Donald Trump is now President of the United States. If that’s not terrifying enough, imagine seeing the parallels between Trump and your father...who just happens to be the late Reverend Fred Phelps, patriarch of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. This is the reality Nate Phelps confronts daily and it’s something which has put him on edge for weeks:

Now, to be fair, we can’t speculate on the Donald’s private behavior. We can only judge from his external actions. Yet, based on Nate’s experiences with his father’s similar attitude, and what is available in the public record regarding the Trump clan, several conclusions can be drawn about life with Donald J. Trump:

1. There’s a strong suspicion the Trump children witnessed similar abusive behavior growing up.

2. SOME of the ugly behaviors might have been mitigated on the spawn of Trump by the maternal figure (Ivana, Marla, Melania). Trump has spoken on Howard Stern about how raising children is the woman’s job.

3. Since this is all related to Trump’s mannerisms, behaviors, and strategies for dealing with other humans, in that light, it’s probable his attitudes were passed on.

Therefore, part of the reasons for Melania’s panic in that image because while she’s in the lap of luxury and power, she’s alone...the kids may not be as fucked up as Donald, but they probably have a similar worldview.

As to whether we’ll see one of the kids break from their father in a serious manner as Nate did is a wild guess. A child’s personality and their circumstances in life will cause them to embrace or reject the attitudes of a parent. "There’s a tipping point for everybody" Nate said, and while it’s possible one of the Trump children may have a moment of revelation, it’s doubtful they could follow through on it due to the fact they ARE Trump’s kin. Nate could at least escape to another city, another state, even another country. If your father is a businessman, media figure, and now president, it makes escape almost impossible. As well, being born in the lap of luxury acts as another barrier preventing dissension in the Trump children.

In addition, Donald will fight back...hard. He is a vengeful child with a "my way or the highway" attitude. For one example out of many, witness the recent squabble with Mexico where they cancelled the state visit for various reasons, but mostly due to the threats of building the wall and stiffing Mexico with the bill. The Donald replied almost instantaneously with threats (threatening in some cases, 20% tax on all imports from Mexico).  Classic Fred Phelps, Nate told me. "Lashing out. ‘OK you wanna get mad at me? I’ll show you freakin’ mad, I’ll show you vengeance’ and this scorched earth one-upmanship policy is how he does business." Everything Nate’s read on how Trump operates with his contractors and employees indicates this is his strategy. "He’ll just keep tightening down the screws until something breaks because he’s got all the time in the world and all the resources."

Whether the world can expect to see him booted out of the office, Nate thinks it’s a matter of time: "I think all of them (Republicans) to a greater or lesser extent recognize it’s a house of cards and eventually he’s going to implode, he’s going to do something we can no longer overlook...and then they’ll take steps to remove him. In the meantime, he’s given them all the green light to be as conservative, as aggressive in their conservative policies as they want to be." And when you look at some of the people surrounding Trump (Pence, Sessions, Bannon) expect the government to take a hard right.

For the world and the U.S.A., is there a best case/worst case scenario? Nate can’t think of a best case scenario, but "...worst case scenario he lasts for eight years and sets America back and we could end up in a war...my own personal inclination says we’ll figure out a way to avoid that....Maybe I’m being completely naive, but I have to believe that...a worst case scenario doesn’t happen."

Furthermore, a best case scenario is problematic. If Trump is removed, we’ll have to deal with current Vice President Mike Pence: "It’s possible he scares me more because of his religious leanings. You have to bear in mind his state was the first to try that thinly disguised LGBT Discrimination tactic called Religious Freedom. It only failed because of so much outside political pressure, but that shows you his inclinations. He’s in favor of conversion therapy. He’s got all of these radical religious conservative leanings that frankly I think would be as destructive if not more destructive for America than Trump is." And even if we got rid of Pence, those individuals potentially replacing him are just as flawed. For at least a couple of years we’re stuck with this extreme conservative ideology.

Regarding who’d inflict the least damage upon the LGBT community – Trump or Pence –  Nate wasn’t excited for either option: "In the long run, if Trump stayed in, we’d end up with a Democratic Congress in two years. That safeguards and minimizes the opportunities they would have to re-establish some kind of institutionalized discrimination." True, there’s a lot of damage they could do in two years, but given that recent attempts in some states to put in religious discrimination bills have failed, we should be aware in this case there are more people who disagree with discrimination – and may even work to protect the progress we’ve made.

So, Nate doesn’t think LGBT community in the USA will lose the right to marry; even with another conservative judge on the Supreme Court. However, "we also know from experience there’s a million ways at the micro level for hateful people to get their ideology put into law where they can mistreat or treat certain communities as second class citizens" so again, we still have to be vigilant. Witness the recent rollback on transgender student rights and school bathrooms Obama put in. Betsy Devos claimed it was an issue for the states and local governments to resolve. It’s never we don’t like X it’s always Well, because of reasons we’re backing off...but hey, it has nothing to do with our fervent disapproval of X."

This is how conservatives respond to change in society if they don’t like the change. Like in the abortion debate, if you can’t overturn it or ignore it put in place a million different regulations or laws at the state or civic level to make getting an abortion extremely difficult, if not impossible. And then "...create the attitude and mentality that there’s something different about this group of people, which is all you really need to maintain ideologies and attitudes of discrimination in this society."

Considering the people surrounding Trump, we also speculated whether this trend of rising nationalism and bigotry might just be the final extinction burst behavior of right wing/fascists. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to figure out history while we’re living in it. Which is why Nate does spend time on Fox News and other conservative sites to try to read and understand their point of view even though he strongly disagrees with it. "Listen to their arguments and see if they stand up to the rebuttal in my head. We all have to be cautious because we all tend to see the world in the way we want to see it (in spite of evidence sometimes). But there is good evidence out there that I would consider empirical or just even beyond my own personal views that strongly suggest that’s what’s going on."

Nate does believe the younger generation will make opposition to LGBT rights, religion and politics go away or become irrelevant in short order. Much like the religions views on slavery – now religious folks have been forced to change their ideology and pretend they were the first opposed to slavery. "That kind of change I see coming in a lot of areas, but we gotta keep in mind ten years, even twenty years from now there’s going to be different issues that will fall into the conservative side of the continuum versus the liberal side." There will always be conflict – just over different issues. The best response Nate has to the original idea is that yes, these current issues defining modern conservatism are dying; it’s a last gasp. "And we know from history when one side...the pendulum swings to far one way, there’s a knee-jerk almost hysterical response the other way until it finally corrects itself.

Sadly, in the future it’s unsure whether some of the changes will be able to come from the legislative arm of the American government. The level of bipartisan agreements or relationships has dropped substantially in the last twenty years. Nate thinks it was around the time of the Clarence Thomas/Robert Bork confirmation hearings we lost the ability to compromise. "I don’t know enough to say that’s when it started. There’s always history to every story but that’s the way it feels now that we’ve lost the ability take a deep breath, let go of the emotional rhetoric, and try to focus on a solution both sides can live with on some of these issues. It has become this ‘all or nothing’ mentality. I’m not going to say it’s all conservatives doing it because we’re all capable of that; and again, when we’re steeped in it, it becomes the mentality of the day."

Comparing that environment to Canada’s politics is one of the things Nate talks about when people ask about the differences between the USA and Canada – he at first didn’t understand how the PCs in Alberta stayed in power for so long. But he realized they did it by keeping their ‘ear to the ground’ so when they political winds shifted, they shifted with them and that was acceptable to the populace. "And without any emotional baggage, when I look at that idea, it’s not a bad idea. Good leaders are supposed to be representing the interests of their constituents...while in America it was always about your own personal convictions – so if you switched sides, you were a pariah...if someone admitted in a political campaign in an election they changed their mind, they were done in politics. You just don’t change your mind."

Depressingly, the conclusion Nate reached is that we may be unable to change much of this situation at the moment. There’s going to be a tremendous amount of rhetoric and noise (hopefully) from the liberal side of the aisle in Congress. There will be marches, and people voicing their opinions, but...while recently we have seen in other countries leaders pushed out of office by massive public protests, there is no mechanism like that in the US. "We can’t go out there and protest so much the government fails...you just don’t see that in the West...so I don’t know what the solution is other than we keep pushing and trying different things. We’re seeing a lot of creative things now and I suspect there will be even more creative things out there but I’m reminded – short of obstructionism what the Congress did to Obama – there’s not much we can do here."

At the very least I floated the idea people need to make sure everyone strengthens their social networks. "At some point in time we may have to start thinking in serious terms of how people get out of there and what resources we have available to support that." To a certain degree, especially in light of the ban on Muslims from seven different countries, those discussions are already happening. At a local level, that may be something we can do – think of ways we can support those who are suffering because of changes in politics in the USA, and fight the expansion of leaders with similar toxic ideas in Canada and worldwide.

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