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This Former MAGA Member Now Says Trump is a Threat to Democracy [1]
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Date: 2025-04-19
As Donald Trump busily shreds the Constitution, destroys our democracy, wrecks the economy, slashes services for veterans and marginalized communities, abandons our allies in favor of dictators, and withholds food from hundreds of thousands of starving people around the world, we at Leaving MAGA are more motivated than ever to continue widely sharing the stories of people who left the movement. These testimonials show it is possible to break out of the bubble of misinformation and return to fact-based reality.
Today, meet former MAGA member David Remington. As he explains in his testimonial on the Leaving MAGA website, David was born in Montana but moved with his mom to the Portland suburbs when he was 6 years old. His parents had divorced, and when his mother passed away when he was 12, David’s father moved to Portland to raise him and his brother.
That’s when his political journey began. “My dad would always listen to conservative talk radio in the car — extreme stuff, like Michael Savage and Lars Larson,” David writes. “Even though I was only in middle school, I started getting into politics really heavily. That became my whole world.”
Influenced by talk radio, “I became a class troll…I was really anti-gay…When the school had a special Day of Silence to honor LGBTQ kids, I declared it Loud and Proud Day…I didn’t fit into the political culture in Portland.”
After being harassed in middle school over his politics, “I kept my mouth shut once I got to high school.” After high school, David briefly served in the Navy. Over the next several years he took classes at Portland Community College while working various jobs. “I studied everything from economics to art, which I loved.”
When Trump ran for president the first time, David supported him over the other Republican candidates. “His debate style was alluring to me,” he says. “I felt connected to the way he stood up for himself, even talking over other candidates. I always thought standing up for yourself is the best virtue you can have.”
David was “a hardliner on immigration, so I liked Trump’s approach to that issue. I believed that people who were illegally in the country had broken the law, so what was wrong with deporting them?…I didn’t have a problem with the comments Trump would make about migrants being murderers and rapists. I thought he was saying a truth people didn’t want to admit.”
David’s sources of information were primarily Andy Ngo, other right-wingers who posted on Twitter, and Trump. “I got into a lot of fringe politics…I fell into white identity politics, and I became a strong anti-feminist…For a while I was a climate change denier.”
He attended a Build the Wall event at Washington State University. “I waved a Trump flag, got my picture taken, and got in the news. That made the local antifa really mad at me. I got doxxed and called a racist.”
David continued supporting Trump after he was elected. When Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” at the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, David dismissed the controversy. “I thought it was a funny Trumpism. To me, it was another case of him saying something ridiculous and people going insane about it. I thought, ‘These Nazis exist, but what are you going to do about them?’”
David enrolled at Portland State University in 2018, and got involved with the College Republicans. While the group supported Trump and MAGA, “I moved away from my fringe political beliefs.” David thought Trump did “a really good job” handling the Covid pandemic, noting that he “was first on the ball with the vaccine, which I got.”
When Joe Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election, “I didn’t buy into Trump’s claim that the election was stolen,” David says. “I thought, ‘This is over. It sucks that he lost, but I’m going to go on to live my life.’”
David’s move away from MAGA began with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “It was shocking, especially because Trump was behind it. As a veteran, I would never commit sedition or take up arms against the government.”
He still stuck with MAGA after that, although “I largely turned away from politics and focused on my art…At the same time, my doubts were growing. I was learning a lot in college, and was seeing that some of Trump’s arguments didn’t make any sense.”
David learned in a climate ethics class at Portland State that climate change is real. “The class made me feel like I was being foolish to think I knew the science better than the experts.” He said he also discovered “the right-wing scare stories about professors teaching malicious stuff weren’t true. They were just teaching us facts.”
Realizing how much misinformation there was in the world, “I started watching CNN, listening to NPR, and reading The Guardian.”
After Trump jumped into the 2024 presidential race, David reached his breaking point when Trump boycotted the Republican primary debates. “For one thing, they were so civil without him in the room. And it showed he didn’t give a shit about the party; it was a grave insult to conservatives.”
As someone with a BA in economics, David felt Trump’s energy and economic policies “didn’t make any sense…The very notion of America First seemed in many ways to actually mean America Alone. And he was making a lot of ridiculous remarks, like claiming Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs.”
MAGA’s treatment of Republicans who angered Trump in one way or another offended David. “For example, when people called Mike Pence a big traitor. How is he a traitor? All he did was stand up for the Constitution.”
David “was done with MAGA. I became more open to the Democratic Party and its ideas. I even voted for Kamala Harris.”
Now that Trump is president again, “I feel vindicated in my beliefs about him,” David says. “He’s wrecking the country. Look at all the financial instability he’s created with his tariffs, which are completely against the American economy and our well-being.”
He adds: “Trump’s slashing jobs at the VA is really offensive. Some of the people in charge of my health care are under attack. His immigration policy is awful. As part of my political evolution, I’ve become very open to immigrants, now that I understand the huge economic and social contributions they make to this country.”
David has also become more supportive of the LGBTQ community. “I have been reading the Bible a lot more since the election,” he says. “A main point of the Bible is, those without sin shall cast the first stone. But that part of the Bible is totally missing from how people are treating trans people.”
David had always considered himself a conservative Republican, “but when Trump took office this time around and started issuing so many anti-democratic executive orders, I realized that our essential liberties are under threat — and that I had taken those liberties for granted,” he says. “Now I consider myself a libertarian — not an anarcho-capitalist, but a believer in maximum liberty, Milton Friedman-style.”
To David, the MAGA movement has “turned against what I grew up believing. It’s against the military, it’s against good economic policy, and it’s against a lot of conservative values.”
He feels remorseful that “I helped bring it about. That’s why it’s so important for me to go public, to tell the world that MAGA is based on a foundation of lies, fear, and hatred, and that Donald Trump is undermining our very democracy.”
David adds that it’s not easy going public with his split from MAGA, “because many of my friends are still in MAGA. Sometimes I feel like I’m betraying them, but in the end I know that’s not true. I’m fighting for them.”
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