Comedian and podcaster Andrew Schulz, who voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 elections, told The New York Times that he has soured on the MAGA movement over a particularly "disheartening" policy.
Schultz is known for working political discourse into his shows, and even interviewed Trump on his “Flagrant” podcast just before the November elections, according to David Marchese. Schultz has claimed that the Trump interview gave him the reputation of being “a right-wing MAGA lunatic,” but told Marchese that the issue of immigration and deportations has turned him off of MAGA.
A lack of "empathy for illegals that are here that are not breaking the law, that have been working here on a pathway to citizenship...is disheartening for me," Schultz told the Times.
He continued, "And then an end to the foreign wars. I think it’s very hard for Americans to be struggling so much, and then the perception of all this money leaving the country to go fight these wars in places that we’ll never go visit. You start to feel like you’re left out."
Schultz said he was taking a wait-and-see attitude on another issue that's important to him, in vitro fertilization.
"My wife and I had a baby through IVF, and it was important to me that [Trump] would do something to make sure that was protected, especially with the abortion bans. He specifically said that he would. Let’s see if that actually happens."
Marchese asked Schultz about the disconnect between standing for reproductive freedom and supporting a politician found liable for sexual abuse against the writer E. Jean Carroll, and stood accused by many others. Schulz said he chose the lesser of two evils.
"What people might not know is that he wants to fight to protect IVF, and that might be important for a woman who goes, 'Yeah, I know all this horrible stuff that this guy has been accused of or convicted of doing, but I want to have a family.' Unfortunately in elections, we look past certain transgressions because there are things that are more important to us," he said.