Last October, Ron, a 55-year-old construction analyst for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), was furloughed for 43 days as the Trump administration took a sledgehammer to federal agencies’ budgets under the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative led by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
“We voted for Trump, not realizing that he was going to slam as hard as he did, but it was on day one when he sat down, right after inauguration, and started signing those executive orders and just trashed us federal employees, it was a kick in the teeth,” Ron said.
“If people would just listen and research and do something other than just listen to Fox News, we may all be better off, but it’s going to take an open mind and an ability to say, ‘I made a mistake,’ because once you say you made a mistake, you can turn the ship around,” said Chrissey Kelley, 50, a stay-at-home mom.
Speaking out against MAGA cost the Kelleys relationships with friends and family members who support Trump, but in sharing their story, they hope to inspire others having doubts about the GOP.
“It’s okay to be wrong. You made a mistake, it was a bad choice, but it’s not the end of the world. We can fix it. We just got to ride it out and hold strong and support each other through it,” Ron said.
. . . Chrissey said she became a Republican as soon as she started voting.
“You were just a conservative. There was no thought behind it. You listen to Fox News, and you listen to conservative outlets, and you’re spoon-fed,” Chrissey said.
Ron, who served in the military for 25 years, said the 2008 housing market crash left him “really disillusioned with the Democratic Party.”
When he couldn’t find work in Detroit, he moved to Georgia. He supported Republicans because he associated them with bigger spending on defense.
Ron said he supported Trump with donations, bumper stickers and the “whole nine yards” of MAGA.
“I bought into the lie about the stolen election and all that, and I thought January 6 insurrectionists were actually patriots,” Ron said.
“I just remember being content with thinking that he was what we needed, and he was going to drain the swamp in Washington until he got into office this third term, and realizing that I was dumb as a rock, and I believed everything that I was spoon fed.”
. . . “Just watching the policies of what’s happening in our world today unfold one by one by one, I just started drawing up very different conclusions and found out that I was clueless, and most people are today, but now I’m awake and looking at it for what it is, and I cannot believe that he had my support,” Chrissey said.
“It’s lie after lie after lie.”
Ron said he now votes for Democrats, and Chrissey said she considers herself an Independent but has voted for Democrats three times now, something she “never thought in my entire life” would happen.
“The road we’re headed down now, if we don’t turn this truck around, we’re so close to going off the edge of the cliff that we need to stick together,” Ron said.
“We need to put our country back together. It might take decades, but don’t give up. We need to be vocal. Stay strong, and follow our laws and Constitution, and hold strong with our values, not the values that the MAGA claims that we have, but the values that we’ve had in the past 250 years from the founding of the country til Joe Biden’s era.”
Yeah I don’t understand all the negativity towards folks like this. Yes they made a monstrous mistake that may be unfixable but I’d rather have people that can see their failures and are willing to change any day of the week. I’ve made multiple mistakes in my youth that I learned from and became a better person. And folks like this are better equipped at helping others to see the light that are in the same boat.
Believe me we are going to need as many people as we can to see the empires has no clothes (but I literally never want to see him naked…I’m gonna vomit)
Skepticism whether they’ve “changed their ways” or just rejected the one person who hurt them.
These are people who were totally down with draining the swamp of all its career politicians and bureaucrats, right up until they were the bureaucrat being drained. They were down with storming the Capitol so only real American votes would be counted. Article bravely stays away from racism. The whole “be a conservative like everyone else” and “vote for Trump like everyone else” vibe suggests they’ll be ready to vote for the next demagogue who promises them easy solutions to intractable problems.
There’s no indication in the text that they have suddenly discovered empathy, only that they’ve learned small government policies cost them their government job. Maybe that’s just the way the article was written, but I don’t think empathy is something one just discovers at middle age.
Exactly. I will NEVER hold hands and sing Kumbaya with someone who condoned erasing my vote. They are my enemy forever.
And it’s a rare damn thing to find a conservative who condemns Jan6 and doesn’t try to excuse it as a simple “protest”. If that day had really gone their way, not a single fucking one would have stood up and spoken against it. Fuck them.
The problem is that elections have consequences. Big ones. Ones you can’t take back, ones you can’t undo. People have died. People have lost everything. People have been hurt in ways that there will never be any amends for, or any possible. People saw this coming and begged people for a decade to see reason, and they were ignored. These were their countrymen, their families, their people and they did it anyway. There are real, tangible consequences to these votes, this isn’t some abstract ideological game. These people have actively turned the wolves on their neighbours, and that’s not a “mistake” that’s easy to forgive. If your brother killed your son while you were screaming for him to stop the car, would you ever be able to forgive him? To trust his judgment ever again?
It’s a privilege to be one of the ones who were not so directly hurt by them. To be able to welcome their change of heart and offer them grace. Don’t ask those who don’t have that privilege to do it.
This is the big one for me.
This wasn’t a confusing thing. Like you said, it’s not abstract. This whole experience has probably been the most clearly definable political thing in the history of our nation. To make this kind of mistake with that in mind I have to assume they either have brain damage or pure, unadulterated hate toward their fellow Americans. And the consequences are generational. Decades to claw back. We will live the rest of our lives with some of these consequences.
Why…how, would I ever trust them with anything important ever again? They simply cannot handle the responsibility as functional adults.
Because they haven’t really learned anything. They just know Trump is awful, but as soon as MAGAs try to slip back to being Republicans again, and pretend MAGA never happened, these people will race back to it. They don’t think Republican policies are bad, just Trump.