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This Former MAGA Member Came To See She Was 'Brainwashed' [1]
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Date: 2025-02-20
When Donald Trump first ran for president in 2016, Courtney Rae thought he was the perfect candidate. She was drawn to wealthy, successful conservative men. She loved his charisma, his vow to “drain the swamp.” In her testimonial for Leaving MAGA (I’m Editor-in-Chief), Courtney says of Trump: “He was so masterful at painting a picture of a corrupt government, of a system in which everything was going wrong. And he was the one who was going to fix it.”
She adds: “Trump created the feeling that you were part of something bigger, something that nobody else saw. I loved feeling like he was going to save us all.”
Courtney got her news from Fox, her boyfriend and a couple of aunts, all of whom were MAGA. “I believed everything I was told about the Clintons being rapists and human traffickers, how [Hillary] murdered American soldiers in Benghazi (although I had no idea what happened there),” she writes.
Courtney didn’t care about the “grab ‘em by the pussy” remark, having worked at a sports bar for six years. “I didn’t care how he talked about women; I just wanted him to run the country.”
She didn’t pay a lot of attention for the first few years of Trump’s term, but that changed when Covid hit in 2020. As Courtney quarantined with her boyfriend, “I started paying a lot more attention to politics — and especially to Trump. For the first time, policy was affecting me. I knew people who had died from Covid.”
She believed him when he said the pandemic would be over in a matter of weeks, and she laughed off his comment about injecting bleach. “But then people started going to the hospital because they were injecting bleach.” On top of that, “Trump’s blatant disrespect for Dr. Fauci really bothered me…I believe in science…So I trusted Fauci…Meanwhile, the president consistently undermined him at every turn.”
Courtney’s breaking point came when “I saw the consequences of Trump’s making fun of people for wearing masks. I saw how he emboldened people to act horribly, like wearing masks with holes in them as some sort of childish, dumb, ugly protest. I watched people yelling at people in the grocery store, at the workers, for wearing masks, treating them like garbage. And these were all Trump supporters…I decided I didn’t want to be a part of it.”
She left MAGA and voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, “but oddly enough I still wanted Trump to win. I still believed there were wealthy elites pulling the strings behind the scenes [she was nearing the end of a months-long dalliance with QAnon], and I wanted to believe that Trump would save us from them.”
Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen, followed by the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, dissolved the last shreds of Courtney’s connection to Trump. “I believed the mark of a good president was to protect and unify, especially during times of crisis. I was watching him doing the opposite.”
She switched from solely watching Fox to include ABC, Reuters, AP, the BBC, CNN, CBS, and NPR.
By opening up her sources of information, and doing some research on her own, Courtney realized, “I’ve been brainwashed. I’ve been a misogynist against myself…I was the person who would make fun of feminists.” She realized her own self worth shouldn’t spring from a man.
“A lot of women in MAGA believe their value comes from being chosen and getting approval from the men in their lives,” Courtney says. “And they don’t feel empowered to give themselves what they want out of life. I think the majority convinced themselves that’s what they want, and that keeps them very submissive. MAGA today emboldens them to embrace that even more so.”
She believes the animated film The Croods has an important lesson for people in MAGA. Set in the Stone Age, it’s about a family that lives in a cave. “Even though the cave is dark and nasty, the father tries to keep his kids from leaving the cave to explore the outside world, because he wants to keep them safe,” Courtney writes. “A lot of people in MAGA are like the father in the film. MAGA is familiar to them, it makes them feel safe — even if something in them says, ‘This doesn’t feel right.’ But the effort to leave that cave requires climbing an emotional mountain, and a lot of people don’t have the resources to do that.”
You can read Courtney’s full testimonial at the Leaving MAGA website. Our collection of testimonials is primarily from people who saw the light about Trump before the 2024 election. I believe more people will leave MAGA as they recognize that Trump 2.0 lied to them about improving the economy, handed over the government to unelected billionaries, destroyed many programs that benefit his supporters, sabotaged crucial scientific research, and sided with our enemies abroad.
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