The rift over Donald Trump's election is running deep in some families across the nation — with several changing holiday plans and other celebrations to avoid uncomfortable moments over politics.
"It's all one big giant contradiction in my eyes," Laura Smith, 30, a small-business owner in Massachusetts, told The New York Times.
Smith was bashed on Facebook by a relative for voting for Trump.
"She's saying to spread the love," she said. "But then you're throwing this feeling of hate toward me, your own family member."
Trump's victory last week is testing relationships among friends, relatives and spouses, the Times reported.
Democrats are refusing to even sit across the table from relatives who backed the president-elect.
Republicans, meanwhile, are blaming Democrats — slamming them for branding them as racists because they supported Trump.
"It felt like a rejection of everyone who looks like me," said Ruth Dorancy, 29, a naturalized American who emigrated from Ghana about a decade ago, told the Times.
A software designer in Chicago, she voted for Hillary Clinton.
"It was a message to me that: 'You are not equal in our eyes. You do not deserve a place in our country.'"
Dorancy is now planning her wedding in Italy to prevent her fiancé's grandmother and aunt from attending. They are strong Trump supporters from Florida.
"I just don't want them around me on the most important day of my life," she told the Times.
Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, said fewer such delicate conversations are happening now because American society has become more segregated — primarily by class — fostering a greater lack of understanding among different groups of people.
"If you went to Thanksgiving dinner 50 years ago, you'd be very likely to have dinner with people from a different walk of life," Putnam said. "Today, there are far fewer people who are different from us around that table."
Misty Bastian, 61, an anthropologist at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., was born in rural Tennessee. After traveling the world with the Air Force, she eventually earned a doctorate.
Those attributes that have set her apart from most of her extended family, she told the Times.
Bastian has long sensed a "parting of the political ways" from her family, she said, but her Clinton vote appeared to be "the last nail in the coffin."
A cousin recently put up a Facebook post she described to the Times as "all about Trump triumphalism.
"You're a liberal elitist, and I don't have to pretend now that I have to listen to you," Bastian described the post's message.
"I feel like I've been living with a lot of people wearing masks, who have been hiding their true selves," she said, "and now with this vote, their true selves are more apparent."
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.