A rural Michigan federal worker who reluctantly cast her 2024 presidential vote for Donald Trump because she believed his promises about lowering the cost of living has now found herself out of a job she loved.
In a Washington Post profile, 24-year-old Ryleigh Cooper detailed her difficult decision to vote for the man who, just three months after the election, would dash her hopes and dreams of a career in forestry and the ability to access IVF for a child she badly wanted.
"Trump, at a campaign stop an hour and a half south of her, had promised to make IVF free. She knew that from a video clip she saw on TikTok. And she had believed him," wrote reporter Emily Davies. "She also believed him when he said that Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the next Republican administration that suggested mass cuts to the federal workforce, was not his plan."
Davies wrote that, after staring at the presidential ballot for 15 minutes and thinking of the daughter she wanted, Cooper cast her vote for Trump.
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Once Trump was in office, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency came into the picture, and the purge of federal employees got underway.
"She figured her job, with paychecks totaling about $40,000 a year, would be safe from the cost-cutting campaign led by President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk," Davies wrote. But Cooper was wrong.
"Getting fired meant she would no longer have health insurance, including the 12 weeks of paid maternity leave that was a guaranteed benefit of her federal service. Also gone would be the promotion that would allow her to plan for the kids she so badly wanted to have."
Four days after she was fired, Cooper learned of Trump's new executive order to expand access to IVF. "But it still wasn’t free, and she was out of a job and out of a plan," Davies wrote.
As Cooper scanned the White House fact sheet about IVF, she read the words headlining the announcement: “Delivering on promises for American families," and she thought, "That's bulls---," Davies wrote.
