This is the joint testimonial of Ron and Chrissey Kelley.

Ron: I was born in Port Huron, Michigan, in 1970. It was a mid-sized town, about 45 minutes north of Detroit. It was a working-class union town. I’m half Native American; my maternal grandma was the first in our family off the reservation in Oklahoma. My parents divorced when I was about six, and my mom remarried.

My mom and stepdad worked at the Morton’s Salt plant in Marysville. But when the plant closed in 1984, we were plunged into poverty. My parents could only get jobs at small, non-union manufacturing companies that paid minimum wage. My mom was a union organizer; she was always getting fired!

My parents didn’t talk much about politics, but I knew they always supported Democratic candidates. The Democrats seemed to be friendlier to the unions — as long as the unions supported them.

My stepfather was very abusive. On top of that, I grew up around criminal motorcycle clubs, because of people on my mom’s side of the family. I didn’t see a future in that world, so as soon as I graduated from high school in 1988, I joined the Army and got out. That summer, I married my high school sweetheart right before I left for basic training.

I was a Republican by that point. I based my beliefs on local politics, and I blamed state and local Democrats for the closure of the Morton’s plant. I didn’t understand how they could let that happen to the main industry in our tri-county area. 

After I joined the military, I started realizing there’s more to politics than local elections. I became a big supporter of defense spending. Most of the guys in my unit were Republicans, too. I cast my first vote for president for George H.W. Bush in 1988. I was in basic training. The drill instructors had us all sit on the floor in our barracks to fill out our absentee ballots. One said, “I can’t tell you who to vote for, but you’re voting Republican.”

I served as a heavy engineer, helping build roads and runways. I was deployed to Kuwait in December 1990, a few weeks before the U.S. launched Operation Desert Storm. We were based in a neutral zone between Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait. When armor would move up we would follow. We pulled crude oil directly from pipelines and poured it on the sand to create makeshift roads for heavy equipment. I was there for about eight months. 

One day, we made a resupply run to Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. I was driving a 2 1/2-ton truck. On the way back, the driver of a large military truck carrying an M-1 Abrams tank swerved into my lane and crashed into me. Something that was on the tank hit me in the side of the head, breaking my jaw and elbow and knocking me out. When I came to, I thought I’d lost the side of my face and my arm, because I couldn’t feel them. That was my first traumatic brain injury.

I left active duty in February 1992 (and joined the Michigan Army National Guard). I worked as a mechanic for a while, doing some welding. In 1997 I was accepted to pipefitter trade school. The other pipefitters in our union were all hardcore, insane Democrats. One time, some non-union contractors came onto a job I was on, and their car had a bumper sticker supporting George W. Bush. The other guys verbally abused them, and told them never to show up again. I learned to keep my mouth shut. 

I fully supported how George W. Bush handled the aftermath of 9/11. I wholeheartedly backed his invasion of Afghanistan; I was ready to be first in line to go. 

When Bush started talking about invading Iraq, I went along with the idea. Back in 1991, we captured some Iraqi artillery and they had chemical weapons stockpiled in their bunkers. Some were loaded in the guns’ breeches. We thought they had used them on us in battle, but that was never confirmed. So because of that experience, I thought Bush’s claim about WMD’s [weapons of mass destruction] was plausible.

But the longer the war dragged on, the more the official story changed. I started questioning the claims about WMDs. This was fairly early on, less than a year after the invasion. I ended up opposing the war. At one point, our leadership in the Michigan Army National Guard was looking for volunteers to deploy to Iraq. They pressured me to go. I kept saying, “I’ve been there, I have no desire to go back.”

When the housing bubble burst in 2008, Michigan got hit hard. I was out of work for about seven months. I finally got a pipefitter job at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia, so in 2009 I moved there (and transferred to the George Air Force Reserve). That happened to keep me from going to Iraq; around that time my old Guard unit in Michigan was activated and deployed.

I ended up getting sent to Afghanistan in 2012. I was there for a year. We were at Shindand, an old Russian air base in the western part of the country. We were constantly under attack from rockets and RPGs. They hit us almost every night. I got to the point where I’d sleep through it. I adopted the attitude of, if it’s my time, it’s my time. 

It was so dangerous that planes flying in with troops or equipment wouldn’t turn off their engines after landing. Sometimes they wouldn’t even come to a full stop; they would just roll along the tarmac, shove everything out the back, and take off again. One night, I was running across the airfield to retrieve some gear, and the next thing I knew I was being dragged along the ground. That was my second traumatic brain injury.

After I got back home, I transferred to the Georgia Air National Guard until I retired from military service in 2015.

The first time Trump ran, I was tired of politicians and all their shenanigans. I watched Fox News exclusively, and I fell for the propaganda that white Christian males were under attack, that “they” were trying to silence us. 

Trump wasn’t a politician; I thought it was what we needed, so I voted for him in 2016. I was fairly happy with his performance in his first term. I wasn’t really deep into politics, so I didn’t follow things too closely, plus I was getting all my news from Fox. So I went along with the crowd and thought he was doing a good job. I didn’t know his staff was holding him back from all the crazy stuff he wanted to do. 

When Trump tried to ban Muslims a week after he took office, it resonated with me. I grew up near Dearborn, which has a huge Muslim population. I had bought into the Fox narrative that Muslims were trying to impose Sharia law to enforce their lifestyle, that they didn’t let the police into certain areas. I was just regurgitating what I was fed from Fox.

After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, I bought into the Fox rhetoric that the neo-Nazis weren’t as racist as everyone said. I accepted the argument that the woman who was killed [Heather Heyer] wasn’t where she should have been, and the guy who hit her with his car [James Fields Jr.] was just trying to get out of there.

Right before the pandemic started, my second wife (we had married in 2007 after my first wife and I divorced in 2005) left me and our two young boys. So after everything closed down, I had to homeschool a kindergartner and a fifth grader while holding down a full-time job. Needless to say, I didn’t pay close attention to how Trump handled Covid, but in general I was okay with how he did.

When Trump claimed the 2020 election had been stolen, at first I believed him. They spoke about it so much it burned a little hole in my head to the point that I felt something fishy was going on. My perspective on the January 6 attack came from Fox. I called the people who stormed the Capitol patriots. I believed the election wasn’t fair and these people were patriots expressing their dissatisfaction with the government.

After Joe Biden took office, he wiped out most of Trump’s executive orders, which turned me off, along with the big push for DEI. I felt I needed more information than just Fox. I reached out for other news sources. I started listening to podcasts and watching Al-Jazeera, BBC, and other stations. I started to feel something was wrong, that things weren’t quite what I thought they were. 

I still believed Republicans were the better party, but I realized that with certain issues — such as January 6 — there was more to it than what Fox was spoonfeeding everyone. 

By some time in 2022, I realized the election hadn’t been stolen, that there was no way the tales about tampering with voting machines were true. I still considered myself MAGA, however, based on my belief that Trump had done a good job in his first term.

I met Chrissey in 2023, and we married in 2024.

Chrissey: I worked as a paraprofessional at his younger son Josh’s elementary school. He was in one of my periods each day. I heard he would be leaving because Ron was moving. God told me to make a photobook for Josh so he’d have memories of the school. I had to contact Ron to get the photobook to Josh, and the rest is history!

I was born in 1975 in Mequon, Wisconsin, right outside Milwaukee. We moved to a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia when I was in second grade. We weren’t lacking for anything. My dad was a consultant for a large consulting firm. My mom was a teacher but when my sister was born, she became a stay at home mom. We were very active in our Lutheran church, always serving the less fortunate.

My parents didn’t discuss politics much at home, but I knew we were Republicans. My mom’s parents were huge Republicans, too. 

After graduating from high school, I went to the University of Delaware for two years, but transferred to Penn State for my final two years. My parents divorced when I was 18, and I was having a hard time with that. I graduated in 1998 with a BS in Human Development and Family Studies. 

I moved to Georgia, and worked in a variety of jobs. I was an activity director in assisted living homes, and later got into sales and recruiting. I also did some mission work through my church, which was part of the Association of Vineyard Churches. (After college, I had switched from the Lutheran church to become non-denominational.) I went to China twice, first to Nanning for two months in 2001, and then to Beijing for a month in 2003. Everything was underground; the first time we went as English teachers, but we were also secretly sharing the love of Jesus and planting the seeds of Christianity. The second time I went as a nanny.

I was somewhat aware politically during the Tea Party movement, but I wasn’t really involved in politics until I met Ron. 

When Trump ran the first time, I was his biggest fan. I think I watched every rally on television. There wasn’t much thought process there; I believed whatever Fox said. I was clueless — I didn’t question anything.

Ron: After working at Robins Air Force Base for five years, I worked at Fort Knox in Kentucky for a year, and then at the FAA for several years. In 2023, I joined HUD. I inspect buildings with Section 8 housing subsidies that need repair.

I inspect a building and issue a report, recommending whether we should pursue legal action against the owner or give them an opportunity to try to make it right. Owners who get Section 8 subsidies are supposed to reinvest the money in their buildings, to keep up with repairs and maintenance. I see so many problems: bug infestations, mold, you name it. I’ve even seen holes in floors I could fit through. So many owners do the minimum they can to get by, then sell the property every couple of years.

When Trump ran in 2024, my investments had been doing poorly, and I blamed the market drop on Biden. We thought our stocks would pick up if Trump won. We had Trump signs, hats, lots of MAGA paraphernalia. We even bought a Trump model electric train!

After Trump took office in January 2025, our perspective changed dramatically. He started spreading lies that federal workers were lazy, staying at home, not even turning on computers. It was like a slap in the face. He created DOGE, which claimed — without evidence — that it found billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse. Once a week we had to list five things we had accomplished the previous week. They fired lots of people for “performance issues” when their last review was outstanding. Many were back on the job a month later because DOGE did it the wrong way. Then they would force them to take deferred resignation.

 That’s when I began to turn away from MAGA. I was pissed. I’m okay with someone criticizing the agency, but when I get personally attacked by people who have no clue — “You guys are lazy, you don’t do anything” — I take offense. And of course, Fox followers — including my own family — bought it. Trump let DOGE loose to go through our agency like a rabid dog. They screwed up everything; instead of making things better, they made them worse. There’s a whole new level of bureaucracy, so things are much more inefficient. We now have additional steps to approve grants for low-income housing projects; the process is like walking through tar. And they cut so many people that we’re seriously understaffed. My workload has become unbearable. I’m supposed to cover the whole southeastern U.S. Even though I’m working at breakneck speed, I just can’t get to everything; sometimes I have to throw my hands in the air. Everyone has the same issue.

We left MAGA, and that started a process that accelerated our political education. We stopped watching Fox; I started getting my news from independent journalists, from conservatives to ultra-leftists. I delete the ones who start spouting obvious lies or racist crap. Plus, I do my own research. If the White House puts out a statement, or a bill is proposed in Congress, I find it in the public record. Then I match it with what Trump says about it, and I can say, “That’s not what this says.”

That’s what gets me so hot, the lies. It’s gotten to the point where he’s changing his story all the time. Within the same press briefing he can give two completely different answers to the same question.

Chrissey: We’re very upset about the mass deportation campaign, too. Speaking as a Christian, I’ve researched Christian Nationalism, and that really woke me up. These people getting picked up and deported to countries they’re not from, that’s not what a Christian stands for. 

Ron: Trump said they were going to get rid of the criminals, which is now everybody who doesn’t look white. And he unleashed his masked domestic terrorists on us. I served in two wars, getting deployed three times, and nothing bothers me more than a civilian organization that has their people dress in military fatigues with military weapons driving through our streets, calling them law enforcement. If they’re dressed like that, they’re a paramilitary group. These masked terrorists, with no ID, covering their faces, are just snatching people off the street. That’s got me steaming mad. That’s not our country; we’ve never done that before until this guy came in.

Chrissey: When Ron started explaining to me about how they’re not following the Constitution, that was a huge wakeup call.

Ron: I know that what he’s doing is unconstitutional. There’s no question about it; they’re ignoring the protections the Founders put in place. They label people as criminals because they crossed the border illegally. That’s not a criminal offense, it’s a civil offense. They’re supposed to get due process, go to a judge, and have the judge decide. This is a racist agenda. If you say no, then you have your eyes closed and you’ve got your head buried in the sand. 

Chrissey: I’m also very upset about the Epstein files. I have a daughter and son from my previous marriage and two bonus sons. My daughter is ten. To know what happened to these girls and women, it’s disgusting. And they’ve been covering it up for years.

Ron: And now Trump has started the war in Iran. It’s so foolish; he said we obliterated their nuclear capabilities last June. Now we’re back saying they’re two weeks away from a nuclear bomb that can reach us. They’ve barely got rockets that reach Israel, and those are haphazardly dropping. There was no reason to go into Iran, we just made things worse. Look at how Iran is bombing countries around them, killing our economy.

Ron: My family is MAGA, and I’ve tried to talk to them, to my mom, but she went off on me, and now she won’t have anything to do with me. It’s easier for my family to ignore anything that’s uncomfortable. Their motto is, “You’re either for us or against us.”

Chrissey: The majority of my family would consider themselves Republicans and most would say they are MAGA. Several say, “This is what Fox says, and that’s how it is.” I just don’t talk to them about politics anymore.

Ron: I’ve been very outspoken with people in my circle. If I can plant the seed of doubt in just one person, if I can get them to doubt, to start the research, they may change their thinking. That has happened with one or two people I am in communication with.

Chrissey: In fact, a number of people in our circle are questioning things now. They’re still MAGA, but they’re questioning things. 

I’m just thankful we’ve realized we were being misled about so many things. I proudly voted for a Democrat for the first time in a special election last month. I now consider myself an independent.

Ron: At the local level, I vote for candidates based on their issues. At the federal level, after a lifetime of being a Republican, now I’m a Democrat no matter what.

                                                                                                                                                                        —March 2026