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| Reno (left) and The Stauff |
After high school, Mike joined the United States Marine Corps, where he was quickly shipped off to the Middle East while Iran held Americans hostage.
Meanwhile, I headed to California to attend college.
Mike is a lifelong Republican. I’m a lifelong Democrat. Over
the years, we've remained best of friends but we've had spirited debates over just about
every issue you can name from war to welfare to healthcare.
But it has always remained civil and respectful between us.
Mike and I know each other on levels that transcend political
labels. We have a lot more in common than our political differences might
suggest.
Such as the kindness we both show not only to our family, friends
and coworkers but to people we meet on the street, and the love we share for
good music, sports, comedy, and so much more.
No one makes me laugh harder than Mike, who I have affectionately
referred to for the last 43 years as "The Stauff." And no one
makes me think more about my own views. We challenge each other,
positively.
Mike, who's defended Trump since he was
elected, has finally seen and heard enough.
“Jamie, I will not be voting again for Trump in 2020,” Mike told
me. "I want
to share this for the sake of integrity. I have been vocal in my support of
Trump on some issues and feel that on this one he is absolutely wrong.”
Mike, who noted that his opinion carries some weight amongst his
circle of friends and professionals, noted that “these migrants are being
protested as animals. It is simply wrong and is a falsehood. I want to speak up
on this."
On one level I was surprised to hear him say this. But when I
gave it some more thought, I realized that this was right in line with Mike’s
character. I know what he is made of.
"I would not vote for any of the current Democratic
front-runners such as Booker, Harris or Warren,” he told me. "But I could
definitely vote for someone like a Joe Manchin or Joe Biden. Regardless, I
will not be voting for Trump."
Knowing I am a journalist, Mike also said that if I wanted to
write a story about this, "I trust you and give you absolute unconditional
freedom to write and communicate this how you see and think best."
In other words, he was giving me permission to tell the world
what he had just told me. And in this divided, downright tribal era in which we
live, that took courage.
Trump Fomenting Hatred
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| Mike Stauffer, Yankee Fan |
Over the past few weeks , Mike said he has been reading in
"very neutral media" sources about the migrant caravan of families
from Central America that is making its way to the United States up through
Mexico.
He said he began to notice that, each day, the description of
this caravan grew more threatening and inaccurate.
Ultimately, Mike said, “The President fully embraced an ad that
was in my opinion fomenting hatred and fear among Americans toward the people
of Honduras."
Mike had turned off his Facebook account and stopped watching
all cable news channels.
Except for reading a couple relatively small written accounts,
he said he was determined to come to his own conclusions regarding the migrants
and immigration from south of the border in general.
"I came across a picture in which a young migrant mother
was collapsed from weariness and sleeping on the dirt,” he said.
"Her two young children were close by her. I asked myself
how bad it must be in her homeland that she would uproot and walk thousands of
miles across sun scorched land to escape it. I heard Christ’s words ring clear
and unmistakable in my heart: 'In all things do unto others as you would have
them do unto you’.”
Mike looked at the mother’s despair and that’s what turned him
against Trump for good.
"I knew beyond all doubt that if I were in her shoes, I
would want to be welcomed and received in a better, safer land,” he said.
"I then thought again about how the President has been describing an
entire people as dangerous and a threat to us, when in reality it is probably
an extremely minute percentage."
At that point, Mike said his faith could no longer align itself
with the words coming from the Presidents mouth.
“The active duty troops I've talked to this week, most of them,
say off the record that Trump is abusing his power as commander in chief for
purely political purposes. No one considers these families as an actual
threat,” Mike said.
He also read this past week how the President has called the
Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution insane, and that also was too much to
take.
"Calling for change to the Constitution through the orderly
process of ratification is one thing,” he said. "Attacking any part of our
Constitution as being ‘insane' as a sitting President is downright
dangerous."
Mike has been a staunch defender of our Constitution his entire
adult life.
"To ignore such a remark simply because I am a Republican
would, for me, be hypocritical,” he said.
Mike has justified some of Trump's words and deeds as President,
he explained, because there are some of his policies he does agree with and he
still has a strong aversion to some parts of the Democratic platform.
But he can no longer do so.
"I will not be voting Democratic in the 2020 election, but
I also will not be voting again for Donald Trump,” he said.
Questioning Your Tribe
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| Mike Stauffer, Marine |
One of the lessons I believe we should take away from hard
decisions like the one Mike made this week is that we all have corners of
ourselves that we do not reveal for fear of being booted out of the tribes we
join.
Historically, political scientists have attributed such rigid
political loyalty to the way we are raised and by our experiences.
More recent
research suggests there may be a genetic component to why we cling so tightly
to our views.
Whatever the case, the truth is once we pick and join a
"tribe," most of us permanently subscribe to the tenets of that tribe
and find it very difficult to outwardly question it, no matter how disdainful
it gets.
I suspect this behavior has everything to do with our most
primal instinct for survival. Don't step out of the herd and risk the chance of
getting eaten by a T-Rex.
I've never had any problem stepping out of the tribal line. I
guess that's because, as oxymoronic as it sounds, I am a fervent centrist, a
passionate moderate.
I have strong views and can argue with the best of them, but I
don't follow any party or ideological lines.
I am a liberal, but I have never been a knee-jerk liberal or a
knee-jerk anything. I have always had some conservative views.
I believe, for example, that if they are physically able,
welfare recipients should have to prove that they are looking for a job to
continue receiving welfare.
I have also always been a staunch supporter of the military and
our veterans, as anyone who has read my journalism over the last 30 years will
attest.
And I am a capitalist who strongly believes that free-market
competition is a good thing -- as long as it is kept in check by, yes, the
government.
But I am, at the beginning, middle and end of the day, a proud
liberal. I have been all my life, and it is because I care about the less
fortunate. This is why I call myself a liberal.
Mike, too, has always had a few left-leaning views, though he
would probably never admit it.
Probably his most liberal position, he said, is that he supports a “robust Medicaid system and strong federal aid toward Medicaid."
And he is of course an unabashed supporter of expanding our
military. But in 2005, during the Iraq War, he said against the wishes of his
party and many of his fellow Marines that the war should end and that we should
bring our troops home.
But make no mistake: Mike is a classic conservative. I guess you
could say he is a conservative in the Reagan model and I am a progressive in
the Joe Biden model.
But the friendship between us is bigger than politics. It actually
works in the way it is supposed to work in Congress. Our
debates have always stayed civil, and we always manage to find common ground.
That is, until Trump was elected.
Since then, while Mike has generally stood by Trump, I have grown
increasingly outraged with Trump’s lack of moral compass, his thousands of
blatant lies, dog whistles to racists, unprecedented divisiveness, systematic
destruction of the environment, destruction of our relationships with our
allies, and just his profound corruption.
Knowing Right From Wrong
I take no credit for my best friend’s change of heart. And with
all respect for his religious beliefs, which I believe is a positive aspect of
his life, I don't personally credit Christ for this decision.
I credit Mike’s own sense of goodness. I credit his own deep
understanding of the difference between right and wrong, which he knew even
before he embraced Jesus.
"Thank you for doing your job as a journalist through thick
and thin,” Mike told me this afternoon in an email.
It meant a lot to me in this era in which The President of the
United States calls any journalist who does his job honestly and writes
anything negative about him “fake news” and an “enemy of the people.”
I am undeniably pleased that my best friend recognizes that
Trump's ugly, racist fear-mongering over the non-threatening caravan of
Hispanic families seeking a better life, and Trump's preposterous take that
American journalists are enemies of the people, are both unAmerican.
"I was very wrong and completely off base when I joined in
piling on the media,” Mike said. "There are .001% agenda-driven wackos in
any part of life. But 99.99% of journalists are doing the job we as a democracy
need them to do.”
Unlike so many people these days on the right and the left, Mike
has a rare ability to re-carve a personal political view that seemed cut so
deeply in stone.
He, like most of us, typically sees the world through a narrow
political prism. But this week, to my amazement and his credit, his courage and
common sense overcame his stubborn inner machinery and he adjusted his sights.
Again.
He did it with the Iraq War 13 years ago, and he did it again
this week with Trump. Which is not to say that he is suddenly a liberal. He
isn't. I don't expect that nor do I want that. He sticks to his guns.
Literally.
I also don't expect a bunch of people to read this story and
suddenly change your position on Donald Trump.
But one can hope.
There's no shame in changing one’s mind. There is, in fact,
great honor and courage in doing so. My best friend did it. So can you.
