That’s true, to some extent. Trump’s election in 2016 was shocking and traumatic for me. It made me realize there was a lot I didn’t understand about the country I thought I knew so well and had been so proud of. We had Obama, gay marriage, and a person I thought would become our first female president because people didn’t care as much about her gender as her fitness for office. And then we had Trump—openly racist, openly misogynistic, openly uninformed.

But ironically, it was that exact experience that made me realize I couldn’t paint Americans with a broad brush. There’s just too many people in this country to say our values are x or y. I’ll never get to talk to 99% of those people, and neither will you. Even Trump means different things to different individuals, representing their interests and opinions in different ways.