These are just ordinary people, doing their best

If you follow the suggestion I am about to make and read what some of the people I've just encountered have to say for themselves, you may not immediately warm to them. But you might find the experience instructive, as I did. The country is in such straits under the Trump regime, it's important to learn we can become unlikely allies and maybe friends.

Rich Logis left MAGA and he created a community with others to share their experiences of detaching from the Trump cult. He calls it Leaving MAGA. Here are a couple of testimonies from among dozens:

Michael Sirback: I was born and raised in a small, Republican town in Ohio; I still live there today. I had a pretty good childhood. When it came to politics, my parents didn’t really talk about it much as I was growing up in the 90s.

My family started discussing politics in 2015, when I was in my early 20s. My parents had voted for Barack Obama, but they were drawn to Donald Trump on cultural issues. They saw him as a guy who was going to end gay marriage and transgender rights.

... Still, I just wasn’t interested in politics. I didn’t even register to vote in 2016, although I was hoping Trump would win. After he became president, I started paying a bit more attention. 

... My feelings started to seriously change around the beginning of 2024, thanks in large part to the fact that I am dating Shey, a woman from the Philippines. My relationship with her opened my eyes to how much damage Trump is doing when it comes to immigrants. When Trump ran for president this time, his campaign was nothing but non-stop fear-mongering and hatred towards immigrants, with all its rhetoric about them being rapists, murderers, and the like. ...

... With Trump, only White Christian Nationalists will get treated with decency. That really worries me.

I now believe the Jan. 6 attack was completely unacceptable, a big attack on our democracy. I’m still hoping Trump is held accountable for it, but I have a hard time believing he will be.

Looking back, I see how much disinformation there was about the pandemic. I’ve evolved with regards to women’s rights, as well. I was always pro-life to the core, but now I believe that a woman should make her own decisions, that it’s not my place to tell a woman what to do with her body.

Watching Trump lie about hurricane disaster relief money going to undocumented immigrants, and lying about Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, just reinforced my feelings. I now know that he would much rather tell a lie than admit to being wrong about anything. ...

• • •

PattyAnn Giles: I was born and raised in Connellsville, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was the 1960s; my parents were JFK Democrats: pro-life, culturally conservative. My dad was a big union guy; he worked for West Penn Power. My mom was an administrative secretary for a local hospital. ...

I started paying attention to politics when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980. I liked his message, and my dad and I got into it a couple of times over Reagan. I remember asking my dad, “Can you explain to me how you’re pro-life and you support the Democratic Party?” He said, “Well, the Democrats aren’t forcing women to abort. I’m personally against abortion and I would try to talk someone out of it, but I’m not going to be a single-issue voter.”

... A huge influence on my politics came through my becoming a born-again Pentecostal Christian when I was 17. I had a friend in that branch of the church, and she told me Catholics aren’t real Christians. ...

That evangelical message coordinated very well with Reaganism. It became a spiritual journey for me. It reinforced for me that I needed to support the Republican Party, because I saw the Democratic Party as amoral, too secular. I thought if the country were more in line with Christian values, we’d be better off.

I would go to Republican rallies and it would feel like an old-time tent revival. I felt a real fervor; it was very exciting.

I got married in 1988 and moved to northern Virginia. I became a Licensed Practical Nurse. I was still a conservative evangelical, and I got involved with some local Republican groups. I was a delegate in 1994 to the state GOP convention in Richmond as a supporter of Oliver North for US Senate. I was a member of the Republican Women’s Committee, and I worked on some local campaigns. 

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, I thought, “How could anybody support this guy? He’s slimy. He cheats on his wife.” I thought he was a sexual predator, and so wasn’t morally fit to serve as president.

... Around 2003, when I got divorced, I found myself moving away from the evangelical movement. I still had those basic values, but I was noticing things going on in the church that made me uncomfortable. I started hearing about sexual abuse. ...

The next important chapter in my political development came around 2012. My kids were coming of age, and I had friends whose kids were coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD and terrible injuries.  ...

I started to think, like a lot of leftists, that the wars were just to enrich the weapons industry, and that the Iraq invasion was just the result of a Bush family vendetta against Saddam Hussein. I soured on the hawkish, neocon wing of the Republican party.

You can see how this tracks logically. By this point I’m saying to myself, “Both parties suck. They’re elitist, they’re working for their millionaire donors, they’re giving us a load of crap.”

Then in 2015 Trump came along. He had an anti-establishment message, and I was mad at the establishment. He wasn’t my first pick, but after he won the Republican primary I got behind him. He struck me as kind of creepy, crass, with a lot of bluster. ...

... I got more and more excited about Trump. I liked that he wasn’t beholden to big donors. He was paying for his own campaign. I liked that he talked tough, that he said patriotic things. I liked his America First anti-war message, that we needed to get out of all these expensive wars. I liked that he was saying, “I’m a rich guy, I have access, I know who the crooks are in DC, I’m going to expose them, we’re going to get rid of them, we’re going to hold them accountable, we’re going to be more transparent.” ...

... Over the next months, I didn’t like that he was playing footsie with dictators and autocrats. I thought, “What is going on here? You act like you want to date them. You said you were going to be tough on this kind of stuff. Where’s this coming from?” So my balloon started to deflate a little.

More credible information emerged in 2017 and 2018 about Trump molesting women, how he talked creepily about his daughter, and walked in on beauty pageant contestants while they were getting dressed. I’m a victim of rape; it seriously traumatized me. And it traumatizes me to hear how powerful men get away with this kind of stuff. 

I was still within the tolerable spectrum in terms of my support for Trump and MAGA, but I was starting to get a bad taste in my mouth. 

... Trump’s whole “stop the steal” campaign, his nonsense about the election being stolen because of widespread voter fraud, the January 6 coup attempt, and subsequent reports about how there was a coordinated plan to overturn the election, were the final nail in the coffin for me. I officially walked away from MAGA in 2021.

Then I asked myself, “In what other ways have I been lied to?” I started digging deeper, and I started to learn a lot. ...

The site provides dozens more of these stories of MAGAs who changed their minds. They are us, coming from different lives.