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Love of an Immigrant Led Him to Leave MAGA [1]
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Date: 2025-02-25
How often do we see this: A person changes their mind about politics when it negatively affects them or their loved ones. We’re watching it happen as people who voted for Donald Trump turn on him because they lost their jobs or livelihood as part of his shredding of the federal government.
A different personal experience changed Michael Sirback from a MAGA follower to one of its fiercest critics. He told his story for the Leaving MAGA website (I’m the Editor-in-Chief).
Michael grew up in a small, Republican town in Ohio; he still lives there today. He was raised as a cultural conservative; he strongly opposed gay marriage and transgender rights on moral grounds.
Michael’s family didn’t really talk politics until he was in his early 20s, when Trump first ran for president. “My parents had voted for Barack Obama, but they were drawn to Donald Trump on cultural issues,” he writes. “They saw him as a guy who was going to end gay marriage and transgender rights.”
Michael “was also worried about Muslim immigrants, because this was when ISIS had its caliphate in Iraq and Syria. I feared talk about ISIS being let in to take over territory and Sharia becoming the law of the land in America.”
Like virtually every person we’ve talked to who joined MAGA, he “entered the right-wing media bubble” of Fox, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, et al. “I was buying into all of it. I thought Trump would improve the economy because he was a smart businessman, and I believed he was the only one who could handle the immigration threat from ISIS.”
Michael believed Trump’s denials of the many allegations against him of sexual assault. “I believed Shapiro and the rest when they said none of it was true, that Trump was being attacked because he was anti-establishment.”
But Michael still wasn’t that into politics. He didn’t register to vote in 2016, although he hoped Trump would win. Michael says after Trump took office, “I started paying a bit more attention. I liked how he was carrying out tax cuts. I liked watching him on TV, telling people off, his whole anti-establishment thing.”
He supported Trump’s Muslim ban, “again, because what was happening with ISIS scared me.”
He voted for Trump in 2020, but “I didn’t believe his claims that the election was stolen; I didn’t see any evidence of that.” After the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, “I wasn’t sure what to believe. Trump was saying he didn’t mean for the mob to do what it did, although it seemed as if he had egged them on and didn’t try to stop the riot.”
Ultimately, Michael hoped “the craziness would allow Trump to stay in office. I still lived in the right-wing echo chamber, so I was still loyal to MAGA.”
Michael stuck with Trump and MAGA until the beginning of last year. The reason? He started to date Shey, a woman from the Philippines. They met online.
“My relationship with her opened my eyes to how much damage Trump is doing when it comes to immigrants,” Michael says. He saw how Trump’s 2024 campaign “was nothing but non-stop fear-mongering and hatred towards immigrants, with all its rhetoric about them being rapists, murderers, and the like.” To Michael, it was “Nazi Germany kind of stuff.”
Michael wanted to bring Shey to the United States, and he was afraid a Trump administration would make it harder to do that. “After hearing Fox, Ben Shapiro and the others justify Trump’s positions, I turned away from MAGA,” he says. “I started listening to more mainstream media, although over time I felt they weren’t tough enough on Trump. Eventually I started following people and outlets that made a lot more sense to me: MeidasTouch Network, Adam Mockler, Brian Tyler Cohen.”
Michael says opening his mind to independent thinkers “has changed my feelings about a lot of things. I realized the only reason I didn’t like Joe Biden was because the right was telling me not to like him. When I did my own research, I found I liked some of the things he did, such as the Inflation Reduction Act. I also appreciate that he says all Americans should be treated with respect.”
He now sees Jan. 6 as a “completely unacceptable…attack on our democracy.” Michael’s research showed him “how much disinformation there was about the pandemic.” He says he’s evolved with regards to women’s rights, as well. “I was always pro-life to the core, but now I believe that a woman should make her own decisions, that it’s not my place to tell a woman what to do with her body.”
And there’s more: “I’ve come to understand that inflation was not Biden’s fault, that it was a result of the measures taken to revive the economy after the pandemic. I’m more supportive of the Affordable Care Act now. I’m still not fully comfortable with gay marriage and transgender people, but I learned that everybody should have the right to live free in this country however they choose.”
Michael says he now knows that Trump “would much rather tell a lie than admit to being wrong about anything.”
He’s very worried that under Trump 2.0, “only White Christian Nationalists will get treated with decency.”
While Michael says it’s hard to get his views heard in his small Red town, “I’m very happy that I finally came to my senses and now understand that the MAGA movement is built on lies.”
You can read Michael’s full testimonial at the Leaving MAGA website. I believe more people will leave MAGA as they recognize that Trump lied to them about improving the economy, handed over the government to unelected billionaries, destroyed many programs that benefit his supporters, weaponized the Department of Justice for his own retribution, sabotaged crucial scientific research, and sided with our enemies abroad.
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