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.”
Oh, look who is having the day they voted for.
No sympathy. They voted for this piece of shit after the racism, misogyny, and pedophilia was all out in the open. It wasn’t a mistake until it hurt you personally. Fuck you Ron and Chrissey. You learned nothing, and chances are, you’ll vote for more of this in the future.
Part of the demagafication of America will need to include accepting those who want to reform.
So they can start their racist, misogynistic, and homophobic intolerant bullshit all over again? No. Project 2025, figureheads like Trump, and movements like MAGA need to absolutely be stamped the fuck out. The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance.
Maybe I’m in the minority here, but I think people who purposefully hurt others, and their nation as a whole, should suffer some consequences and pay some form of reparations before I accept their fucking apology.
This wasn’t a political issue of disagreeing where tax money should go. These are people who condoned a violent insurrection to erase our votes and directly voted to oppress minorities and openly and gleefully supported a felon rapist pedophile who regularly demonizes half our populace.
And to anyone that thinks they didn’t generally condone a violent insurrection, they really did because they went out and voted AGAIN for the fucking traitor that instigated it.
Would you support a law that brought criminal charges for anyone who voted Republican in 2024?
100%, yes. We actually don’t even need a new law for that. We already have laws against treason on the books. We just stopped enforcing them when the traitors took over.
I’m pretty sure somebody said the same thing after the Civil War about the confederacy, and that’s why we’re where we are today.
Jesus dude, they’re barely on their road to recovery, and you want to alienate them for it? That’s not going to encourage good behavior you know. You’re just going to drive them away again.
I want nothing to do with the likes of anyone that voted Trump in the last election. They don’t care about others. They only care now, because they are the ones being hurt. I 100% believe they still don’t give a fuck about anyone that isn’t a white, cis-het believer in Christ.
the 2008 housing market crash left him “really disillusioned with the Democratic Party.”
So the last year of Bush’s second term. What a fucking idiot.
Lol that’s how far I got and just fucking Roflcoptered…like how fucking dumb can you be…
like how fucking dumb can you be…
Apparently dumb enough to repeatedly vote for a lifelong grifter rapist felon pedophile.
Republicans spend their term(s) wrecking the economy, then some people get pissed when the Democrats get control and don’t push the emergency “fix everything right now” button.
Never been on Reddit or Facebook?
This disillusionment may refer to the D response to the 2008 crash (Obama’s first term, too big to fail, doubling down on Bush’s TARP, Tea Party, etc.).
Yes. the way Obama and his administration dealt with that crash was poorly thought out (to be charitable), but I really don’t think from what I read, this guy was that nuanced in his thinking. Probably more along the lines of “Democrats are bad therefore this is their fault.”
“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.
Absolutely astounding how Americans care NOTHING about anyone that is not themselves. The orange pedophile has literally been directly responsible for the slaughter of THOUSANDS and that fact does not even register with this piece of shit
White Americans care nothing about other people…
When I was a kid my tribe would bring dentists to my elementary school, and it didn’t matter if you were native or not you would still get tooth care.
Was? Nah you just jumped ship because it affected you negatively. You still dumber than a rock drooler.
100% this. If he didn’t lose his job he’d bend over backwards and take more of it.
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.
He was so upset at the Democrats for the 2008 housing crisis (Which was caused by private equity, not the government, also remind me who was the fucking president in 2008? I seem to have lost my memory on that /s) that he moved to the south and supported increased spending on the military and defence instead of checks notes FUCKING HOUSING.
Fuck this absolute twat.
Ron, who served in the military for 25 years, said the 2008 housing market crash left him “really disillusioned with the Democratic Party.”
I lost it at that. The market fucking collapsed while Bush was president. That’s some genuine “everything I know is from watching Focks Nooz”
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. These people were inundated with powerful propaganda and influential family structures and managed to escape it. MFing these people and calling them twats isn’t going to win their hearts and minds and working people need as many allies as we can gather against a billionaire class that continues to tighten their grip.
I’m just as frustrated as you and people like them voting these ghouls into power is the reason they’re in power, but they speak some truth here and maybe they can convince some of their maga family to change course.
Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are big fans of spending on housing, not since the Red Scare of the 1950s. Investments in public goods carry a faint odor of socialism and are therefore verboten in the United States.
The (Republican-led) government did play a role in bringing about the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis: George W. Bush’s administration successfully lobbied for the abolition of regulations which had previously prevented people with insufficient credit from getting a mortgage approved.
But of course the right wing narrative held Jewish bankers at fault for inner city types defaulting on their mortgages, bankrupting Lehman Brothers et al. Not a combination of deregulation and corporate greed.
“It’s okay to be wrong. You made a mistake, it was a bad choice, but it’s not the end of the world."
Uhm about that …
He literally goes “this third term” at one point in the article. And that we need to go back to the morals this country had up until “Joe Biden’s term” He hasn’t learned a thing.
All the things Trump is doing was laid out in Project 2025. I was begging people to read it and all of my mouth breathing friend just ignored me. I really don’t have friends anymore and I am OK with that. This dumb fuck claiming he did know Trump would do this just ignored the warnings because he thought Trump was only going to fuck the libertards. So the leopard eats his face and he cries.
Trump himself said he’d never heard of it, which for some was apparently all the evidence they needed, regardless of all of the other giant, glaring warning signs.
Yeah I was laughed at and told to stop believing the liberal media’s lies.
Imagine having a brain that, without question, believes the words of a lifelong grifter, prolific liar, felon, rapist, and pedophile.
Yeah, there’s no coming back from that kind of brain damage.
Actually Trump said he never read it, which was a rare instance of Trump telling the Truth.
This does not mean that someone didn’t give him a tl;dr and he said, “New Jim Crow?! Sign me up!”
Thing is, I went to that site several times before the election, and throughout the summer of 2024 was a big “Apply Now” link at the top in the upper right. If you clicked it, it asked you if you wanted a career with the new Trump administration and invited you to submit your resume, especially if your area of experience pertained to any of the Project 2025 policy objectives. This is an article with a screenshot of that front page in the summer of 2024.
So when people threw that shit at me, my immediate response was, “So you haven’t applied for a job with the planned administration? Because Project 2025 is taking Trump administration applications right now.”
And they’d shut the fuck up, which was always the desired effect. I don’t know if they ever went and saw it for themselves, but they could have if they’d looked. It was always there.
Note: I went back to archive.org to see if they still have what I am talking about, but the only available archived versions of the page are from earlier in 2024 when the big red “Apply Now” button led to hiring for Project 2025 itself. Anything that would show the changed version I’m talking about has now been removed and the blue links all go to a redirect, not an archived page. The Library of Congress has it, but the archived site can only be accessed in-person, so it’s pretty clear the administration has cleared it from the net themselves.
I knew the leopard was eating people’s faces, but it wasnt until it started eating my face that i realised what an idiot i was.
Everyone kept telling me they ate people’s faces. They told me this for 8 years. But despite there being documented evidence and first hand witness accounts, I didn’t think it was that bad until they started eating mine.
Never, ever, underestimate Americans ability to turn lemonade into lemons.
Imagine working FOR the government and ever voting for the party of small government.
I work for my county, I have coworkers who are proud that they don’t vote and don’t follow politics
WE. WORK. FOR. THE. GOVERNMENT! Go up the food chain from us a couple steps and our boss’, boss’, boss’ boss or something along those lines is an elected official! You’re basically passing up an opportunity to choose who your boss is, and those elections often end up happening on off years when there’s no presidential or other big election going on and even less people turn out to vote, so your vote really counts.
A government so small it can fit in my uterus.
I’m sick of sharing a planet with cave people
They’ll be back. They’ll vote Republican. They can’t learn.
I DON’T CARE
IT’S TOO LATE
YOU FUCKING TOOLS DID THE SAME THING WITH BUSH JR
YOU WILL DO ALL THIS AGAIN BECAUSE YOU ARE IDIOTS
None of this means anything. These people do not learn from mistakes. That is abundantly clear at this point. And in the unlikely scenario that this one actually did, they are such a vanishingly small percentage that it really just doesn’t matter. The vast majority of conservative voters that actually are turning on Trump will NEVER, EVER, EVEN UNDER PAIN OF DEATH, vote for anything other than Republicans.
That’s how cults work.
Well, they did learn from their mistakes. Most of the time these stories are like ‘it affects me now so I’m against it now’, but these people took that selfish starting point and unpacked all the fox propaganda and how it all happened
It is a cult; but some people leave cults
I get that we all have to be really sceptical of ‘reformed’ Magas. Most of them will just be rats fleeing the sinking ship, with no actual reflection or admitted culpability
But at the same time, I’ve marched with a block of skinhead ex-nazis who were violently opposed to racism now. People do change sometimes - people are able to unpick the propaganda they once bought into and grow
So scepticism, absolutely. But a life-long condemnation of anyone who ever bought into Fox News, without exception, is not the way to go
I agree. Ron seems pretty legitimately aware of how it works now.
“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.”
Acknowledging a mistake only works if you them stop making that mistake. And I’m not convinced these or similar people will do that.
How many red flags have they ignored? They didn’t give a shit about other people being screwed over by him. It was only when it affected them that they started to question. He worked for the Federal government and was still bashing the shit out of it. They ignored the January 6th riots. They voted for the this THREE times. This is all typical maga idiocy, and the reason why we’re in such a mess.
I mean, I guess it’s good they’re seeing reality now. But holy shit. And these stories are basically pointless. Anyone who hasn’t pulled their heads out of their asses by now won’t because of other people’s accounts like this. The only thing that will change their minds is personal hardships. And even then it’s a toss-up.
What are the odds this dude votes for Vance in 2028?
1,000,000% he is voting republican all the way down the ticket in 26 and 28. They won’t learn, they won’t change, they won’t grow.
They’ll vote red, lose even more, might have another minor revelation but they’ll drool they’re way back red
If Vance is the RNC nominee, it’s probably the only way I’d think less of them.
Well. There’s lots of ways. That’d just be one of them.
“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.
My god, the clarity! Sadly, the people able to see it and recognize their error is vanishingly small. Most just seem to double down on their error and make excuses to justify their position.
