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Two years later, I received a letter from Alaska bearing my mother’s distinctive handwriting. “We’ve left the farm,” she wrote. “We’re staying in an apartment outside of Fairbanks for now.”
I couldn’t have been more thrilled. She didn’t explain why they left and I didn’t ask. The story gradually emerged that the elders of the Alaska farm had used my parents for their money and for their labor. Those in charge wielded their power like tyrants and behaved as if the rules they forced on others did not apply to them. After Dad and Mom understood the mistake they’d made, they packed the Subaru with their few belongings and, with my younger siblings, left the farm for good.
Not long after that, Catherine, finally fed up with submitting to a controlling husband, filed for divorce. She left both her husband and The Move behind without looking back.
Over time, all my family members moved back to Kansas. We formed a kind of extended family, adding spouses and grandchildren along the way. We celebrated life events and holidays and mourned the death of our dad together, but a faint anxiety of unfinished business hung over all our gatherings. We never talked about what had happened to us. For my part, I believed that to be best. What would uncovering old wounds do but remind us of pain we never wanted to feel again? It was enough to know they’d left The Move behind them. However, sometime around 2010, when Mom and my younger siblings took up the same kind of right-wing politics as prescribed by Sam Fife, I worried.
Then, in 2015, as I watched Donald Trump float down the Trump Tower escalator to announce his candidacy for the U.S. presidency, I felt a stab of recognition. Under the guise of a politician with a fake tan and bad haircut was an angry man, an arrogant man, a dark and dangerous man — a man so like Sam Fife that I immediately knew I was facing the same threat I had faced as a young woman all those years ago. Then, when Mom and our three younger siblings declared their enthusiastic support for Trump, I felt overcome by the terrifying possibility that my history was repeating itself. Only this time, the entire country would be at risk.
After Trump won the Republican nomination, I knocked on doors, made phone calls, registered voters, wrote essays and posted on social media about the dangers of a Trump presidency. I did anything and everything I knew how to prevent his ascension to power.
After he won the election, I saw more and more Fife whenever Trump opened his mouth. The lying, misogyny, apocalyptic language, fear-mongering and the enthusiastic embrace of conspiracy theories all set off ancient alarms inside of me. I fell into a deep depression. For months, I lived with the same fear I did as a teen, in a panicked certainty that my life was slipping away from me. When the despair became debilitating, I sought therapy and revealed to my therapist — and later in a memoir — the full story of what happened to my family and me.
Now that Trump once again threatens to take the reins of the federal government, the possibility of living under the eye of another misogynistic authoritarian regime feels frighteningly real.
And when I imagine the freedoms Trump will endanger should he regain power, that future looks untenable.
Trump has already arranged for the overturning of Roe v. Wade by appointing a slate of radical right-wing justices to the Supreme Court. According to Project 2025, a document linked to Trump that many allege he will use as a blueprint if he wins a second term, he and his party plan to further encroach upon women’s independence by banning birth control and IVF. The 922-page document published by a conservative think tank also lays out plans to gut health care, DEI and LGBTQ rights, public education, voting rights and environmental regulations, among other unthinkable reversals.
Even more alarming, the scheme advocates for establishing a kind of state-sponsored religion to be imposed on every one of us regardless of our beliefs. As described by The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, an American civil and human rights organization, a new Republican administration would “preference an exclusionary interpretation of Christianity … stripping rights from other communities.”
I’ve seen and heard all of this before. Trump and the Christian Nationalists working to elect him espouse many of the same ideas and use the same language as The Move did. They share the same beliefs and envision the same dystopian future under an authoritarian theocratic government. That vision didn’t end well for my family — or for many others in The Move. I don’t want to see such a future for me, for my family, or for my country.
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