cost of Trump’s policies, which might change his mind.

Nick started hanging out with guys in Houston who shared his beliefs or had even more radical ones. They started talking about what makes a man. They said men have to be strong, so Nick bought a bike and rides it around every day. That’s a healthy habit. But they also say things like “men smoke”, so now he does that too.

They introduced Nick to guns and started taking him to the shooting range. On his 21st birthday, his mother and I sent him money, thinking he’d spend it on a computer or something, but he went out and bought a gun. He didn’t tell either of us, because he knows how we feel about them.

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