How Do I Explain Trump’s Rise to My Children?

This is the first election my daughter Sally has paid attention to, and she’s horrified. Completely horrified. She has Hispanic friends at school, and while she may be too young to grasp all of the ideas in play, she’s outraged by Trump’s rhetoric and campaign promises on immigration primarily. She’s terrified her friends will be deported, but mostly she’s angry, and she laments the fact that she can’t vote. For my part, I’ve lost track of how many times NPR has warned me to cover my child’s ears or turn down the volume before playing a clip or quoting a Republican candidate. This election has left me, as a parent, feeling powerless and grasping for straws.

How do I explain this to my daughter? This election will be her first political memory, and will set the foundation for how she understands and views future elections. We may look at the GOP race this year as some sort of weird aberration where all the rules are being broken, but for children like my daughter, who are paying attention to politics for the first time, it is all they know. Ads like this and candidates one-upping each other to see how anti-immigrant they are is all she knows.

And that’s not even a Trump ad. In what world will my daughter grow up?

I’m not generally one to foretell doom and gloom hinging on any one election. I’ve watched the Republicans do that too often to take it seriously. I’m also not completely sure where Trump stands on social issues, though he’s obviously been tacking to the right in his campaign. I’ve always been far more worried about Cruz when it comes to women’s rights or LGBTQ rights than I am about Trump, but this is not to say that I’m not worried—I am. On many issues Trump is a wild card, an unknown—which is bad enough—but on some he is most definitely not. His statements about immigration, building a wall, rolling back trade deals, and committing war crimes scare me.

And then there’s the question of what judges he would appoint.

This fall, the United States will have a choice. American voters will have, on the one hand, a candidate who has promised to deport 11 million Americans, bar Muslims from immigrating to the U.S., build a 30-ft wall on our southern border, and target terrorists’ families—a candidate who downplays the problem of police brutality and excuses or defends violence against protesters—on the one hand, and on the other hand, a candidate who supports minority rights, embraces political dissent, praises the hard work of immigrants, extends a hand to refugees, and looks forward to a better tomorrow rather than backward to how things used to be.

Can we talk for a moment about everything that is wrong with Trump’s campaign slogan? Make America Great Again. Well you know what? The world of the past was not great for me, as a woman. It was not great for African Americans. It was not great for Latinos. It was not great for gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender individuals. It was not great for children, or for those with disabilities. It’s like we’ve collectively forgotten what we did to the Native Americans, or to Japanese Americans during WWII. What does it mean for America to be great, exactly?

I don’t have a crystal ball and I can’t see the future. The polls suggest that either Bernie or Hillary would trounce Trump in the fall. I’d like to believe that, but the general rules of politics seem to have been suspended this year.

How will I explain things to my daughter if Trump wins? What would that reveal about where we are as a country and who we are as a people? Even his candidacy itself, and his position as presumptive Republican nominee, even that is hard enough to explain. I mean yes, in many ways Trump is simply the end result of decades of racist dog whistling, but I had thought we as a country had at least moved beyond the point where we would say the things he does out loud. And then there is the bullying, the way he treats protestors, the way he talks about women.

Several weeks ago Sally came upon a flier for an anti-Trump rally and asked to attend. She was enthralled with the idea of standing up and doing something. We couldn’t make it work, in terms of location and time, but the general election is still six months away and there will be other rallies. I’ve written before that parents should be careful not to push their children into the world of politics as a pawn of sorts, or as a reluctant clone, but I also don’t believe parents should keep their children out of politics if they’re genuinely inclined to be involved. Sally has a stake in the future of the country she’s growing up in, and I’m not holding her back.

To be perfectly honest, I’m somewhat ashamed. I’m ashamed that the grownups of this country have let things come to here, to a place where my child has to worry that her friends will be disappeared. How much harder must it be for Latino parents, or Muslim parents, having to explain Trump’s rise to their children? Perhaps an anti-Trump landslide will make it clear that we as a nation are not this hate, but that’s something I don’t feel I can count on, and that leaves me at a loss.