My MAGA Family Is Turning on Trump — And He Should Be Worried
At Easter, something shifted. Even the most loyal believers are starting to question him and they all point to the same reason.
Welcome back to The Red Letter.
I’ve recently become the black sheep of my family and it’s not just because I’m childless, work in media, live in big cities, and am inching toward 40.
It’s because I question Trump.
With a few exceptions—my grandmother, who survived a concentration camp in Hamburg, and my swing-voter mother, who became a citizen to vote for George W. Bush but somehow voted for Hillary, Trump, and then Kamala—I’m one of the only people in my family who isn’t MAGA. Even my nurse practitioner aunt is MAHA-curious. (To be fair, after living in Europe, I understand the concerns about food and pharmaceutical standards.)
My father is the most extreme. He raised me on talk radio like Rush Limbaugh, Hannity & Colmes. He hasn’t turned on Fox News since they called the election for Biden. In fact, he barely watches TV anymore, just YouTube, which feeds him Bill O’Reilly and an endless stream of fringe commentary. They’re evangelicals, after all.
My brother wept when Charlie Kirk died and somehow managed to pin it on me. My cousins and aunts and uncles love Trump too, each for reasons that are hard to fully explain.
For years, I’ve been outnumbered. For every one person in my family who questions Trump, there are four who support him. I’ve done the math.
And they didn’t just support him, they defended him. At Christmas, they were still arguing for him. Still convinced he would end the wars, fix the economy, and make life better for their kids. My family isn’t the fringe of Trump’s coalition—they are the base. Evangelical, loyal, plugged into the same media ecosystem that built him.
But something strange happened this Easter. Everything changed.
Subscribe to read the full story:
Why Trump’s core voters are starting to question him and what it means for this war
What happens when certainty inside MAGA gives way to doubt
