The tension was still thick between Rachel Brewson and her ex Todd Jenkins. It was the first time they had seen each other since breaking up over “another man.”
“Yes, I would say Trump ended the relationship,” Brewson said.
Almost five months into their romance, Brewer called it quits after discovering Jenkins’ love for all things Donald Trump.
“Everything that he was saying about women, everything he said in front of our friends, and the fact that I had to smile and pretend that I was OK with it even though it literally killed me inside,” she said.
When they first met at a video game conference last summer, the attraction for both was instantaneous.
“I was drawn to him because he was extremely handsome,” Brewson said. “He seemed very approachable and I just really wanted to strike up a conversation with him.”
“She’s real easy to talk to,” Jenkins said. “Real easy to kind of get into natural conversation.”
Brewson said she broke up with Jenkins when she heard him talking about Trump at a party.
“It just really got under my skin.”
“He had really turned into a Trump lover,” Brewson added. “He was just all about Trump.”
Jenkins, on the other hand, thought Brewson was overreacting to his political views about Trump.
“I think Rachel was just a little over sensitive and maybe took things a little too serious as far as my political views,” he said. “He’s the most viable candidate that I can see and it kind of -- I feel personally offended that someone would take my opinion so far as to ruin what I considered at the time a great relationship.”
Brewson said she plans to vote for Hillary Clinton.
But’s hers is not the first romance gone sour, in part, due to Trump. His candidacy seems to be uniting an unlikely coalition aimed at stopping him, including one known as “Vote Trump, Get Dumped,” a viral campaign urging women to go on a “sex strike.” Its mission statement reads, “Until Trump is defeated, we don’t date, sleep or canoodle with Trump supporters.”
Rachel Peters and Chandler Smith are part of the team behind the campaign. Since its launch last month, Smith said the group has amassed a huge following on social media with over 100,000 Twitter followers and has around 10 million impressions on its website.
“We’re pretty normal people,” Peters said. “We’re both moms. Uh, we live in the Midwest and we’ve always had a little bit of an interest in politics, but have never really gotten hyper involved until this election.”
These mild-mannered mothers said they were at first amused, then deeply disturbed, by Trump and his comments about women and what they saw as his extreme misogyny.
“It moved us from just being responsible voters to people who wanted to amplify our voice more in this particular election,” Peters said. “We couldn’t just sit by and let a sexist become president because what would that say to our daughters? What would it look like out on the world stage as he’s meeting with women heads of state? This is not the man that we want representing America to the rest of the world or to future generations.”
So for the cost of a few online ads, these two women and their six friends maintain the “Vote Trump, Get Dumped” website. They consider themselves the “silent majority” and stress that theirs is not a partisan campaign.
“We’re just anti-Trump,” Smith said. “We don’t really care who else you vote for.”
The women said they have supporters for Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton on their team.
“The one thing that brought us all together was we absolutely could not stand the thought of sitting by and letting Donald Trump become president,” Peters said.
On their website, the women post what they consider Trump’s most flagrantly sexist quotes online, such as “you can’t be flat-chested and be a 10,” and “you wouldn’t have a job if you weren’t beautiful.”
Critics of the “Vote Trump, Get Dumped” campaign have claimed its mission seems almost regressive. Some have even claimed its sexual blackmail, but that’s not how Smith and Peters see it.
“It’s not sexual blackmail because actually our thought never was we can get Trump supporters to change their mind by abstaining,” Peters said. “It was, ‘Hey it’s in your best interest to stay away from romantic relationships with Trump supporters because it tells you something about their character.’”
This tongue-in-cheek campaign takes its inspiration from an ancient Greek comedy where women boycotted sex to end a war.
“Sex strikes don’t necessarily work because of their practical work,” Smith said. “They work because they get media attention and they raise awareness to bigger issues.”
But Peters and Smith said they were surprised to hear that some of their followers were actually boycotting sex and canoodling after they launched their site.
“What we’ve discovered is voting for Trump is the new disqualifier in relationships,” Peters said. “In the same way a girlfriend wouldn’t let you date somebody who is living in their parents' basement or can’t hold a steady job, or is addicted to video games, is the same way you go ‘Oh, he a Trump supporter? Girl, you can’t be dating him.’ It is I think the most current disqualifier that people have right now.”
But it’s not just early infatuations. Trump-inspired sparring is also straining long-term relationships. Mandy Stadtmiller married comedian Pat Dixon at the Gotham Comedy Club last year. The couple bonded over their shared sense of humor, but Dixon is a Trump supporter and the two have gotten into heated arguments over it.
“The only reason I’m interested in this election is because of Donald Trump,” Dixon said. “He doesn’t apologize. That’s the first thing that caught my attention.”
“He has the sociopathic trait where you believe your own lies that really concerns me,” Stadtmiller said.
The two said they didn’t really talk politics before they got married.
“We were all so caught up in the falling in love stuff and then once that was all in place and that’s when we realized it’s an election year,” Dixon said. “And that’s when we realized we were on the opposite sides.”
“The sense I got was he was really frustrated with me and I know I was really frustrated with him and it was just kind of one of those -- you know they say don’t go to bed angry? We went to bad angry, you know?”
The women of “Vote Trump, Get Dumped” say it’s something they hear regularly from women across the country. To Trump supporters who say their choice for president doesn’t reflect on their character, Peters said they should understand they are supporting a sexist.
“If you are using your vote and your voice to support Donald Trump then it means that you ... can’t have high regard for women because it doesn’t matter to you that he said all these really terrible things,” Peters said.
As for Rachel Brewson and Todd Jenkins, they are still coming to terms with the role Trump played in spoiling their romance.
“If Trump wasn’t in the picture a couple years ago I think we may have had a better chance,” Brewson said. “It would have been different.”
“I think it could have been totally different,” Jenkins added. “I think we would have been together much longer -- could have been pretty serious.”
from ABC News: Politics http://ift.tt/1Yxsnlx
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