But Trump’s election led to escalating political arguments between her and her children like never before. She rejected their accusations of racism, especially when it came to her belief in strong border enforcement. She said during screaming fights that she felt as though they blamed her personally for all of Trump’s actions. She felt the same disdain from coverage in the mainstream media, which she refers to as the MSM.

“The MSM were, to a person, arrayed against him, from the day after the [2016] election, and over time that’s where my suspicions finally landed,” Claire wrote in an email. “Even a [broken] clock is right twice a day, but they couldn’t throw Trump even a crumb. It sickened me and I stopped watching MSM in 2017.”

Claire said she did not read Q-Anon message boards, but she did have friends who sent her Q-Anon links on Facebook. She noted that some of the videos she had watched were “too fantastical to believe.”

“That’s not real life,” she wrote. “But I am still convinced that Trump won the legal vote and by a landslide. And now the question for me is: Is my vote worth a plug nickel, given what I saw happen in the past election?”