'The White Lotus' Dabbles in Trump 2.0

Hit HBO Show Highlights The "MAGA Supporting Ex-Liberal Friend" Dynamic

Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb in this week's episode of The White Lotus

The White Lotus is a third of the way into its third season, and this Sunday, HBO’s hit show touched on Donald Trump for the first time.

This season features a storyline of three longtime friends, Kate (Leslie Bibb), Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), and Laurie (Carrie Coon), who now live far from each other – in Texas, Los Angeles, and New York, respectively – and are meeting for a girl’s week at The White Lotus resort in Thailand.

The catty, frayed relationship between the trio is bubbling up three episodes in. In the third episode, The Meaning Of Dreams, the three friends chat at dinner, and religion comes up. When Jaclyn criticizes religions for being male-dominated and focused, Kate admits that she embraced Christianity and enjoys attending church now that she moved to Texas with her husband. Kate explains that her family attends one of those megachurches the American South is famous for, which have become hotbeds of political and social conservatism since the 1990s. Jaclyn, assuming that Kate is still politically liberal, notes that it must be uncomfortable for her to be around that type of conservative culture, which leads Kate to say it’s not weird at all because she identifies as independent.

What follows is an exploration of the fleeting nature of personal politics and its divisiveness. Most Americans do not have deeply held political beliefs. Instead, their politics is about self-interest—it revolves around what helps them and those they love in the moment. That is on display in this scene.

Laurie and Jaclyn find out that Kate’s husband voted for Trump, and Kate likely did. The duo is shocked that she would defend her Republican husband and the Trump-voting churchgoers. Kate describes them as “good people with good families” and notes, “The church is really pretty.” The awkward scene ends with Kate inviting her friends to Austin and an unconvincing promise from Laurie and Jaclyn to go. Later, Kate overhears Laurie and Jaclyn, possibly mocking Kate’s politics.

The scene triggered a viral discussion on social media, with conservatives saying it exemplifies how intolerant liberals can be about Trump-supporting friends or friends who, at the very least, defend Trump supporters. The duo had no issues with Kate’s potential flaws until she hinted that she may have voted for Trump. In an interview aired this week, Coon and Bibb said the scene drives home the discomfort people have talking about politics in the Trump era and how people judge each other based on who they voted for.

Liberals, meanwhile, saw the scene as an example of how insincere people’s politics could be. Hinted as once politically progressive, Kate has become alienated from those politics, clearly expressing that she has become more conservative since moving to Texas, or at least more comfortable with conservatism. Liberals would agree that her progressive politics were never genuine and that Kate shapeshifts to fit the culture and worldview of whoever the dominant group is. When she was on the coasts with her friends, she was progressive, and now that she’s in Texas with her Republican husband and community, she’s conservative. She identifies as “independent” as a shield because the label allows her to shift her politics on the dime based on convenience credibly.

My analysis is that it’s probably a mix of both. The show’s creator, Mike White, hasn’t shied away from critiquing progressive politics and worldviews. The show’s first season, which aired in mid-2021 when the backlash to progressive social policies was first percolating, offered a critique of “wokeness” lacking in media at the time.

Regardless of where you fall on the scene – if you think it shows the intolerance of liberals, the fleeting political stances of many Americans, or both, it’s a scene that has been playing out all over the country in real life, especially in the past five years.

It is very reminiscent of the experiences of many liberal Gen Xers and Millennials like myself, who came to politics through the social activism of the 1990s and 2000s, culminating in Barack Obama’s election. There was always this expectation that our politics would never change and that many of us would leave the liberal bastions on the coasts, move to “red” America, and turn it purple and blue. Unlike our Boomer parents, who went from burning bras in the 1960s and 1970s to voting for tax cuts and harsher police tactics in the 1980s and 1990s, we would remain faithful to our progressive worldview.

To some extent, that’s happened. Millennials remain the most progressive generation, but Gen Xers, a major driver of Clinton-era Democratic support and part of the Obama coalition, have become the most right-wing generation. Even older millennials have shifted right when compared to as recently as 2016.

The real-life Kates have been numerous in the last five years since the COVID-19 Pandemic. As the pandemic and the economic growth that existed on either side of it drove aging Gen Xers and Millennials like Leslie Bibb’s Kate out of the progressive cities and into more conservative areas, these same people have put their progressive politics in the rear-view mirror. I have seen many progressives leave New York for a more rural or suburban lifestyle, promise to bring their politics with them, and influence these hardcore conservative areas to shift left, only to completely abandon their progressive politics once they plant roots in their new communities. Whenever I asked them what happened, they usually gave me some similar answers to what Kate gave on The White Lotus:

“They’re good people. They have great families.”

I know one formerly progressive person who moved to North Carolina in 2023 and adopted a more rugged rural lifestyle that included farming, hiking, and hunting. He got married and had a kid and has become quite conservative, arguing that owning guns and joining the National Rifle Association was his inflection point. Another friend who joined Women’s Marches in 2017 voted for Trump in 2024 because she was concerned for her 2-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter, whom she felt would grow up “marginalized” in a “woke anti-white” society. I even have my own Kate – a college-era friend who moved to Texas in 2017 to " turn it blue.” A year after she moved there, she got involved with Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign and sent me campaign swag. She has since become a born-again Christian and a hardcore conservative who regularly rants about trans girls in sports, a top priority, she says, because she’s concerned for the safety of her four-year-old daughter¹. Despite progressives arguing otherwise, none expressed openness to any economic progressive platform. The North Carolina guy even argued Medicare For All was “retarded,” and his former support for it is indicative of how progressivism “brainwashes you into believing stupid shit.” His political journey closely aligns with his favorite source for news – Joe Rogan – who gave a tepid and short-lived endorsement to Bernie Sanders in 2019 and now is a hardcore Trump supporter who basically serves as Elon Musk’s publicist.

For many younger people, especially Gen Xers and Millennials from the 1990s-2010s, progressivism served their interests. The movement attracted them with ideas like affordable college and healthcare. It also served as a break from their culturally conservative post-war communities and allowed them to be part of key civil rights fights, like the LGBTQ and immigrant rights movements. In the 2000s, progressivism was primarily a vehicle for Millennials to express dissatisfaction with the Iraq War and extreme social conservatism. Eventually, however, these generations got better-paying jobs, married, and started having families. Their priorities changed, and their younger rebellious spirit faded. Protecting their families, households, and communities became a job only conservatives are suited for. This zeitgeist became even more apparent when the stability of society appeared to fall under threat by anti-capitalist progressives during and after the pandemic.

The pandemic was destabilizing for everyone, but none more than progressive communities in large liberal cities and college towns. Many of these communities were shattered by months and, in some cases, a year or longer of COVID-19-related shutdowns and restrictions. Meanwhile, conservative culture thrived, attracting converts to the rebellious nature of thumbing their noses at the smartypants elite demanding adherence to seemingly arbitrary rules, first related to the pandemic – like mask mandates and Zoom meetings – and later at progressive ideas in general, like pronouns, land acknowledgments, and forgiving student loans these generations struggled to pay off and finally did.

I imagine Kate as one of those who moved to Texas during or just before the pandemic and saw the chaos and instability in New York and Los Angeles and the priorities of the modern progressive movement that felt alienating to her. She began to feel glad she wasn’t there and warm to the safety and comfort of her Texas lifestyle. While Jaclyn and Laurie were at home doing Zoom meetings with friends and staying six feet apart in masks – something that may have contributed to Laurie being unable to meet a man, a key plot element – Kate had her need for human interaction filled at her “pretty church,” where pandemic restrictions never went beyond May 2020.

Indeed, that happened to many of my liberal-leaning friends and acquaintances in 2020 and 2021 and would be one explanation for the character’s arc.

1. She met the baby’s father while both volunteered with the Beto O’Rourke campaign in 2018. Both are MAGA-voting “independents” living outside Houston today.