Some liberal parents face a new, unexpected challenge: how to talk to their children who support Donald Trump.
It is easy for Alex Behr to gush about her son, Eli, whom she describes as a generous and thoughtful college junior who had a serious skateboarding phase.
It is much harder for her to talk about his politics. Behr, 59, is a Democrat in Portland, Oregon, who voted enthusiastically for Vice-President Kamala Harris in the November election. She and her ex-husband were appalled that Eli, 20, decided to cast his first vote in a presidential election this past fall for Donald Trump.
When Eli brought a “Make America Great Again” hat home from college this year, Behr threw it into the corner of his bedroom. They argued about guns, immigration and abortion, struggling to do so without permanently damaging their relationship.
“Facts don’t matter to you,” Behr wrote in a moment of frustration during one text exchange about Trump’s legal battles. “love you. have a good day.”
A few months removed from Trump’s victory, the two have arrived at an impasse. Behr worries her son is being swayed by conservative opinions fed to him on YouTube and Instagram. Eli feels like he is simply learning to think for himself – a quality he admires in Trump.
“He’s not afraid to say what he thinks,” Eli said in an interview. “It seems like what he says is coming from him instead of coming from a big cabinet behind you, telling you what to say.”
Trump has for nearly a decade been a source of political divides within families, cleaving new fault lines along the way. In 2016, as younger voters leaned toward Hillary Clinton over Trump, it was easy to find left-leaning children loudly bemoaning the politics of their Trump-supporting parents, online and in the news.
This time around, there is a fresh wrinkle. Although young voters as a whole preferred Harris, Trump secured a second term in office with the help of an improved performance among young men. That has in some families exposed a different dynamic: liberal parents contending with their conservative sons.
In one of several articles of its kind published in 2016, The Cut interviewed Clinton’s supporters about their Trump-voting fathers. By 2024, one of the publication’s columnists was instead asking “Can Parents Prevent Their Sons From Sliding to the Right?” on behalf of progressives like herself.
Some liberal parents aren’t so sure they should try to intervene. Plenty see their sons’ embrace of Trump as an expected act of rebellion, or a choice made by an independent young adult that they should respect. For others, it has felt like a painful rejection of the values they have tried to instil in their children.
“I’ve had to do a lot of soul searching and reading about it to not feel like I’ve failed as a mum,” said Behr, who adopted Eli from China when he was 10 months old. In tearful therapy sessions, she has come to believe that pressuring her son to share her views was only making him more deeply entrenched.
Over Christmas break, the pair watched The Godfather II and hiked in Forest Park, avoiding any talk about politics. Eli said he was confident his close relationship with his mother would survive their political differences.
“I love my mum,” said Eli, who now refrains from wearing his MAGA hat around her. “I want her to stay a part of my family.”
“Who’s got a hold of my son?”
Research has typically supported that parents pass along their political loyalties to their children. When children are young, parents have more control over their political influences; as they grow closer to voting age the onslaught of messaging becomes harder to monitor.
In a hyper-digital world, parents’ influence may be waning, said Christopher Ojeda, an assistant professor of political science at University of California, Merced, and an author of two studies on party identification across generations.
Parents used to decide what news channel played on the TV and which newspaper arrived on the family’s doorstep. Children might have encountered opposing political opinions at school, but “it’s not like they had an endless supply of information about alternative ideas to what their parents were presenting them,” Ojeda said.
Today, though, social media has given young people access to a world of information about politics far beyond their parents’ visibility or control – much of it targeted towards young men.
In the months leading up to the election, the Trump campaign conducted a full-court press to appeal to this demographic, aligning Trump with a constellation of podcast hosts and YouTubers who put out irreverent entertainment while validating young men’s frustrations with the status quo. The move seems to have been broadly effective: while support for Trump was strongest among young white men, he also made inroads among young Black and Latino voters.
Before 2020, Chris and Melanie Morlan, who both lean Democratic and live in Spokane, Washington, had mostly heard their son echo political beliefs that resembled their own. He began to sound different around the time of Black Lives Matter protests in Portland and Seattle, Melanie Morlan said, which he told her had got too out of control. He began listening to YouTube channels like Better Bachelor, which disparages feminism and diversity, equity and inclusion. (Its host also cheers on Trump.)
“I was like, who’s got a hold of my son?” said Morlan, 64, a marriage and family therapist.
Morlan says her son, now a 24 year old who voted for Trump in the 2024 election, seems to have been drawn into an online sphere that affirmed his fears and vulnerabilities as he was ageing into his masculinity. As he became more immersed, she said, he began to see the Republican Party as a defender of more conventional notions of manhood. When she tried to push back, explaining how much she was pained by Trump’s treatment of women, she remembered him telling her that the President’s most inflammatory comments did not reflect who he really was.
“I always tell him, ‘I might get worried about you and I might feel sad because I don’t think you understand some things that maybe you will down the road,’” Morlan said. “‘But I’m going to love you more when you’re struggling, because it’s just politics.’”
Chris Morlan, 57, an architect, was not immediately accepting of his son’s support for Trump. “Initially, it was like, ‘Are you crazy?’” he said. But Morlan has backed off over time, conscious that trying to discredit his son could keep them from having political discussions at all.
“As soon as they’re young adults, you don’t get to tell them how to think anymore,” he said.
Some parents still worry about the kind of men they will grow up to become. Kevin Bromberg, 58, a Democrat who lives in a suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina, said he disapproved of Trump’s lack of empathy towards immigrants like his wife. The insults and shock-talk that turned Bromberg off did not seem to alienate his 22- and 20-year-old sons from a previous marriage, who both voted for Trump.
Bromberg says he is happy that they are paying attention to politics at all, and has told his sons he respects their opinions. But a part of him remains concerned that the callousness he sees in Trump and the Republican Party will find its way into his children.
“Look, I’m not worried about my kids becoming educated on the issues,” he said. “What I don’t want is for my kids to become these cruel people.”
“Nobody feels heard”
Parents who have been warned against hovering like helicopters seem to understand that micromanaging their children’s party affiliation is probably not setting them up for independent lives. Still, they didn’t necessarily consider that the children they taught to think for themselves might someday vote differently than they did.
That goes for parents in both parties. A decade ago, conservative talk show host Dennis Prager wrote in National Review about right-leaning parents gawking at their progressive children. “As the father of two sons, I readily admit that if they became leftists, while I would, of course, always love them, I would be deeply saddened,” he wrote, before concluding that young people were internalising left-wing values from “radical” universities.
Mike Rothschild, a therapist in Austin, Texas, says he more frequently hears from families whose political friction stems from a conservative older generation sparring with a more progressive younger one. By the time they reach his office, it is usually the case that “nobody feels heard and everybody feels invalidated,” he said.
Parents often feel anxious to ensure that their children, moving into adulthood, do not become destructive forces in society, Rothschild added. And young people are hard-wired to reject pressure from their parents, whether by piercing their noses or by voting for a candidate whom elder family members despise.
“The stronger our parents feel about something, the more likely we are to be like, ‘Cool, now I know where you stand and I know exactly how far away to run,’” he said.
In an article published in August in The Guardian, Sam Delaune, a special-education teacher in California, wrote that his political identity as a Democrat had been forged in opposition to that of his father, an “old-school” Reaganite. Still, Delaune was thrown when his own son joined far-right message boards as a teenager and eventually bought into Trump’s political propositions.
“I wonder now how much of Nick’s fascination with MAGA is a reaction against the way I brought him up,” Delaune wrote, using a pseudonym for his 21-year-old son.
Conservative young men are quick to object to the idea that their ideology is some neat reversal of their parents’ beliefs, or a byproduct of indoctrination by right-wing podcasts and influencers. In interviews, they describe feeling undervalued in a society with rapidly changing gender roles and concerned about a lack of economic opportunity.
Some see the Republican Party as a safe place to voice those concerns. Max Sorokin, 19, said he had become frustrated with the progressive atmosphere in the Bay Area, where he grew up, because he felt like people on the left were too quick to “cancel” anyone who did not agree with them on every issue.
His decision to align himself with Trump in the 2024 election was reinforced by what he viewed as the Democratic Party’s total lack of interest in trying to court his demographic.
“They didn’t even try to make young men sympathise with them,” he said. “They sort of ignored them.”
Max’s father, Alexei, usually identifies himself as liberal but says he has been careful not to impose any political beliefs on his son. He’s talked to Max about how some Americans are afraid their lives will be thrown into chaos because of their sexual orientation, their religion or their immigration status.
“I told my son, ‘Look, you’re privileged,’” said Sorokin, 44, who immigrated to the United States from Russia with Max in 2013. “You don’t feel fragile because you’re young and healthy and white.”
Alexei still considers himself to the left of his son, but said some of his own views had shifted, too. In particular, he feels the Democratic Party has far too little tolerance for conversation about ideas that challenge its party orthodoxy.
He began to describe what he sees as Democrats’ eagerness to “censor” opposing viewpoints, then interrupted his stream of thought. “A lot of this echoes what my son was saying,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Callie Holtermann
Photographs by: Michelle Gustafson, Kenny Holston
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