Frayed ties
STACEY PAVESI DEBRÉ’S YOUNG DAUGHTERS HAD A HABIT WHEN THEY SAW PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP ON TV IN THEIR PARIS APARTMENT.
They’d hold their noses and boo. That is, until Stacey’s mother Lonnie Pavesi came to visit for a week, to help take care of her grandchildren. After she left, the elder Debré child, who was about 7, had some strong words for her mother. “Mom, you lied to me,” she said. “You told me Trump was bad. Actually he’s not. Ama told me he’s making America better.”
It transpired that Lonnie had mixed in some political discourse with her grandmotherly duties. “She had brainwashed our daughters behind our back,” says the girls’ father, Guillaume Debré, with amusement. He’s a French journalist who has written a book on Trump, but he maintains that he does not have as intense feelings about him as his American wife. “I was like, This is getting out of hand. The mother and the grandmother are fighting for the soul of their granddaughter. This is crazy. Even the French people don’t do this.”
Disagreements about politics have been the specter of every family get-together since dinner was invented. But after one of the most divisive presidential administrations in U.S. history followed by an election the outgoing leader claims was fraudulent (without any evidence that has stood up in court) and an attack on the Capitol, those rifts are as wide as anyone can remember. A postelection Pew Research Center survey found that fewer than 2% of voters felt those who voted for the other party understood them very well, and only 13% of Joe Biden’s voters and 5% of Donald Trump’s voters expressed any desire for future unity.
President Biden won the election partly on the promise that he would heal the fissures between those who voted for him and those who voted for Trump. “Now it is time to turn the page,” he said in a speech
