"Ew, you're a Trump supporter? Get away from me."
"How can you support a candidate that has no clue about what he's doing?"
"Sorry, I don't think that I can really be friends with someone who is a supporter of a rapist."
I have overheard all of these here at the University of California, Berkeley. While I am personally not a Trump supporter, I find these comments inherently divisive and disgusting. We're college students. We have more in common than not, and political opinions should not be the defining factor of who we "like" or who we consider friends. Just because you support a presidential candidate does not mean you agree with everything that candidate says or does. Does supporting Trump mean you support sexual assault? No. Does supporting Clinton mean you support poor ethics and laziness? No.
Long before we cared about politics, we made friends based on personality attributes, activities we enjoy doing, food we like eating. When did politics become an important factor of friendship? The truth is, most of us only care about politics for a few months before an election and then it somehow just disappears from our minds until the next one. Perhaps it is because I am a humiliated Republican who is ashamed of what his party has become, which makes me more open to friendships across the aisle. Regardless of who is running, politics has no place in the relationships we have with the people around us. It's no fun having friends that are carbon copies of us, who believe in everything we believe, who do everything we do. Embrace diversity.
I think it's pretty obvious that, as a Republican, I have Trump supporters as friends. I have absolutely no problem with it. It does not speak about their morals, it does not speak about their personality. I think you would be hard-pressed to find someone who only supports Trump because of his... interesting remarks, to put it lightly. All they want is a change in the establishment because they are frustrated with the status quo. I can respect that; I just believe Trump is not the one who should shake things up.
Of course, there are the exceptions. I am sure all of us have seen or met Trump supporters that are just plain racists or xenophobes, for example. However, this is not just exclusively Trump supporters. We have all also seen the recent protests here at UC Berkeley where students blocked off Sather Gate, restricting persons of Caucasian descent from passing through. I'm sure they're Clinton supporters.
Let's look beyond someone's political beliefs and opinions and examine them as a person. If nothing in the past had ever made you question their friendship, why start now?
