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.”
At the same time, if they are able to just skip off into the sunset AGAIN we will be back here before long. Every. Single. Time. This shit happens, the shitty mother fuckers who wouldn’t listen to a fucking word anyone said get to destroy society, enable the deaths of millions, and then go back to doing the crossword on Sundays because we have to give them an out so we can have a society.
Fuck that. I want their faces ground on the fucking gravel. I want them to ALL know exactly how fucking moronic they are and to remember it for their entire lives.
The people responsible, meaning the people at the top of their internal hierarchies, should be held accountable and shown no mercy. Even the people who enabled it by their support should be held accountable, at least to the degree that they contributed to the problem.
But people willing to change should be given an opportunity to do so. I can’t explain how counterproductive and idiot it is to reject your enemy’s former supporters when they finally decide to turn on them. That is not how you win wars, especially when you’re the underdog.
I don’t believe for a god damn second that WE are the underdogs. We may not be in the government but there are far fewer of them than us.
I honestly don’t believe them when they say they realized they were wrong. In the vast majority of cases, they are just now being affected by their policies. They are the exact same people who voted for trump 3 times. They haven’t changed. I don’t want to walk with them. I don’t trust them.
After the civil war, did we hold anyone to account? After the Nazis were defeated, were all officers and government officials held to account? Beyond that, did we hold any of the people who supported these ghoulish regimes, through bitter war and death, to account? Or did they just fold back in and disappear like snakes in the grass, dripping poison in the ears of society until they could foment more turmoil to take advantage of and seize power. It is generational.
I refuse to allow them back into polite society with but an apology, if we are lucky, as you suggest.
I mean they only control the police, military, prisons, and intelligence agencies and infrastructure. They’ve got the corporations in their pockets and a stranglehold on taxpayer dollars, a trifecta in the executive and legislative branches, with a stacked supreme court.
But you’re right, that totally doesn’t make us the underdogs /s
You are absolutely right. But I still think that if people were slightly more motivated it would be a very one sided dispute. Motivation in the form of starvation is approaching. So I suppose we are the underdog because we are currently sleeping, but waking up.