Can't we all just get along?A road trip with my Trump-loving cousin

Somewhere around Fort Worth, we have our first argument in the car. Frances says something crude about immigrants, which I let pass, then she brings up Franklin Roosevelt. This is a game we play. I tell her my favorite president was FDR, then she says something like, “he was OK, except for all the handouts he gave.”

Which is when I remind her of 1936. After her father died and her mother disappeared, FDR’s relief checks kept her and her siblings alive.

“Yeah,” she says, “but we were just kids.”

“And welfare still helps kids today, along with single women like your mother.”

“But it’s different now,” she says. “People just don’t wanna work.”

And when I remind her again that a majority of welfare recipients are employed, she waves me off.

“My favorite president was Ike,” she says, which I know. Frances is quick to praise men she sees as having backbone – her father, Ike, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump – and deplores whiners and eggheads. That morning, she couldn’t find Fox News in her hotel room and had to settle for “some puny guy” on another network. I’m shocked when she tells me Barack Obama was “cute”.

“Hated him as president, but I could watch him run up and down those stairs all day long,” she says. “But Lincoln – boy, I really hate him.”

I’d never heard this before. I nearly swerve out of my lane. “Lincoln? Who hates Abraham Lincoln?”

“He stood on that platform and watched those boys kill each other,” she says. She’s referring to the Battle of Fort Stevens in July 1864. Confederate troops came within striking distance of the Capitol. Lincoln watched from an earthen parapet and was nearly shot by a rebel sniper. I had to look it up.

“But Lincoln ended slavery,” I say. “Can we agree that slavery was bad?”

“That’s not why they were fighting, and you know it,” she says.

I turn on some music and try to make time.

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It started as a joke.

My cousin Frances, who’s 93, loves Donald Trump. She’s adored him ever since the beginning, from the fateful escalator ride at Trump Tower to Billy Bush and beyond. The morning after he won, when I was hungover and she called to gloat, we had some words and didn’t talk for weeks. Afterwards we vowed never to let politics get in the way of our friendship.

Then a few months ago, after the umpteenth controversy to come out of the White House, I asked her what she thought of Trump now.

“What do I think?” she said. “I like him even more. In fact, I’d drive clear to Washington just to shake his hand.”

“Then I’ll drive you myself,” I said, kidding. “We’ll go together.”

But the joke took on a life of its own until it was no longer a joke, and here we are, driving 2,000 miles to try to meet the man. I assure myself that he’s a germaphobe and won’t shake my hand anyway.

We began our journey from Big Spring, Texas, where Frances and I were raised 50 years apart. I met her only three years ago while researching my latest book, The Kings of Big Spring, about my family’s troubled history there.

She was living in Scottsdale, Arizona, unbeknownst to us. Her father Bud had died of dust pneumonia during the Depression. Her mother then suffered a mental breakdown and abandoned them, leaving Frances to care for her brothers and sister. Throughout the reporting we became close, even after she discovered I was “one of them”, meaning a Democrat. Most of our phone conversations took place over a rumbling of Fox News.

I know the real work of this road trip lies in the journey itself. Along the way I’ve arranged to meet with people who challenge us ideologically, who represent our frustrations and fears. In our siloes of social media and cable news, we scream and rant about these enemies yet rarely ever talk to them. And this lost civil discourse only benefits those in power.

So what happens when we engage our enemies face to face? If exposure is the antiseptic to bigotry, I want to give our stereotypes and preconceptions a proper airing.

I know this trip with Frances won’t be one long kumbaya. As the lone Democrat in a family of Christian conservatives, I’ve long grown accustomed to defending my beliefs.

Just the previous night in Big Spring, my uncle and I started discussing sanctuary cities. Within seconds, our blood pressure had spiked and voices were raised. “I can’t talk politics with you!” he said and walked out of the room. Later it turned out we had a lot in common about immigration. We’d just started the conversation shouting.

My plan is to get a blessing from different clergy along the way. And since we’re in the most heavily evangelical state in America, I look up Pastor Mark Fuller at Abundant Life church. He greets us in his office, which is decorated with American flags and a framed copy of the Declaration of Independence.

I like the pastor. I grew up in evangelical and Pentecostal churches, so I find him warmly familiar. Over coffee I tell him what Frances and I are doing, how we’re trying to address the division in our country. He says that most of his congregation supports Trump, but during the previous administration, a few Obama supporters got angry when others insulted the president and Fuller had to intervene.

“We have to be more mature as Christians whether we agree or disagree with the current administration,” he says. He quotes 1 Peter 2:17, which ends with, “Fear God. Honor the emperor.” It’s a quote I’ve been hearing a lot lately, mainly from white evangelicals when challenged about morally supporting this president.

“Well, we certainly applied that scripture when Obama was president,” he tells me. “Here was a guy who was completely away from Christian ideology. Pro-abortion. Of course, pro-homosexual, pro-LGBT. So that scripture came to my attention. We have to honor the emperor and pray for them.”

“That’s hard,” I say, searching my brain for counter scripture, which never comes when I need it.

“It sure was!” Frances pipes in. “But you deal with it and don’t riot in the street! You go to the polls and hope for the best.”

I share with him my frustration about the evangelical embrace of Trump, how I find it hypocritical and discrediting, and how as a fellow Christian, it’s impossible to honor a man whose actions and behavior are a direct affront to the gospel of Jesus. I tell him about my church in Austin where many in the congregation are gay and transgender, having come there after feeling ostracized in mainline churches.

These are my friends, I tell him. Our children play together. The religious right’s well-tailored message that Christians can’t be progressive or gay or Democrat is one I find maddening and offensive.

The pastor politely waits for me to finish, then says, “When you say welcoming LGBT, we do welcome them as well. We’ve had members who are inclined to that persuasion. And we welcome them with open arms. Just as anyone else involved in any other sin, we don’t condemn them.”

I was waiting for the “greater sinner” response, the belief that gay people are second-class citizens of the Kingdom, and when it comes my face flushes with rage. I want to grab him by the collar and shout God made them this way don’t you people get it? But I’m stopped by the very point he was trying to make. That love is patient. Love is not easily provoked. For lack of a better argument, God and the pastor had the upper hand.

“There are differences in feelings of what is sin and what is not sin,” he says, sensing my anger.

“That is indeed our difference, pastor,” I say.

We talk some more and finish our coffee, then we get up to leave. But before we go, I ask the pastor if he’ll bless our journey. We form a circle in his office, hold hands, and pray.

Back on the highway, Frances tells me to slow down. I’m going over 80. I’m still fuming, upset that I didn’t say more, didn’t know how to express it.

“I don’t know why you’re so mad,” she says. “He’s just telling you what’s in the Bible.”

“Maybe I don’t believe everything in the Bible.”

Her eyes get wide. “The devil’s working on you, kiddo.”

“I just expect more from Christians, but then I have to understand what stripe of Christian I’m talking to.”

“You sound like you think you’re better than everybody else.”

“I don’t, we just disagree on fundamental things.”

“You’re rebelling against everything I was taught. The stuff that I was taught you look down on it.”

“I don’t look down on what you believe.”

“These are good people,” she says. “I just wish we’d had this conversation before we started out.”

After that, Frances doesn’t talk to me for three hours. I put on more music, trying to coax her out. Then, as we enter the hills of western Missouri, she tells me something else I’d never heard. That after divorcing her husband Tommy, who cheated on her and sometimes hit her, she started dating a really nice guy and they became close. “But the next thing you know he’s telling me he’s a cross-dresser,” she says. “And he married a lesbian. He’s a girl now. So don’t tell me about lesbians and homosexuals. I know about homosexuals.”

I don’t say anything.

“It just shocked me is all,” she says. “I don’t know what to think when people start talking about that stuff.”

“I understand,” I say.

She stares out the window at the rows of dogwood in bloom, then says. “I’ve never been on anything like this before.”

“Me either,” I tell her. “It’s a new experience for us both.”

By the time we reach St Louis, we’re exhausted. At the hotel, I take her up to her room and perform what will become our bedtime ritual. I place her suitcase on the luggage rack, order room service, then flip through the channels until I find Fox News. And with that, I bid her goodnight.

If there was ever a polarizing force for the current divide, it’s the Black Lives Matter movement. To the conservative right, the “BLMs”, as Frances calls them, are the new Black Panthers, the cop-hating boogeymen of failed liberal cities driven by anti-white rage. If Donald Trump is what’s saving America, the BLMs and other ingrates who march in the streets are what’s destroying it.

So I thought it was only appropriate that we visit Ferguson, where the Black Lives Matter movement began.

A couple of weeks earlier, I’d sent a Facebook message to Mike Brown Sr, whose son Michael, 18, was killed by police in August 2014, sparking a national outrage over violent policing in black communities. I told Mike about Frances and her love for Trump, then asked if he’d like to meet her. Since it usually falls on black activists to reach out and be understood, he was intrigued. He agreed to join us for lunch.

We meet at Cathy’s Kitchen, a popular soul food place located on South Florissant, two miles from where his son’s body lay face down in the street for four hours. The riots and protests that ensued lasted for months.

Mike is tall and beefy and still wears his signature long beard. He looks around the room before walking over, uneasy, and I realize he’s more nervous than Frances. He brings his wife Cal, whom he married two months before his son’s death. The two of them now run the Michael Brown Chosen for Change Foundation, which works with youth and advocates for better policing. Just the day before, as Frances and I were discussing what had happened in Ferguson, she uttered something I found painfully old-fashioned: “Used to be,” she said, “black policemen worked their own neighborhoods and people were happy.”

After introductions, I ask Mike about the foundation. He says they’ve been working on building bridges with the police, gaining back the trust, and vice versa. “They need to put police who live in these communities back out to police them,” Mike says.

Frances puffs her chest. “I like this guy.”

Cal looks at Frances. “Can I ask you a question? What do you like about Trump?”

“I think he’s good for the country.”

“Is it the business aspect of it?” Mike asks. “Because he’s a good businessman, I agree with that. What is it?”

“I think he just loves the people.”

Mike and Cal look at each other. “Everybody have their own opinion,” Mike says. “You entitled to that.”

“I’m just sorry to hear about your son,” Frances tells him.

“Yeah. I’m still recovering from that.”

“You’re coping,” Cal says. “You never recover.”

Cal and I volunteer to go fetch drinks for everyone. As we walk away, I suddenly worry about leaving Mike and Frances alone. My recorder catches what follows:

Long silence, then Frances says, “I like sun tea.”

“What’s that?” Mike asks.

“You put the tea out in the yard and it makes it real good.”

“Oh yeah? I’ll tell my wife about that. She makes a lot of lemonade from scratch. I should’ve brought you some.”

Over catfish and shrimp and grits, we talk about “Mike-Mike” (as Michael Jr was called) and the day he was killed, how Mike had just gotten off work and Cal was folding laundry when someone burst open the door shouting their son was dead on Canfield Drive; about the riots that followed, the trauma and depression, and the power of good therapy. And we discussed their strange new role as grief ambassadors of black sons killed by police. Over the past four years they’ve attended numerous funerals and memorials across the country, mostly of kids who didn’t get the same press coverage as Mike-Mike. “When these people memorialize their children year after year, it’s like sitting in the funeral all over again,” Cal says. “We had to take a break. There’s only so much my heart can take.”

I ask what I think is the obvious question, about their role in Black Lives Matter and what it means to see the movement take on such force. They raise their eyebrows.

“We do not like them people,” Cal says.

“I don’t deal with them,” says Mike.

“They hijacked the movement and now make millions of dollars off people’s pain,” says Cal. “It’s not like they take any of that money and put it into foundations and fight for justice. They just do their own thing.”

Mike says he’s met BLM representatives from other states who were legitimate. “But the ones who kicked this off here? Nah.”

And thus, Mike Brown and Frances now have two things in common.

Later, when I ask the waitress for the check, she tells me another customer already paid it. “We get that a lot,” Mike says. He asks if we have time to see something before we go. In the car, we follow him and Cal down the street to a drab, red-brick restaurant called New Chinese Gourmet. “This is where we had our last real conversation before he died,” Mike says. He points through the window to a round table where all the family had gathered: himself, Mike-Mike, Cal and Mike-Mike’s sisters. Although it was summer, it was the day Mike-Mike finally completed his credits and graduated from high school. His mood was buoyant, soaring.

“He told us one day he was gonna change the world,” Mike recalls, smiling. “‘One day everyone gonna know my name!’ Said he was gonna be a big rapper and artist, bigger than Tupac, Lil Wayne and Biggie. He never knew he was gonna change the world in a different type of way.”

“Eight days later he lost his life,” Cal says. “Two days before he was supposed to walk into a college classroom. This is the first time we’ve been back here since that day. First time we ever even talked about it.”

Frances gives them both hugs and we say our goodbyes. “God sees us all the same,” she says, once we’re alone and driving. “Nobody deserves to lose their child.”

After leaving the Browns we cross the Mississippi and arrive in Alton, Illinois. We’re going to Eagle Forum, the rightwing interest group started by the late conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly.

It was Schlafly’s 1964 book, A Choice Not an Echo, that galvanized Frances and millions of others behind Senator Barry Goldwater for president. Although Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson, he became the torch bearer for the swelling conservative movement that culminated with Reagan’s victory in 1980. Frances worked for Goldwater in his Phoenix Senate office and later helped elect conservative candidates nationwide. In the late 1960s she and Schlafly became friends, and later Frances helped her rally housewives to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment.

Frances has often told me she hates women. “I don’t trust them,” she says. “And I sure wouldn’t vote for one for president.”

She loves talking about the 1974 movie Planet Earth, where a man awakes to find himself in the 22nd century when women rule the world and men are slaves. “It scared the fire out of me!” she says. I assume her distrust stems from issues with her own mother who abandoned her, but I’m no psychologist. I just remind myself that she grew up hard, and after her divorce, she worked a series of low-paying jobs for years to raise four girls on her own. According to her, feminists are whiners. And the #MeToo movement? Just a new wave of crybabies who should’ve known better.

Eagle Forum is now chaired by Schlafly’s youngest daughter, Anne, who greets us at their downtown office. She’s polite with a touch of midwestern iciness. She and Frances reminisce a while about her mother, then I ask Anne what Phyllis Schlafly would say about #MeToo.

“One of my mother’s famous quotes is ‘Sexual harassment is not a problem for a virtuous woman,’” Anne says. “That may sound old-fashioned, but if you say, ‘Sexual harassment is not a problem for a strong woman,’ replace virtuous with strong, then you know where she is coming from, because harassers always prey upon the weak. Strong women know how to deal with slobs who might do untoward things. And strong women would never participate in sexual dalliances in the workplace where this stuff originates.”

“But strong women are being harassed,” I say.

“There are crimes. But a lot of what I’ve seen with the #MeToo movement is a lot of whining. It’s not a crime to ask someone out on a date. If you whine about it, you’re just a whiner.”

“But it is empowering for a lot of women …”

“You’re not understanding what feminism is. Feminism is not about empowering. It is about celebrating victims and celebrating victimhood. If you wanted to celebrate powerful women, you would celebrate women like Phyllis Schlafly who succeeded without whining.”

She looks at Frances. “Poor Bryan needs to get his head straightened out.”

“Sure does.”

She then brings up her mother’s rigid Catholicism, which was famous. “Faith can give you enormous comfort and strength because you know the truth,” she says. In the next breath, she tells me she wants to abolish the Department of Education.

“But I would worry about poor states,” I say, still thinking about faith and its social imperatives.

“You don’t have to worry about other people’s families,” she tells me.

I can feel the frustration rising up, but I quell the urge to shout or talk over her. I remember what the pastor in Oklahoma had said about love being patient and kind. How listening is hard.

Outside a cold front is blowing in from the east and bringing snow. Frances zips up her jacket – a pink Ivanka Trump – and we head off to Ohio.

If there’s ever a group that understands its need to reach out – to be seen as fully human by the other side – it’s American Muslims. A few weeks earlier, I’d contacted Imran Malik, outreach coordinator at the Noor Islamic Cultural Center outside of Columbus and told him about our journey. Since interfaith relations is one of Noor’s biggest priorities, he’d arranged for us a welcoming party.

With more than 5,000 members, Noor is one of the biggest mosques in the United States. Thinking Frances would balk at the idea of a visit, I didn’t tell her until we were deep into Oklahoma and it was too late for her to bail. Her reaction surprised me. “I’ll talk to anyone,” she said, crossing her arms. She was out to prove me wrong.

Although it was built in the immediate wake of the September 11 attacks, the mosque started receiving threats in 2014. The phone calls, hate mail and protest alerts continued well into Trump’s candidacy. Now there’s armed security for Friday prayers and the doors are kept locked throughout the day.

In a large conference room past the ornate prayer hall we’re greeted by a group of men, women and children. The women wear brightly colored headscarves, while one man wears a long robe and a skullcap. Frances is sporting her pink Ivanka.

Sitting in a circle, Frances and I explain what we’re doing. Then each person says their name, their country of origin – Pakistan, Gambia, Syria – and what message they’d like to send to the president.

Halfway through, the man in the skullcap asks Frances to explain her support. “How did you choose Trump?” he asks, but what he’s really asking, I sense, and what each person in this room is wondering, is how on earth can you love a man who referred to Syrian refugees as snakes, talked about shutting down mosques, pushed bogus polls saying a quarter of Muslim Americans wanted jihad, riled up crowds with fictional stories about bullets dipped in pig blood, a man who routinely negates the American experience of millions of its citizens?

Surrounded, and without breaking a sweat, Frances launches into her defense. “I don’t know how I wouldn’t choose him,” she says. “I think he loves the people. I think he took this on because he loves the people and wants to get the country straightened out, to bring back jobs. He’s very intelligent, I’ve read all of his books …”

The group just stares at her as she talks, and in that moment, I find myself feeling oddly proud of her, not because of her answers, but because of her steel nerve. At 93, she doesn’t give a flip.

After that, I expect the gloves to come off, especially after a teacher named Lila tells Frances she’s never felt more disenfranchised in her own country, and how she feels like Trump could care less when it comes to making minorities feel welcome.

Frances tells her, “Well, he’s not giving a pity party.”

But the gloves don’t come off. In fact, our Muslim hosts do the opposite. They listen, and then they embrace her. One woman points out how they both value faith and family. Another complements Frances’s complexion. After we finish, they surround Frances for hugs and photos, and then we all hold hands in a circle and pray. When I finally manage to pull her out of there, she’s holding a gift box of assorted baklava.

Weeks later, back home, I’ll read a story from 2015 about how the same congregation responded to an anti-Islam protester. Instead of ignoring the woman, the members of Noor came outside and greeted her one after another, whittled her down with humor and reason, and took the air out of the monster. Finally, one woman simply walked up and wrapped her in a hug. “I felt her body go from tense to soft,” the woman wrote on Facebook, “and I asked her to please come inside with me.” Which she did.

That night as I help Frances settle in to her room, she tells me what a wonderful time she had. “Weren’t they the nicest people?” she says. “I made so many new friends.” I agree that it was wonderful, then leave her to watch Fox News. We’re not changing the world here, I think, but the next time Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham disparages one of her new friends, I hope she’ll remember the baklava.

I started reporting here in early 2009, shortly after the shipping giant DHL shuttered its North American hub and shed 10,000 jobs, leaving the community reeling. One of the first people I met was Mike O’Machearley, who’d been a bus driver out at the facility. Mike had taken the job shortly after his son Steven was killed in Iraq when his helicopter was shot down over Falluja. The driving, seeing different faces, helped to pull Mike out of his depression.

After getting laid off at DHL, Mike turned a hobby of making custom knives into a career. His shop is a little wooden shed out in his backyard, where he greets Frances and me wearing a Trump mask. I have a feeling what we’re in for.

Sensing an ally in Frances, Mike launches in about the border wall.

“I say build it!”

“Darn right,” Frances says.

I can tell Frances is having fun. My relationship with Mike is a bit like our own. We’ll joust a while over politics, then move on to topics we have in common – barbecue, hunting, or heavy metal bands. But there have been times I’ve left Mike’s shop thinking I’ll never return, after he said something I found crude or racially insensitive.

Sometimes I think he just revels in pushing my buttons – like now, when he and Frances start on the topic that sits at the very heart of the divide.

“You know, I should be able to wear a shirt that says ‘Straight, White and Proud’,” Mike announces, “but I can’t.”

“You can,” I say.

“Yeah, and I’d get shot. But a black man can wear a shirt that says, ‘Black Pride’. It should all be OK. We should all be equal. Gays and lesbians want to be treated equally. Well, equal means being treated the same, not getting more than us.”

He tells us how they pulled their grandson from public school after he repeatedly encountered gay classmates kissing in public. “When we complained,” Mike says, “the principal said I can stop a girl and a boy, but you can’t stop two boys or two girls.” His son is now enrolled in a local Christian school.

“Why does that bother you?” I ask.

“Look, you can live the way you want but don’t come at me,” he says.

“But how does that affect you?” I say.

“It doesn’t. But don’t force me to put my children in Christian school because it’s getting so bad.”

“So, it’s just uncomfortable to see?”

“It’s just not equal,” he says.

After some additional comments about transgender people and restrooms, I finally ask Mike to come to church with me the next time he’s in Austin. Come meet some of my gay and trans Christian friends, I say. The invitation surprises him, because now we’re on the same level again. And since I’ve been to church with his family a couple times, he smiles and agrees. We move on to something else.

People will ask why I kept returning to Mike’s and why he continued to be my friend, and this journey has prompted me to ask myself the same thing. Like the pastor, I find Mike warmly familiar. I also understand that he, along with Frances and others in our family, feel like they’re being shunned and displaced in our culture, that the system – which, by the way, has been rigged against minorities for generations – is finally closing in on people like them: the straight, white and proud. And so they build higher walls, where inside, all they hear is each other.

Ever since that afternoon, I’ve questioned my response to Mike. Should I have skewered him as a racist and a homophobe, torched the bridge and walked away like so many others are doing? Was my strategy of “listening” not enough? I ask because these encounters along the road have left me in a dark new place of my own conscience, where the answers are buried deep, too close for comfort, and will require some pain.

Whether it was right or wrong, I’ll tell you what I did, this person with his own walls to bear: I wrapped Mike in a hug and told him I loved him. In that moment, it was all I knew how to do. I kept the bridge open for empathy and grace, because if I didn’t, who would?

By the time we arrive in Charleston, it’s well past dark. Frances is sick, having come down with a cold, and is flagging. But I’ve heard there’s a group of high school kids from rural West Virginia headed to DC for the March for Our Lives.

I know how Frances feels about protesters, but I’m curious to meet country people who are willing to march against guns.

“They probably grew up hunting,” I tell her, assuming they were like us.

Upon arriving, we discover that most of the students are black. I sense Frances deflate. Another group of haters, she’s probably thinking. Simply getting her in the door had been hard enough.

The kids are from Logan, about 60 miles south. We form a circle and they start telling us how drugs have taken over their town, how it’s hard to find a good job and that people are suffering. Most of them come from low-income families. Someone had started a GoFundMe campaign to pay for their trip to Washington.

Like most American kids, they’re terrified by the school shootings. And they’re afraid of teachers carrying guns, because in their school, students often overrun the faculty. I then ask if they have a message for the president. If I were poor and black and stuck in Logan, I imagine I’d have plenty of angry words for Donald Trump. But that’s just me projecting. These kids show way more compassion. They actually want Trump to succeed.

“Mr Trump, we’re your future,” says Kiana Minter, 17. “Don’t you want to be proud of us? You can teach us. Watch what we’re doing. If we’re messing up, just tell us. We’re not here to make trouble.”

“Try to be the best,” says Tiana Sherman, 16. “Strive to be better than the rest of the presidents.”

At every stop, people surprise us. Frances lights up in their presence. She and the girls exchange phone numbers and pose for selfies. “Never in a million years would I have met those people,” she says.

The next morning, driving through a blizzard, we pull into a gas station on the way to Charlottesville. Standing in line is a man openly carrying a pistol. We start to talk. His name is Mike Welch, a former soldier who served in Iraq. On his phone he shows us video of guys battling door to door in Sadr City. “That’s my unit,” he says.

We ask Welch what he thinks about the march in Washington, which is happening as we speak – 500,000 people advocating for gun reform. He answers by lifting his shirt to better display his holstered handgun. Frances laughs. I roll my eyes. Guys like this are why I don’t go to gun ranges any more.

“Obviously, I’m for gun rights,” Welch says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“But there are things that can be done. I don’t fall in line with the NRA’s views as much as some of the nutjobs out here. Get real.”

“OK.”

“Having to be 21 to own a gun isn’t against the second amendment,” he continues. He’s also in favor of stronger background checks. In fact, he says, there was a longer delay than usual when buying the pistol he’s carrying now. “I didn’t cry like a baby because I didn’t get it five minutes after I applied for it.”

It’s Palm Sunday when we enter Washington. At the gates of the White House, the usual crowd has gathered. A preacher rails against abortion. A man holds a banner against a potential war with Korea. There are students and tourists and vendors selling #MAGA hats and flags.

In one way or another, we’re all here to lay our hopes and grievances at the seat of American power, or to gawk at the spectacle it has become. And inside sits the man, fresh from the green at Mar-a-Lago, who we’ve driven 2,000 miles to see.

In several hours, Stormy Daniels will appear on 60 Minutes and the clouds will roll over Pennsylvania Avenue once again.

In the end, we of course never met the president – or came even close. I catch a plane back to my liberal enclave in Austin, while Frances returns to Scottsdale.

Over the coming weeks, she’ll talk about missing the road and the friends we met, and how she’s been writing letters. She still loves Trump, especially when he tweets, but that doesn’t mean the journey was in vain. Before leaving Washington, I took her to the beauty shop, and while waiting in the next room, I overheard her describe the trip as her “crowning achievement”. No longer was the country so small or frightening. Whether or not she changed her mind, she’ll always have those memories and the indisputable joy they bring.

As for me, I’ll wrestle over the coming days with what we experienced, still feeling frustrated by some of the encounters. But the following Sunday, on Easter, I’m in church listening to the old resurrection story when something happens.

It’s a tale I’ve heard my entire life, ever since I was a kid, but that morning it takes on newer and greater meaning, then spreads itself into all my dark places.

Resurrection is a force that lives on within us, my pastor says. Resurrection begins with you; you are the healing of the nation. My frustration and anxiety fall away, and I realize that the journey into the divide has only begun.

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Design by Sam Morris.
Photos by Bryan Mealer and Scott Slusher. Additional elements provided by Getty