On an unseasonably warm December day in 2017, about a year into Donald Trump’s first presidency, I found myself at my uncle’s home in suburban Virginia for the usual family lunch, with injera, whiskey and impromptu eskista, the shoulder-shaking Ethiopian dance.

Our host, Mesfin, had immigrated to the US in the late 1990s after receiving a Diversity Immigrant Visa – better known as the ‘green card lottery’, which randomly selects about 50,000 recipients each year from millions of applicants. A month before our lunch, Trump announced he intended to end the programme, which he claimed was bringing “terrorists” into the US.

So it was a surprise when Mesfin suddenly announced that he had voted for Trump. Like many of my uncles, he had cycled through various niche Ethiopian industries; he started as a parking lot attendant, then ran a small store catering to the Habesha community, before driving a taxi.

Asked to explain his choice, Mesfin mostly dwelt on his disappointment with Barack Obama. He was particularly irate that Obama had described the Ethiopian government as “democratically elected” during a visit in 2015, even as that year’s elections – like all prior and subsequent Ethiopian elections – were a sham.

Back in 2017, it was easy to dismiss Mesfin’s political realignment. But in the eight years since, what I thought was a singular and idiosyncratic voice has become much more common in the Ethiopian-American community. During my sister’s wedding last autumn, several other uncles enthusiastically informed us they planned to vote for Trump.

After the wedding, my cousin Melat and I drew up a list of possible Trump voters in our family. “Did Elias vote for Trump?” I asked. For the past two years, Elias and I had worked to sponsor two of our cousins languishing as refugees in Uganda. Their best chance to settle in the US was through a programme called the ‘Welcome Corps’, which Joe Biden’s administration had initiated – but Trump’s America was not in a welcoming mood. Before my cousin could answer, I interjected, “Wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

In my family, no one had voted before 2008, when many of my relatives excitedly cast ballots for Obama. In 2012, after we received citizenship, my parents and I did the same. But disappointment with Obama ran high among my Trump-curious relatives. What my relatives saw as Obama’s doublespeak was cast aside for Trump’s cruel honesty. They joked that Trump was an ‘African leader’. The strongman who says and does anything, unbound by the law or decorum, was deeply familiar. As Solomon, the first in my family to settle in the Washington, DC area in the 1980s, told me: “At least he tells you what he really thinks of you.”

Solomon and other relations had lived through a communist revolution in the 1970s that promised liberation and descended into a reign of terror. Those who hadn’t left by the fall of the Derg junta in 1991 then lived under a new coalition government, led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). This new authoritarian regime produced state-led economic growth, but also exacerbated inequality and weaponised ethnicity.

So, when Abiy Ahmed became prime minister in 2018, my relatives in the diaspora celebrated his democratic reforms and cheered his Nobel Peace Prize – only to despair again when civil war and repression returned.

On the day of the US presidential election in 2020, Abiy’s government began its assault on Tigray, Ethiopia’s northernmost state, which was still governed by the TPLF. The two-year civil war led to the deaths of between 160,000 and 600,000 people.

Most of my relatives supported what the government described as a counterinsurgency campaign, harbouring grievances that ethnic Amharas had been marginalised during three decades of TPLF-dominance. When the Biden administration tepidly and belatedly responded by imposing sanctions on Ethiopia, Abiy’s Ethiopian-American supporters believed that Washington was pursuing regime change to restore the TPLF to power.

Such insinuations were carried on popular YouTube news shows like Zehabesha, specifically tailored to the Ethiopian diaspora. On these low-budget productions, fast-talking commentators offer a conspiratorial spin on the day’s news over stills and photographs clipped from elsewhere.

In Northern Virginia, home to a segment of the country’s largest Ethiopian-American community, a new lobby group sent out mass messages on WhatsApp and appeared at Ethiopian churches and restaurants to urge a vote for the Republicans in the state’s 2021 governor’s election. “The Democratic party right now is the Biden administration, and they blindsided us on foreign policy,” one previously loyal Ethiopian-American voter told The Washington Post. “We were Democrats because we believed in the system. But everybody in the Ethiopian community is feeling the pain of neglect.”

‘We believed in the system.’ That could be my relatives’ mantra. The immigrant dream is beset by a tragic irony: at its base, it consists of the wish to produce conditions of prosperity and comfort for children – conditions, unavoidably, in which children will be nothing like their parents.

Educated in America’s schools, fluent in its language and in its unwritten rules, the second generation’s upward mobility is supposed to compensate for the sacrifices of the first. But this process has always been a painful one. With greater assimilation also comes loss – an inability to understand each other, a feeling of occupying two different worlds. When the son sags his pants and pierces an ear, or when the daughter cuts off her hair or refuses to wear a dress to church, the parent senses that the new world is trying to swallow them whole.

Now the bargain of upward mobility has become an uncertain one, and not only for the newest Americans. When Elias’s two daughters graduated from college, they didn’t enter the world of white-collar professionals, but instead joined their mother in care work. Solomon’s daughter dropped out after taking a few classes at a community college and started using fentanyl.

Shortly before the 2021 Virginia election, a family friend there described attending a church Zoom meeting at which an Ethiopian-American teacher told parents that public schools are required to provide sex education. The teacher urged them to make their opposition known at their local schools, to attend school board meetings, and to vote.

Last year, there was a crisis among my extended family in Seattle when the son of Elias’s sister-in-law, Selam, returned from primary school and asked his mother what his pronouns were. Convinced that public schools were going to make her son gay, she withdrew him and his siblings midway through the year and enrolled them in a private Catholic school. Selam also voted for Trump in 2024.

It is easy to dismiss my relatives and many like them as cultural conservatives from traditional societies who are replaying the conflicts of their homelands. But my relatives didn’t step out of the Middle Ages and into postmodern America: in their lifetimes, Ethiopia has seen a communist revolution, its overthrow, the arrival of neoliberal capitalism, and now a second civil war. Far from a reflexive backwardness, their conservatism emerges from their negotiation of these crises and their experience of migration.

Absent the mid-century political and social institutions – such as trade unions and civil rights organisations – that could integrate new immigrants, my relatives have received their political education in a highly privatised form. Rather than unionised workplaces and community centres, people like Selam, Solomon and Mesfin receive their political lessons via YouTube channels and WhatsApp chats.

During the 2020 Democratic primary – the last time I felt hopeful about American politics – I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and campaigning for Bernie Sanders. His field organisers in Iowa reached out because they wanted an Amharic speaker to talk with Ethiopian meatpackers in the state. I gladly did so, and helped with some translation. On the day of the caucus, the Ethiopians joined fellow meatpackers from Honduras and Macedonia to hand Sanders an early victory.

What mattered most to Wendwosen Biftu, a meatpacker I spoke to on the phone, was not that we could communicate in Amharic, but that organisers had shown up day in and day out at his workplace and home. He told me they were the first people concerned to hear about his experience, and what he wanted for the world. I often wonder what has become of him.