ThinkProgress Senior Editor Is Scared of His Plumber

A visit from a plumber left ThinkProgress senior editor Ned Resnikoff “rattled” due to fear that the plumber may have voted for Donald Trump.

Resnikoff stated his fears in a November Facebook post, a screenshot of which is now making the rounds on the Internet.

The plumbing visit, which came four days after the 2016 election, became a harrowing experience for Resnikoff even though the plumber was “a perfectly nice guy and a consummate professional.”

“He was a perfectly nice guy and a consummate professional,” Resnikoff shared. “But he was also a middle-aged white man with a southern accent who seemed unperturbed by this week’s news.”

Resnikoff said his fear was rooted in the chance that the plumber knew he was Jewish.

“While I had him in the apartment, I couldn’t stop thinking about whether he had voted for Trump, whether he knew my last name is Jewish, and how that knowledge might change the interaction we were having inside my own home,” he said.

The “uncertainty” of the situation left Resnikoff “rattled for some time.”

“I have no real reason to believe he was a Trump supporter or an anti-Semite, but in my uncertainty I couldn’t shake the sense of potential danger,” he wrote. “I was rattled for some time after he left.”

Resnikoff says that he is does not often have a “sense of danger” because he is “still a straight, white guy who can phenotypically pass for gentile” and his “first name is pretty WASP-y.”

Resnikoff used his experience to explain how “ambiguous social interactions now feel unsafe and unpredictable in a way that they never did before.”

“Even if Trump is gone in four years, I don’t expect to ever reclaim that feeling of security,” Resnikoff concluded. “That’s just one more thing you voted for, if you voted for him.”