I was born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1997, but I spent my first 14 years in Smyrna, Tennessee, about half an hour’s drive outside Nashville.

My elementary school was next to a plantation: the Sam Davis Home. We would walk over to the plantation a few times a year. They would have petting zoos. The whole atmosphere was fun. They would have the kids go in the fields to pick cotton. At Halloween they would have haunted hay rides through the cotton fields.

They told us the Davis family was good to its slaves. Those experiences at the plantation fed my racial ignorance and normalized my internal racism. 

I had a pretty normal childhood; my dad had been sober for years after being an alcoholic. But when I was about 14, he returned to alcoholism. He started hitting my mom and me.

I asked to spend the summer with my grandfather, who lived in Cape Coral, Florida. Once I got there, I convinced him to let me stay. I bounced between his house, my aunt’s house, and some friends’ houses.

My parents came down to live with me. We moved into my friend’s mom’s house, but my dad got us kicked out because of his drinking. We moved into a motel.

I was about to turn 15 when my mom got diagnosed with lung cancer. The day we were with her in the hospital getting her diagnosis, we learned that my grandma had passed away. Because of that extra trauma, they put my mom on really heavy sedatives. That put her on a crappy road of pain pill dependence; she was a victim of the opioid epidemic.

We lived off my dad’s unemployment checks and my mom’s disability. We were in and out of motels for a while. I remember on my 16th birthday we were flat broke. A social worker who was helping us asked what I wanted, and I said, “A grilled cheese sandwich.” She got us a frying pan so my mom could make the sandwich.

Eventually we got subsidized housing, a little two-bedroom apartment. We still had mom’s disability, but there were many times in the summer when we didn’t have electricity for a week or two because they couldn’t pay the bill.

I couldn’t afford to buy clothes for high school, or do any extracurricular activities. I ended up joining an anti-smoking coalition at school because my parents were very heavy smokers, and the health teacher dropped me off at home after meetings. I was really excited about that.

When I was 16 or 17, my boyfriend moved into our apartment. And that really marks the start of my MAGA journey. My boyfriend’s best friend was pretty well off; his family had a boat, and he had his own car, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. (My parents couldn’t afford a car.) His friend’s mom treated me like the daughter she never had; she bought me jewelry from the Home Shopping Network. 

I really looked up to this family. At the time I was a Democrat (although my parents had never discussed politics with us). They told me my family was in the situation it was in because we were Democrats. I vividly remember a coffee mug in their house that had a picture of Paul Revere saying, “The liberals are coming!”

They drilled into me the idea that Republicans are financially responsible; that if you want to have a nice life, you have to be a Republican.

Meanwhile, my best friend’s family was super heavy into conservative Republican politics. In one of the pictures of her the night of her high school prom, her dad is holding an AR-15 rifle.

We got evicted from our apartment, and I moved out. I was 17. My boyfriend and I lived in a rundown, dilapidated trailer in the back of his great grandmother’s property. I did whatever job I could get my hands on, but we were really deep in poverty. We ate a lot of Dollar Store food and Little Caesars pizzas – those could last you a good three days. 

We were still friends with my boyfriend’s best friend’s family. They became even more influential in my life. Looking back on it, I was like the frog in the boiling pot; I didn’t realize I was becoming fully indoctrinated. They would make little comments all the time. For example, they would point to my parents — who admittedly did abuse the system — as representatives of everyone on food stamps. 

I graduated from high school in 2015, and enrolled at Florida Southwestern State College. 

When Donald Trump came along and ran for president, my only knowledge of him was that he was on The Apprentice when I was a kid. I thought he had to be the smartest guy to have a job like that, just firing people.

I was a resentful kid. I hated the system. I felt really left behind and ignored. So I was a sucker for an underdog story, and Trump seemed like an underdog. He was talking about all these broken systems, how government was only for the rich, and how he loved America so much he wouldn’t take a dime in salary if he were elected. As a poor person, I couldn’t fathom someone saying they wouldn’t take a salary. That was a big selling point for me.

Meanwhile, my friends and their parents were telling me how great Trump was, as was my boss at the time. One thing that really resonated with me was how Trump said he loved America. I was very gung-ho on America; I loved the idea of what America could be. I was the type who would wear American flag cowboy boots with an American flag shirt. I even served in the Army for a short while.

I got my information from Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro. I enjoyed watching these well-dressed men rip into college students. My favorite was an influencer named John Burk, who never made it big.

Part of my problem was that I looked only to men for information; I assumed men knew better than me. Also, I never looked into things. I never took the time to fact check anything. If it sounded good, I believed it.

When there was the outcry over Trump’s quote about “grab her by the p–y,” my friend’s dad said, “That’s how men talk when nobody’s around,” so I thought, “Why is everybody making a big deal out of this?”

After Trump was elected the first time, I didn’t follow politics much. Having come of age in Obama’s America, I felt the country was safe and secure. I didn’t feel the need to tune in.

But I was a full-blown, Trump-loving MAGA member. I thought he was the coolest. 

I turned him into a regular guy in my brain. He was my next door neighbor, just a normal dude. I did not hold him to the appropriate standard of a president.

In 2018, I broke up with my boyfriend and moved to Texas to live with my sister and her husband. Just before Covid became huge headline news in the spring of 2020, my mom passed away. We never knew if it was Covid, but she already had breathing problems from her lung cancer, along with COPD and emphysema. Two weeks later, my grandfather got Covid from someone who went to my mom’s funeral and died. 

The people around me were saying, “Covid’s not real, that’s not how your grandpa died.” I was consumed with grief, and pregnant, but I still knew Covid was real. My son was born that  August. I was really checked out from politics after that, consumed with my newborn and a husband who was cheating on me.

I didn’t know Trump was claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him until I learned about it from Facebook MAGA groups. People whom I considered really smart were telling me, “You wait, any day now you’ll see that the election was stolen.”

I didn’t know Jan. 6 had happened, either. A co-worker who was a Trumper told me there were patriots at the Capitol who were arrested for protesting. I had no reason to doubt it. In my mind, if the election was stolen, they had every reason to protest.

Even after no evidence surfaced proving the election was stolen, I continued to believe it. I convinced myself it was true because it’s so rare for incumbents not to be reelected. But I paid no attention to the court cases, the recounts, or the audits. 

In the fall of 2022, my boyfriend — now my husband — and I took a road trip to spend Thanksgiving with his family in Montgomery, Alabama. I was taking online classes at Wayne State University, and my politics professor had us watch a PBS documentary on Jan. 6. 

I can vividly remember going through downtown Atlanta, watching the documentary on my iPad while my boyfriend drove. I paused it and asked him, “Did this stuff really happen?” And he said, “What do you mean, did this happen? Of course it did.”

I asked him, “Did people really go in and say they wanted to hang Mike Pence? Were they that disruptive? I thought they were just outside the Capitol.” He said, “No, that’s why they were arrested.”

I started researching, and learned about the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers. These were not good people. They said things like, “I don’t care what the Constitution says.” I thought, “What do you mean? That’s the most important thing. I love the Constitution.”

Thanks to that road trip, I was 100% done with MAGA. I was really mad that I missed what actually happened on January 6. I felt really, really dumb. I wondered how any politician could allow me to miss something like that. I lost all respect for Trump when I learned what happened.

That Thanksgiving trip turned out to be revelatory for me in other ways as well. I got to talk with my future husband’s uncle-in-law, who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and was serving in the Alabama House of Representatives. I pestered him with a lot of questions about politics.

Then we visited The Legacy Museum in Montgomery. You walk through exhibits that take you through the slave trade, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration, and you learn how all those things are connected. They have jars of dirt from hundreds of lynchings. It was really powerful; it was the first time I learned the full truth about slavery.

I was starting to see the ugly side of MAGA. Besides learning that Trump was a liar, I learned America was partly a lie. America prides itself on being the melting pot — but we haven’t treated immigrants the same. I came to understand that there’s a duality: A lot of beautiful things have happened in America, but we can’t pretend that it was all good for everybody all the time.

I faced another uncomfortable truth: I had became so hardened to life that I lost a lot of empathy, and I lost the willingness to learn how to be empathetic.

Since Joe Biden was president during this period of learning and discovery, I felt safe. And I figured once we got far enough removed from Trump, we would move on.

I didn’t become vocal about my political transformation until about three weeks before the 2024 election. I went on social media to talk about why I’m voting for Kamala Harris. I would even talk to customers where I worked about it.

After Trump was elected, I jumped on social media and figured out how to get involved in the resistance. I work with Indivisible and with 50501, and I’ve done trainings with Mobilize. I’m even a Democratic Party precinct chair — I knock on neighbors’ doors to talk about issues.

The biggest thing for me about Trump and MAGA is the overarching theme of the lies. His treatment of Ukrainian President Zelensky was an embarrassment. The whole DOGE thing really grinds my gears. 

I’m a lot more financially secure now. I make good money, and I own a home. The further removed I am from poverty, the more I feel every person deserves dignity. That’s the opposite approach of MAGA.

Because I was in MAGA, I feel personally responsible to help other people get out. A lot of people are really angry at Trump voters. But it takes patience, not anger, to get people out of MAGA. My current boss is MAGA. The other day, he said, “Hey, Trump is doing some really weird stuff, huh?” I asked, “What do you find weird?” You have to speak to people kindly; they have to feel accepted before they can admit they were wrong. 

I’m finishing my last year of a BA program in Business Management. I’m about to take the LSAT. I’ve wanted to be a lawyer for a long time. I want to work with the ACLU or the Equal Justice Initiative or some other group that’s working to get true justice for people.

Now that I’m out of MAGA, I’m a happier person now. I no longer have to hate so many people.

                                                                                                                                                                                           —May 2025