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.”
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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.