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.”
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.
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.).
Lol that’s how far I got and just fucking Roflcoptered…like how fucking dumb can you be…
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.
like how fucking dumb can you be…
Apparently dumb enough to repeatedly vote for a lifelong grifter rapist felon pedophile.
Dude the Republican party has never cared about you, the last recession was caused by Bush and the Republican party. Trump has always been a fuckup. You’re still idiots, I don’t care if it took a mountain of bad things to happen for you to realize you might be wrong…
like goddamn, you want a cookie or something?
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.
Being dumb must hurt as much as it is blissful.
And will continue to vote republikkkan down the ballot every time…
“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 …
I mean, I’ll take the win. They owned up to it, are voting Democratic now, etc.
Can’t unring a bell but at least they’re somewhat atoning. Easy to be angry still and I don’t blame people for that but again, can’t fix the past. Maybe their story will inspire a few others to leave the cult.
Yeah I don’t understand all the negativity towards folks like this. Yes they made a monstrous mistake that may be unfixable but I’d rather have people that can see their failures and are willing to change any day of the week. I’ve made multiple mistakes in my youth that I learned from and became a better person. And folks like this are better equipped at helping others to see the light that are in the same boat.
Believe me we are going to need as many people as we can to see the empires has no clothes (but I literally never want to see him naked…I’m gonna vomit)
Hollow words from white fools following hate who never thought the hate would effect them.
Honestly, I doubt they’ve learned anything.
So I have zero fucks to give for you. None.
If only these people had figured it out after his first term. Oh wait, they weren’t harmed personally in his first term.
If someone said, “I was dumb, I didn’t know he was going to cut off aid to starving people, didn’t know he was going to send masked thugs into the streets to beat, kill, kidnap and disappear innocent people, didn’t know he was going to start wars, didn’t know he was going to betray all our allies and destroy any remaining drop of goodwill toward the US in the world, … etc”
Then I’d say, “yes, you were dumb, very fucking dumb, exceedingly dumb, but welcome to humanity. Some things are permanently ruined because you were so fucking dumb but now let’s start picking up the pieces and try to create a better system than the one that allowed someone like trump to gain so much power.”
But it’s never that. It’s always, “I didn’t know he was going to hurt MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
I expected the haters to dogpile on them - and rightfully so - but it’s also important to recognize that we’re in a little progressive bubble in here, and the majority of voting americans barely disagree with them.
Yes they got their share of being f*ked by trump policies and incompetence but that’s not the only thing they talked about. They talked about being in the cult. They called out Fox News. They said they “woke” up! *gasp*. And to cap off their newly minted vows to Satan, they actually voted Democrat! *shrieking*
Hell some of you fuckers haven’t even gone that far!
No, I kid, I kid. I’m just saying this is not the “They tooked mah jorb, but I still support ‘im”, this is a ‘holy shit we’re the baddies’ - in very early stages.
You want they should get violently assaulted, they should wear sandwich boards declaring their complete idiocy, they should never feel joy or contentment again - I get it. But in reality, that’s not going to happen. What might happen is they tell their new church friends or whatever that they have revised their opinion of foxnews and that’s progress.
Slow, slllooowww progress, but they did it themselves. And a lot of their former cultmates don’t have that in ‘em.
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 warns 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.
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!”
Disillusioned by the subprime crisis?
That shit was driven by republican action and deliberate inaction.
Republican regulators prevented states from trying to crack down on predatory lenders and congress refused to impose oversight and pushed deregulation. The Bush administration allowed banks to begin “super leveraging”, iow they could lend even more than before yet have less in reserve, so when the crash happened there was no cushion. The repeal of the Glass-Stegall act got the ball rolling on creating these mega-banks that doubled down on bad lending, bought and sold bad loans, and then they all needed bailouts.
Republican deregulation and refusal to engage in oversight by both dems and repubs caused the crash.
“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.
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.
“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.
