Gaylord is a member of the Living Room Conversations advisory board and executive director of HomeAhead.
A friend recently asked, “How do you do it? How do you deal with the vast political differences in your family.”
My family ranges from Trump-voting Republicans to far-left Democrats and most every position in between. How do we coexist? I’d be lying if I said it’s easy ... especially during election years and sensational news events. My politically varied family stays connected, even though the connection is sometimes tenuous, through celebration and tribulation.
When my house almost burned down in the Colorado Marshall fire almost one year ago, all of my family members reached out to offer comfort and support – whatever we needed. When one of my children suffered from a difficult illness, everyone was there, in my corner, offering love and support.
When there is a death, birth, celebration or hardship in the family we come together. We’re not always graceful in our interactions but we try. We have some simple rules about not talking about politics. Sometimes we gingerly cross that line, and sometimes we trample the line. And then we regroup and return to baseline, remembering and prioritizing our connection to one another.
At our core, we are simple beings who want love and belonging. When I am devastated by a loss I don’t care about politics – I want love and comfort. When there is something to celebrate, I want to celebrate with my family. In my world, where the rubber meets the road, there is no place for politics.
It is likely that I’ll never agree with some of my family members’ politics but I will love them and they will love me all the same.
Some of you will call me naive, irresponsible, maybe even “Pollyanna.” I’m okay with that because in my world, love wins – and so do I.
Argue, attack and avoid. What else is there?
My 18-year-old son recently told me about a conversation he had with a couple of college friends. They were discussing Covid-19, mask-wearing, and the politics involved in the pandemic. One friend expressed a very different view than the other two. Once the friend realized it was a 2-on-1 dynamic, he quickly shut down the conversation saying he didn’t want to argue.
My son asked me why it seems we have only a couple of options when disagreements arise, especially political disagreements. Why is it that the prevailing response is to argue and attack, or avoid the conversation altogether?
This launched a terrific conversation between me and my son about other options. Of course, my tenure with Living Room Conversations could not be ignored, as it is my belief that there are much better options. I encouraged my son to approach a second conversation with his friend in an LRC sort of way: with curiosity, kindness, respect and deep listening.
I reminded my son that this particular friendship has been a lifelong one, and that for him to invite his friend into a deeper discussion, the friend would need to feel safe that the friendship would not be jeopardized. I asked my son to consider this seriously, as it can test our ability to remain in friendship with one who espouses opinions that we find objectionable. Of course, the other side of the coin is that by having the conversation, my son could practice and begin to hone the skills to remain in a friendship with someone who sees things very differently.
My son decided to seek out another opportunity to have a second, deeper conversation with his friend. He reported back on his conversation. He found it interesting as he now has a better understanding of his friend’s perspective. More importantly, he exercised a muscle that is horribly atrophied in our conversations, communities and country – that of being civil and friendly in a conversation with someone who has a different perspective. I am proud of my son and I will encourage him to do more of this. It will make him a better-rounded, more intelligent, compassionate person. It will strengthen his friendships. It will allow him to begin to create and live in a world where he can coexist and even flourish, despite differences.
As for the health of the friendships after the risky conversation, they seem right on track. Recently, the three friends enjoyed a day of skiing in the Colorado mountains. Onward and upward, my son!
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.