The idea of starting a book club came to Valeen Heinle late one night in July. She was having a particularly bad argument with her Trump-supporting dad over Israel’s war in Gaza and its devastating impacts on children.
"I'm begging you to just try and learn something that isn't from Facebook, Fox, or Newsmax," Valeen, a 38-year-old registered Democrat who works as a pet sitter in Denver, wrote to her dad via Instagram DM after they exchanged a series of posts about Gaza. “Read a book on the history there. I have tons I can suggest but I know you would never because you’d rather sit in your confirmation bias, and that makes me so sad.”
“I spend too much time worrying about my children. What the future will bring for them,” he replied. “So when my kids are safe and [taken] care of then maybe I could give a shit about other kids.”
Gaza isn’t the only issue that has left Americans—and Valeen and her dad—divided. They’ve argued about the Covid-19 vaccine, climate change, gun laws, the results of the 2020 election, the January 6 riot at the Capitol, and more. “Ever since 2016, he seems to be pulled more and more to the far right, and he’s become clouded by hatred and anger—things that just aren’t him,” says Valeen. “It’s gotten harder and harder, and it’s not just difficult to debate with him, but it’s painful, and some of the things he says really just takes me aback.”
But Valeen said his response to their discussion on Gaza was a breaking point. It upset her so much that when her partner returned home that evening, he found her crying on their Ikea sofa in the living room. They had a long talk, and in an attempt at distraction, they gathered animal crackers and Chips Ahoy cookies and fired up an anime episode on her laptop.
When the anime episode ended at around 3 am, Valeen sent her dad, who now lives in central Florida, a message. “Alright. I’ll make you a deal: you read three books of my choosing—all the way through—and prove you actually read and understood them,” she wrote. “And I'll go back to church for a month after.”
Reddit is full of stories from people who, like Valeen, say the current political environment has challenged their relationships with their Trump-supporting parents. In some cases, people have compared their families’ involvement in the MAGA movement and blind loyalty to Trump to being part of a cult—a comparison that’s also been made by cult experts.
But some think they can potentially salvage their relationships with their loved ones and even “deprogram” their MAGA parents—by starting de facto “book clubs.”
One Reddit user posted on a popular subreddit r/suggestmeabook, asking for suggestions of “good reading materials for someone who may need some help being nudged back towards reality and morality”—their dad. They asked specifically for recommendations of fantasy books, a genre that their dad had enjoyed in the past. “I’ve always felt fantasy books have ‘progressive’ values, and I’m hoping to find some that don’t beat you over the head with that message!” they wrote. In another subreddit, someone else asked for book recommendations that they could send to their father “in pursuit of deprogramming him from the cult of Trump.”
Others have said their relationships hit a breaking point, and they had no other choice but to go “no contact" with their parents. One study found that 1 in two adults was estranged from a close relative and cited political differences in a fifth of those cases. Nearly half of those estranged over politics said the rupture had occurred in the past year.
Dominique Forbes, 28, tells WIRED she has minimized contact with her parents, who live in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, over their continued support for Trump since 2016 and hasn’t seen them in person since May 2020. “I see MAGA as a cult, personally, and I think the identity fusion and cognitive dissonance are the main pieces that I’ve experienced firsthand from my parents,” Forbes says. She says she tried to broach the topic in November, around the time of the election, via Facetime. “My dad exploded and said he felt attacked,” Forbes says. “I was adamant about being gentle and remaining calm, but I could see the identity fusion—he could not separate himself from Trump.”
There was talk of them coming to visit her earlier this year where she lives, in Seattle, Washington. She was looking forward to it, and to introducing them to her cats. But she told them she didn’t want them to stay with her, to establish some boundaries, and their offer to visit crumbled soon after that. Forbes says that attempts at establishing common ground have fallen flat. “I’ve learned it's not my responsibility to educate them,” Forbes says. “I believe they’re brainwashed, and I believe there could be underlying health issues that could be contributing to it. But I finally just hit a wall of exhaustion. I just feel pushed away and rejected so many times that I’m finally planning on going some form of no-contact.”
Steven Hassan, a cult expert who escaped a cult in 1976 and has since written several books about deprogramming, including The Cult of Trump, says there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to helping a loved one who has been brainwashed. And it’s not like switching out a faulty component in a car, he says. “The mind is precious. I need to know how he got hooked,” says Hassan. “What I've learned as a mental health professional when it comes to how to effectively influence a person, you need to customize it for the individual”
He does have some advice for what not to do. “It’s important to understand that the MAGA identity is fused with Trump and its ideology. And what doesn't work is trying to attack the leader, the doctrine, the policy of any cult,” says Hassan. “Trying to argue with logic or with facts is counterproductive, because it activates the cult identity to label you as an enemy that is persecuting them.”
“What I have always been advocating for years is: Stay warm, stay loving, don’t say ‘you’re stupid’ for following Trump or ‘you’re a moron,’ but just be warm and say ‘I don't understand, help me step into your shoes,’” Hassan adds. “The most powerful technique is to ask questions that empower the person to think and reflect.” Another key part of effective deprogramming, Hassan adds, is to remind the person who they were prior to being brainwashed.
Valeen grew up in Florida’s Pompano Beach, north of Fort Lauderdale, and was raised in the Evangelical church. Her father, who Valeen calls her best friend and her hero, served in the Marines during Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s and later ran a glass business.
For a long time, debating current affairs was “their thing”—and it was fun. But a few years ago he had a pulmonary embolism, leaving him in poor health and often struggling to breathe. Valeen thinks his views have become more extreme in part because he’s isolated, depressed, in poor health, and engaging with divisive content online. She worries that he’s become increasingly drawn into a political belief system that is defined by misinformation over fact and cruelty over empathy.
Her father, John, says he gets along great with Valeen, though “sometimes it gets a little difficult in our conversations,” adding, “We’re on different political spectrums. I raised her to be a free thinker. I wanted her to have her own path and have her own ideas, not mine.”
When Valeen was in her early twenties, she briefly moved to Australia for her long-distance boyfriend she’d met via Facebook. At some point, he started reading Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth, which is about evolution. “I’d joke and say ‘that’s your devil book,’” she recalls. She became increasingly interested in its ideas as he worked his way through it, and she eventually picked it up herself. She says it challenged her entire belief system and opened her eyes to an entirely new way of thinking; it also taught her that books could be a powerful way to change minds. She left the church when she was 25.
“Reading has had such an impact on my own life,” says Valeen. “I am hoping not only could it potentially teach him something or make him think about something he typically wouldn’t, but also if it’s laid out in front of him with data and references by someone who has studied, it might be easier to not just understand but to trust.”
And she knew that promising her dad to go back to church, even for a short time, would be a valuable bargaining chip. “She completely turned around,” says John. “Next I noticed she said she was agnostic, then she was atheist. And I'm like, what?” He’s chalked up a lot of her misfortunes over the years—financial struggles, health problems—to her lack of faith. “I live in poverty, and he's very much a bootstraps mentality. So he blames anything that goes wrong in my life on me leaving Christianity,” says Valeen.
John says that these days he’s more concerned about making sure she gets to heaven. “My health isn’t that great, and it would be good to know that when I go one day, I’ll see my daughter again,” John says. “She says I was using a guilt trip. I said, ‘I'm not trying to use a guilt trip. I'm trying to say that, you know, that would make me feel a lot better.’”
Hassan says that reciprocity is important when trying to get through to a brainwashed loved one. “The goal is not who is right and who is wrong, the goal is to learn and, based on love, pursue what's true.”
Valeen wants her dad to read The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond, which looks at the systemic causes of poverty in the US.
In selecting her titles, Valeen says she tried to pick books that were “noncombative.” “It’s been tough to convince him to do this, because he doesn’t really want to read anything that doesn’t confirm his beliefs and his views,” she says. “I basically just kept pushing the deal on him and kept telling him, like, well, you really want me to go to church.” Eventually, after some back-and-forth, he agreed.
Valeen is estranged from the rest of her family, and there’s no book club that she thinks could fix it. She says her sister believes that the Earth is actually flat, among other conspiracy theories, and her cousins called her an "abomination" and told her she was “going to hell” when she came out as pansexual.
But she believes that she can establish common ground with her dad again. “A lot of things have happened to me in my lifetime, and my dad is the only constant I’ve ever had,” she says. “So I won’t give up on him.”
And as for her dad, he tells WIRED: “I’ll read ’em. I’ve got time.”
