Women whose husbands voted for President Donald Trump are gathering online to support one another.
Carole Catherine, who learned her husband Tim backed Trump the day after the 2016 election, started the "Wives of the Deplorables" group on Facebook last year to figure out how to speak to her partner about politics, reported CNN.
"I didn't know that he's anti-abortion," she said. "I didn't know that he is so emotional about immigration. Both of us never really fleshed out those issues."
Catherine said group members are glad to have a place to talk about how it feels to be married to a Trump supporter.
"There is a big wall between us like never before," one woman told the group. "We've been married 45 years and I adore him. Except this. I have GOP friends and I love them. But it's hard to be married to a man who I thought shared the same values."
Democrat Joe Biden leads Trump by an average of 25 points among women voters, and white women in particular are moving away from the president since the last election, despite his often clumsy attempts to woo them back.
"I'm a suburban woman, I have kids, I go to a job everyday," said Gretchen Wisehart, a Democrat married to a Trump-backing Republican. "There were a lot of women who voted for him in 2016 as the lesser of two evils. But his constant rhetoric, the way he demeans women, it turns women off. It turns them the other way. I hear it from a lot of people."
Catherine said group membership has grown in the final months of the 2020 election, but she sees a ray of hope in her own relationship with comments her husband has made about Trump.
"'What's the a-hole and chief saying today?'" Catherine said her husband recently asked. "And I was like, 'I love you!'"
But she said the Trump presidency has done real harm to their marriage.
"We've had some really good conversations recently, where I can tell that we agree on more than I think, and it makes me feel so good," Catherine said. "He wants things to be pre-politics, but that's the thing. Your relationship has changed forever, for good and for bad, and, you know, there's a little of both."