By David Futrelle
Back in March, Washingtonian magazine reported that young Trumpers in DC were having a bit of trouble finding dates, what with virtually everyone in the heavily Dem city hating their guts. (I wrote about it here.) Three months and several big steps closer to fascism later, and, guess what, decent people still don’t want to be in the same room with Trump enablers, much less in their pants.
A story on Politico today by Danel Lippman and Ben Schreckinger examines the widespread social shunning of the “young Trumpies” who descended on DC like a plague of Nazi dweebs after Trump’s electoral college victory in 2016. Talking to “more than 30 millennial staffers from the Trump White House and across the administration, both current and former,” the two authors report, these poor creatures “told us their horror stories about being heckled on the street and their struggles to get a date.”
Owning the libs by being treated like the crap you are!
They are so hated, apparently. that “they largely keep to themselves, more likely to hop between intimate apartment gatherings than to hit the town,” and live clustered together, mostly in a single neighborhood, where they drown their sorrows in the hot tubs on the roofs of their luxury apartments, consoled somewhat by the fact that they and their Young Trumpy pals are still running the government (into the ground).
Nowhere do they suffer more than in what a lot of them, I’m guessing, call the sexual marketplace.
When it comes to disclosing their affiliation with Trump, no ground is more fraught than courtship. “Trump supporters swipe left”—meaning “don’t even bother trying”—might be the single most common disclaimer on dating app profiles in Washington.
I think I might bust out crying.
Some Young Trumpies have come up with a genius strategy to counteract the perfectly justified hate, which is to hide the fact that they are Young Trumpies from dates and potential dates.
Young staffers have had to develop a keen sense of just when to have “The Talk” with romantic partners. “I’ve still been able to hook up with women,” says a male former White House staffer. “But I know that I need to be careful about broaching the Trump stuff. I just know that going in, I need to be able to get it out at the right time and not get it out too early to the point where it’s like, ‘Hey, I worked for Trump, you should stop talking to me,’ but late enough in that eventually they know that there is this information floating out there that I worked for this guy and hopefully you have now seen that I’m not a horrible person and we can go further with this.”
Huh. Somehow I suspect he’s having this “Talk” after he’s hooked up with unsuspecting women, not before.
Even the lady Trumpies are suffering.
One beleaguered 31-year-old female administration official described at length her “very, very frequent” scraps with her matches on dating apps. “You do the small talk thing, and you have a very good conversation, and then they might say, ‘You didn’t vote for Trump, right?’” she says. “As soon as I say, ‘Of course I did,’ it just devolves into all-caps ‘HOW COULD YOU BE SUCH A RACIST AND A BIGOT?’ And ‘You’re going to take away your own birth control.’”
Is there such a thing as justifiable mansplaining? Because I’m thinking this might qualify.
In one recent star-crossed exchange, the official told a match she worked for the federal government. When he pushed, she revealed she was in the administration. He asked her, “Do you rip babies from their mothers and then send them to Mexico?”
Gosh, it’s so unfair to be criticized for enabling the grotesque human rights violations the Trump administration commits every day.
Evasive answers will get you only so far, though, since many dating apps provide enough information for inquisitive users to sleuth out their matches’ identities. “I literally got the other day, ‘Thanks but no thanks. Just Googled you and it said you were a mouthpiece for the Trump administration. Go fuck yourself,’” says the official. It’s all enough to drive her and some of her colleagues away from at least some of the apps. “I’m no longer on Bumble,” she says.
Good. One Twitterer suggested a dating app that might be a bit more appropriate for Young Trumpies looking for love:
Have a good weekend, unless you’re a Young Trumpy. Or an old Trumpy. Or any other Trumpy. Or a Trump.
@Hambeast Damn you beat me to it. *puts trombone away*
Maybe I should compose a ‘Womp Womp March’ in their honour. 😉
A thousand times this!
Women have to make it clear we find toxic masculinity to be a major turn off.
So what if a lady happens to enjoy some non consent fantasies every now and then? In real life, we’re attracted to men who obsess over what is and what isn’t misogynistic.