Losing a Parent to Trumpism: Ideological Capture and Ambiguous Loss

 

 

To lose a parent to Trumpism is not simply a political disagreement. It is the slow experience of estrangement within intimacy—the unsettling discovery that one’s mother or father has been radicalised, captured, and reconstituted by ideological forces. The body remains, but the relationship is hollowed out. What was once a space of care and reciprocity becomes a site of confrontation, where the child is cast not as kin but as adversary.

 

A Parent’s Message as Symptom

One WhatsApp message encapsulates this process of capture:

“This nonsense is shallow jealousy spoken by weak minded people who only know vocabulary of hate!
Reza Pahlavi is great in every way, he is accepted and supported by world leaders. He is too good and too soft for those Iranian assholes who are pro regime!
May the Almighty protect him so Iran can be free again!
For me and a majority of Iranians and also westerners this stands: if we want a peaceful ✌ world, our leaders will be: Trump, Netanyahu and Reza Pahlavi 💚🤍❤
We shall see 🤞
Long live Israel and Iran!”
That’s my view whether you like it or not and nobody can change that!” (10/11/2024)

 

At one level, this is a political declaration. But at another, it is the announcement of a relational rupture. “Whether you like it or not” marks the foreclosure of dialogue; affection and mutuality are subordinated to an absolutist creed. The parent no longer speaks as a parent but as a partisan subject whose loyalty belongs to distant leaders rather than to the intimacy of family.

 

The Propaganda Ecosystem

The rhetoric here reflects what communication scholars call propaganda loops: discourses that isolate adherents from external critique by redefining disagreement as hatred or weakness (Herman & Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, 1988). Each line in the message bears hallmarks of this process:

• Othering and contempt: opponents are “weak minded,” “haters,” “assholes.” This mirrors what Stanley (2018, How Fascism Works) identifies as the fascist rhetorical tactic of constructing an enemy whose dehumanization justifies aggression and even death.
• Messianic leadership: the elevation of Trump, Netanyahu, and Pahlavi into guarantors of peace illustrates what Eco (1995, Ur-Fascism) called “the cult of action and authority.” Leaders are imagined as transcendent figures, not flawed political actors.
• Religious sanction: the appeal to “the Almighty” imbues the ideology with sacred inevitability, aligning political figures with divine will. This is consistent with what Arlie Hochschild (2016, Strangers in Their Own Land) found in her ethnography of the American Right: political choices framed as moral and even spiritual obligations.
• Non-negotiability: the insistence that “nobody can change that” reflects what Festinger (1957, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance) observed: once a belief is deeply fused with identity, contradictory evidence is reinterpreted or dismissed rather than accepted.

 

What results is a worldview closed against contestation—a hardened ideological identity.

 

Ambiguous Loss and Familial Estrangement

For the child, receiving such a message is not merely an encounter with political difference. It is what Pauline Boss (1999, Ambiguous Loss) defines as the experience of mourning someone who is still alive. The parent is there in body but absent in presence; reachable by phone yet unreachable in spirit.

This “ambiguous loss” has unique features:

• Double grief: mourning both the parent and the bond itself.
• Unresolvable mourning: unlike death, there is no closure. The person may return, but often does not.
• Role inversion: the child becomes the one forced to set boundaries, protect themselves, and sometimes even parent the parent.

The estrangement is compounded when siblings or relatives reinforce the ideological capture, transforming family into an amplifier rather than a counterweight. Instead of being sites of solidarity, kinship networks can become echo chambers that deepen the rupture.

 

The Global Dimension of Trumpism

Though labeled “Trumpism,” the phenomenon is transnational. As Nadesan (2020, Fascism, Trumpism and the Future of Democracy) has shown, authoritarian populism easily hybridizes with local grievances and diasporic longings. The figures named in the message—Trump, Netanyahu, Pahlavi—reveal how disparate contexts can be fused into a single myth of strongman salvation.

This is especially potent in diasporic communities, where dislocation, nostalgia, and ressentiment create fertile ground for demagogic promises. The longing for homeland or “lost greatness” makes parents susceptible to ideological narratives that promise restoration through charismatic leaders.

 

Naming the Loss

The greatest wound is not the ideology itself but the foreclosure of relationship. When a parent declares, “whether you like it or not and nobody can change that,” the child is cast outside the circle of care. The parent’s allegiance is no longer to family but to ideology.

To name this as loss is essential. It resists the temptation to downplay or normalize the fracture. It also prevents the child from internalizing guilt or responsibility for “not trying hard enough.” The truth is harsher: propaganda has replaced intimacy.

 

Mourning as Resistance

Losing a parent to Trumpism is not just a private grief but a political catastrophe, akin to what awake Germans of the 1930s felt watching family slip into Nazism, or what Muslims more recently endured as loved ones were consumed by ISIS and other extremist currents. It reveals how authoritarian movements hollow out family bonds, replacing love with loyalty to abstract (often violent dystopian) creeds and distant leaders. The parent’s WhatsApp message is not merely personal opinion — it is the symptom of an ideological colonization that reconfigures intimacy into confrontation.

        Yet in the act of mourning, there is resistance. To insist on grieving truthfully, without euphemism or denial, is itself a rebellion against the machinery of propaganda. Authoritarian movements thrive by demanding silence or complicity; they rewrite family histories, erase nuance, and train their adherents to scorn the language of love as weakness. Mourning reopens that space. It asserts that love existed before ideology, that tenderness and memory precede the slogans now shouted in their place. It refuses the lie that people are reducible to their political catechisms.

By naming the loss, the child not only preserves the past but also asserts a different future: one where memory outlasts manipulation, and where the truth of relationship remains beyond the reach of demagogues. Grief becomes a moral compass. In the refusal to normalize estrangement, in the stubborn insistence that something sacred has been stolen, the child claims a clarity that ideology cannot corrupt. This clarity is not naïve hope that the parent will return unchanged, but the recognition that love, once real, leaves an indelible imprint. And even if propaganda colonizes the living, it cannot annul what was once shared. To remember that is to resist.

 

They’re here in body, yet far away,
A parent lost to the slogans they say!

No room for love, just leaders adored,
Trump, strongmen, false gods they’ve stored!

 

The voice once warm now echoes in hate,
Propaganda’s script decides their fate!

Kinship fractured, the bond undone,
Ambiguous grief for the missing one!

 

We mourn what’s gone though the flesh remains,
A family tied in invisible chains!

But naming the loss is a weapon of light,
Preserving the truth against endless night!

 

For love once lived, and still it will stay,
Though ideology steals and memory frays!

Mourning is courage, resistance, and grace—
To guard what propaganda cannot efface!

 

References

• Boss, Pauline. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Eco, Umberto. Ur-Fascism. New York Review of Books, 1995.
• Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press, 1957.
• Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent. Pantheon Books, 1988.
• Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. The New Press, 2016.
• Nadesan, Majia Holmer. Fascism, Trumpism and the Future of Democracy. Routledge, 2020.
• Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works. Random House, 2018.
• Reddit: Losing my parents to trump/far right ideology https://www.reddit.com/r/exchristian/comments/1jjpv9i/losing_my_parents_to_trumpfar_right_ideology/ (retrieved 25 August 2025).