Trump Supporters Aren't Leaving MAGA Because They Feel Empathy, But Because They Feel Pain.

Recently, I was on a Zoom call with some of my Substack subscribers. We were processing the state of our nation, which we all agreed was somewhere between sky-is-falling and Armageddon.

The conversation turned toward the alleged bright spot found in the reality of many of Trump's supporters joining the Leaving MAGA movement; finally being roused from the ten-year stupor of cultic adoration enough to see with lucid assessment that they have tethered themselves to a monster.

Some suggested with tentative optimism that after a confounding, infuriating decade of sycophantic devotion, they might finally be putting aside their fierce tribalism and joining the rest of the reasonable people in opposing this rapidly unfolding coup.

At first, I co-signed such a possibility as a sign of hope, but quickly realized that it was misplaced optimism. That’s probably not what we’re seeing at all right now.

The fact of the matter is, with very few exceptions, people who voted for Trump in 2024 (many for the third time) and who are beginning to come around enough to move them to action, have not had their humanity awakened watching his and his Administration’s violent, illegal weaponizing of I.C.E. against immigrants, both documented and undocumented.

They have not tapped into heretofore unaccessed reservoirs of compassion for LGBTQ people facing unlawful and unprovoked legislative and personal attacks by his surrogates in Congress, school board meetings, and in the streets.

They aren’t having their once-stone hearts broken by the abject horrors of the Epstein Files and moved to demand the unredacted contents be revealed, so that accountability for every monster and justice for every survivor would come.

They haven’t experienced a miraculous, biblical Road to Emmaus spiritual awakening, realizing how many ways Trump has already violated the poor, withheld food from the hungry, visited injury on already suffering people, or urinated on the teachings of Jesus.

They aren’t being overtaken by some newfound responsibility as global citizens, feeling a sudden rush of affinity for the persecuted people of Ukraine, or Gaza, or Iran, or Lebanon.

No, the only reason Trump supporters are forming any kind of oppositional response to Trump is that the pain has become personal.

As they abruptly lose their jobs, see their companies move overseas, watch their 401(k)s evaporate, reckon with the skyrocketing grocery and gas prices, find their own voices silenced, and see their healthcare options dissolve, they are magically finding themselves becoming the resistance that decent human beings have been for a decade now.

Their rebellion is not born out of true contrition for their damaging alliances, genuine regret for being complicit in empowering a fascist, or a sincere desire to partner with the disparate human beings already united in saving our Republic and our planet.

As MAGA Americans realize that they, too, are victims of the criminality and predation they initially hoped would only be for those despised others (the immigrant, the gay, the brown, the black, the woke, the blue staters), it is finally becoming a bridge too far. As their feet are finally put to the fire they wished upon so many others, suddenly immorality and overreach are becoming objectionable.

And this will continue to happen in the coming weeks and months with the people around us. We will see more and more conversions of convenience.

The moment members of Trump’s genuflecting multitude are jarred awake by the sobering truth that their whiteness and their party affiliation and their church attendance and their red hats won’t save them from the disaster they have helped create, then and only then will they care in the slightest bit.

I’d like to be wrong, but sadly, I don’t believe I will be.

And though it will still be a small consolation to see a larger swath of this nation find out that this president’s sociopathy will spare no one, it would have been nice if they’d been internally transformed by love for their fellow human beings instead of just for themselves.

The real victory would have been if they’d been moved by self-examination and not just self-preservation.

I could have celebrated their empathy, but I can’t celebrate their selfishness.