WTF?! Is MAGA finally cracking?
If rumors are true, we're confronted with a choice
Have you thought about what you’ll say to the Trump supporters who are changing their minds?
Through a series of highly unpopular policies (ICE, BBB, tariffs), Trump’s supporters have felt the pressure mounting. This is a bit like a giant zit that's warm and infected. At some point, the efforts to conceal and minimize don’t work. The pressure builds.
What seems to have broken the spell for many of them is Epstein.
MAGA (especially young MAGA) trusted Trump to be transparent. He made them feel smart, needed, and anti-establishment.
Evangelical MAGA trusted Trump to bring back Christian values.
Wellness MAHA trusted Trump to improve our food supply and overall health.
These feelings bolstered them to overlook violence, contradictory policies, and upheaval...but it only works to a point.
In groups where belief is required for belonging, cognitive dissonance depends on the ability to tune out any reality that contradicts that belief.
That’s impossible when the contradictions come from the top.
Trump supporters zealously believed he would do as he promised. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote,
As Jay Kuo outlined in The Status Kuo today, Trump owes his 2024 victory to QAnon followers, who believe a cabal of Democratic lawmakers, rich elites, and Hollywood film stars are sex trafficking—and even eating—children. PRRI, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that researches religion, culture, and politics, estimated that in 2024, about 19% of Americans believed in QAnon. CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten noted yesterday that QAnon supporters preferred Trump to Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 by 61 points.
More broadly, Enten noted that Trump’s political career has depended on conspiracy theorists, from his 2016 support from those who believed Trump’s “birther” charges that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, to his 2024 primary support from those who believed President Joe Biden did not win the 2020 presidential election legitimately.
Those supporters followed Trump because they believed he was leading a secret charge against those child sex traffickers. Now that his administration says it will not release any more information about Epstein’s files, they appear to feel betrayed.
His contradictions feel like betrayal, because they are.
Cult scholar, Daniella Mestyanek Young, calls Epstein “mission critical” for MAGA supporters.
The Epstein list was this group’s “transcendent mission,” and when the mission fails (the end of the world doesn’t happen, or an embarrassing mission failure), some double down, but many give up and go home, cracked open and doubting.
That spot? The one where the light and truth can break in? It’s fertile ground for growth and change.
Events like this are known as the “crack in the brainwashing.” Cracks are involuntary and irreversible. Light is getting in, and doubts rise. Young shares her first crack—it was seeing the true horror of 911 after being sold a counter-narrative. Mine was my daughter’s death, and pastors telling me she might not be elect, and could be burning in hell. I was never the same after her, and not after that either.
(That story begins on page 99 of my story of cult escape, A Well-Trained Wife, and my book is in Kindle Unlimited.)
We’ve seen small cracks over farming, tariffs, immigration violence, Medicaid, Signalgate…so many issues have caused rumblings in the MAGA base. But, nothing like Epstein, and nothing like Trump’s critical turn against the very people who put him in office.
Feeling betrayed by leadership cracks the messaging and belief because believers sacrificed so much to protect their belonging within their ideology—family, relationships, money, time, acceptance, personal goals, etc. MAGA supporters were willing to go to war with their neighbors and family members to protect Trump and his promises. That’s not unusual in authoritarian cults, where absolute loyalty is demanded.
Betrayal arrives like a collections agency for those debts and losses, and it hurts. The pain splits one open in necessary, blinding ways. But the process is awkward and messy, and to outsiders, it will be very (very) imperfect.
I can tell you from experience, I’m so grateful for those who held space for me as I left both a religious cult and a high-control, violent marriage. I was a wreck, rarely self-aware, and said a lot of poorly informed, stupid things. I tried to save face when humiliated. I left in stages, sometimes trying other ideologies on for size, sometimes coming to a full deconstruction with resistance.
But a dammed lake does not reflect the true nature of the river it was without manipulation. I’m eternally grateful to the friends and family around me who knew the real me was still in there, and they gave me room to figure myself out. That took ten years of trauma therapy, deconstruction, and an ongoing self-accountability.
In a culture accustomed to instant results, hot takes, screen shots, and static moments that live forever, it can be challenging to know what to say or do in the face of a mass turning.
It can feel easier to gloat in all caps: FAFO or say “I told you so.”
It can feel easier to demand instant accountability.
But leaving a cult isn’t instantaneous. It’s a long road, and what we’re seeing now are just the first steps.
Another example is the evangelical uproar over Chip and Joanna Gaines. MAGA is unlikely to allow them to change their minds away from the mandated beliefs.
Trump supporters will first face challenge, criticism, and exile from within their own group.
They’ll begin to take public stands that cost them something to say.
Outsiders may doubt them. They may insist these declarations are not enough. But of course they aren’t. They are cracks, not chasms. These are baby steps out of the group, and the first feelings of “where do I belong now?”
Accountability comes. But it’s not first when stepping away from high control. First, there is shock, pain, grief, and disbelief.
Inside groups that require belief for belonging, you are not allowed to change your mind when you receive new information. Changing your mind is dangerous and vulnerable.
Those who step away will need a soft place to land. It might suck to realize it if you’re angry over the losses we’ve incurred, but ironically, we have to model health, intelligence, and kindness to those coming from a cult movement who’s robbed those things from our current culture. We have to be different, and it won’t be easy.
Will you hold space for their doubts and small steps (that may justifiably feel inadequate and untrustworthy,) trials, and shy attempts to rejoin the collective outrage against these crimes?
Can you hold a long view?
If you’ve deconstructed an ideology, do you remember the pain and wandering of wondering where you’d belong? Do you remember how fear can keep us stuck in place?
“To be human is to be farsighted.”
We have an opportunity here to draw on our experience and tap into deep stores of empathy and compassion, expressed within clear boundaries. It’s up to cult exiles to rejoin society, not for society to enable cult beliefs. However, we can maintain those lines with kindness if we’re thoughtful about what that looks like.
If you’ve been waiting for this crack to come, you are now faced with a challenge: How will you receive them?
Questions to ask as you consider your response to an exodus from MAGA
Can you be a soft place for someone?
Are you the safe person to come out to?
Can you hold space for their imperfect exit?
What are you both worried about with this administration?
What can you discuss that’s neutral and positive, to reconnect as humans?
Can you empathize with how they’re feeling, without getting into the specifics that might trigger self-protection and defenses?
You don’t have to answer yes, but understand your no, and be curious about it.
You don’t have to trust, but consider what you’d need to.
The key is to avoid becoming a reflection of rigidity in the other direction. To be the loving, law-abiding, person of integrity we’ve grieved losing during this administration.
Get A WELL-TRAINED WIFE: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy
Thank you for writing this. There's so much I WANT to say to my MAGA family/friends, but in my heart I know it's not the most helpful things to say. Your article helps me to prepare a tangible plan. Thank YOU
This is so wise and so human. And so right.