When I first started dating my husband in 2018, I avoided asking who he voted for in the 2016 presidential election. Part of me already knew the answer, but I wanted to bury the uncomfortable truth: he’d voted for Donald J. Trump.
If I’d asked him the question then, I’m not sure we’d be where we are today: happily married and head-over-heels in love.
When we met in the fall of 2018, I was a political reporter at the local FOX-TV affiliate in Seattle and President Trump was less than two years into his first term. While I’ve always been right of Seattle’s hard-left politics – it was difficult to break free from the groupthink of a newsroom. Especially a newsroom in one of the bluest cities in America.
Donald Trump had declared the “fake news” media the enemy of the American people and, in turn, we waged war against him, too.
To be clear, not all our coverage was unfair. It’s the media’s job to hold politicians accountable and there’s no doubt, when it came to Trump, the Fourth Estate took that job seriously. The problem, as I’ve come to realize, was they took it less seriously when it came to Democrats. They still do.
During my years at FOX 13 News, I like to think I did my best to hold Washington state progressives accountable for their failures on homelessness, crime, and the anti-business policies that were driving companies like Amazon to move jobs elsewhere. But, in truth, I spent far too much time as a local news reporter covering the White House. I even convinced my bosses to send me to the border in 2019 to cover the so-called family separation crisis – an unusual expense for a local newsroom to agree to. It’s worth noting that local FOX affiliates are different from the network and don’t necessarily share the same conservative bias. Ours certainly did not.
My family and friends knew I was vehemently anti-Trump. I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and often chided my older brother for flying a Trump flag outside his home in Minnesota. By 2019, I’d moved in with my then-boyfriend – but still avoided talking to him about Trump and left the room when he’d turn on his favorite network news show.
In hindsight, I had what the right calls Trump Derangement Syndrome. And my diagnosis had the potential to be terminal.
But things started to turn at a most unexpected time.
The January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol had a different effect on me than you might expect. Rather than deepen my disdain for Donald Trump, it opened my eyes to disturbing depths of hypocrisy that I cannot unsee.
I’d just spent six months covering acts of leftwing political violence in Seattle that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
I watched as cop cars were torched in the streets downtown. My security guard disarmed rioters of stolen police rifles. Stores were looted to the studs – bare manikins left strewn in the streets. Officers were assaulted and hit with improvised explosive devices. My crew was mobbed in what later became known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHOP) – six square blocks surrounding a police precinct that were taken over by armed anti-police extremists. A few days into the occupation, rioters tried to light the precinct on fire after putting quick-drying cement on a door to lock officers in.
Those are just a few examples of what unfolded in Seattle during the racial justice movement of 2020. Our mayor at the time, Jenny Durkan, famously referred to it as a “Summer of Love.” The acts of that summer were ignored and even supported by many in our city’s Democratic leadership. Then-Councilwoman Tammy Morales scolded anyone who questioned the behavior of criminal demonstrators.
“What I don’t want to hear is for our constituents to be told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told that looting doesn’t solve anything,” she said during the unrest.
Our state’s chief law enforcer at the time, Attorney General Bob Fergson, stayed mostly silent about the destruction happening on our streets. He had by then made a national name for himself by suing the Trump administration dozens of times and had his eye on the governor’s office (which he went on to win in 2024). There was no way he’d risk angering his base by condemning leftwing extremism. Instead, he issued a short statement focused on criminal justice reform.
The media downplayed the violence, too. Even my own station took great pains to excuse or ignore criminal acts and play up non-criminal elements of the protests.
No such pains were taken with J6ers.
That hypocrisy was the beginning of my yearslong red pilling.
In 2021, frustrated by new management and our coverage of both the riots and the pandemic, I quit my job in news to launch an independent show.
The biggest supporter of me walking away from my $185,000/year dream job?
My sweet, Trump-voting boyfriend.
I married him in the fall of 2023, five years after I almost let his support for Donald Trump steal the joy we now share. There’s little doubt that had I asked him in the early days of our relationship who he’d voted for in the 2016 election, I would have ended things.
Typing that now makes my heart hurt.
This past November, I voted for Donald. J Trump for the first time. And yes, my husband did too.
Today, more than any other emotion, I am full of hope and optimism for our country – finally free from the echo chamber that once soured me on Trump and his agenda. But I am also battling a tinge of guilt. Guilt for the viewers I let down in those early days of the Trump administration. Guilt over the wonderful life I almost cost myself.
For that, I offer a sincere apology to our 47th President (and my husband, for that matter). And I offer this advice to anyone upset by a second term of Donald J. Trump: Never let politics stand in the way of your happiness. And never be too stubborn to change your mind.
While I’ve had my share of social media trolls rile their followers up into a rabid mob, Eric Crowl presented a different kind of security concern – one worth taking seriously.
