A Georgia couple is abandoning MAGA after saying they were personally affected by President Donald Trump’s policies.
Longtime Republicans Ron and Chrissey Kelley, both once-loyal Trump voters, told Raw Story that they have turned on the Trump administration after its policies came for their jobs.
Ron, a 55-year-old construction analyst for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) told the outlet he was furloughed amid the administration’s haphazard Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts.
“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.
“That point was the beginning of my turning away from MAGA,” he added.
Ron said he started to regret his vote when Republican policies began to “destroy my life, which affects my family.”
Months later, he says the impacts of the administration’s failed DOGE mission, led by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, are still a “headache.”
“They brought DOGE in and created a whole new layer of bureaucracy that we’re still suffering from,” Ron said. “They’ve created so much headache and so much overhead.”
Ron noted that he was very embedded in the MAGA movement—enough to believe Trump’s repeated lie that the 2020 election was rigged.
“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 [election], and realizing that I was dumb as a rock, and I believed everything that I was spoon-fed.”
Chrissey, for her part, said she was a lifelong Republican—until now.
“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.
She recalled thinking, when Trump first came onto the scene: “He’s gonna fix everything. He’s a businessman. He’s gonna help us.”
But now, Chrissey said the administration’s botched handling of the Epstein files, as well as its deadly immigration tactics, have turned her away.
“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,” she added.
Their decision has come with personal consequences, though, as the couple said leaving MAGA has caused a rift with their friends, who are still fully committed to Trump.
Ron said he now votes Democrat, while Chrissey considers herself an Independent.
Ron added that he thinks that while there are people in “deep, deep red MAGA that you’re never going to convince that Trump is not who they think he is,” he believes many are slowly coming out of their MAGA haze.
“I believe that the more that we share, the more of the fringe MAGA are dropping off,” Ron said.
“As you see in the polls that they keep taking, that Trump is dropping lower and lower and lower almost daily,” he said. “So the only way that that could happen is that his base is leaving him, which means that MAGA is moving.”
