“I was working, so I did have that exposure to other thought processes, but it really wasn't enough to pull what was essentially the foundation that primarily my dad laid for me to become infatuated with Donald Trump and with the thoughts and ideologies that he was putting out into the world around his first election in 2016,” Leugers told Raw Story.
Leugers grew up in a wealthy suburban Kansas City household with “very authoritarian-style parenting” and was homeschooled for religious reasons.
Her home was a “Fox News 24/7 household,” and she came to believe in far-right conspiracy theories like QAnon, which promotes lies that Trump waged a secret war against cannibalistic pedophiles among Democrats, Hollywood elites and the so-called “deep-state.”
“I was raised, ‘You respect the military. You respect the police. You respect the president. These are the people that God put in power. You listen to them because it's your moral obligation, basically,’” Leugers said.
“I feel like that's kind of where things started to go downhill for me.”
Addy Leugers (provided photo)
But when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in May 2020 and sparked a national racial reckoning, Leugers began to depart from the MAGA movement.
“I was one of those people that was like, ‘Well, because I haven't experienced it, and everyone else says that racism died when we ended slavery, racism isn't real,’ and people were like, ‘Addy, you're stupid,’” Leugers said.
‘My breaking point was that because I did have friends that I knew closely that were trying to correct me and trying to be kind and helpful, and I was just being nasty, and I doubled down, and they were like, ‘OK, well, I'm not gonna be your friend anymore because you're not being open-minded, and I'm trying to help you, and you're just being ignorant on purpose.’”
Leugers, a registered behavior tech who works with children who have autism spectrum disorder, has now joined dozens of others in Leaving MAGA, a growing online community of former Trump supporters whose allegiance to Trump led them to lose friends, family relationships and marriages, commit crimes in Trump’s name, embrace Christian nationalism, and believe conspiracies.
‘Echo chamber’
Leugers, who now lives in the Honolulu area, said she primarily votes for Democrats these days and is very supportive of younger representation in politics.
“I'm no longer a Republican,” she said.
Her time in MAGA gave Leugers insight into the drastic ways the direction of the movement has changed since Trump’s first election, when MAGA was more about “regular people” whose “support for our president is unmatched,” she said.
Now “MAGA [is] taking such a hit in the last couple of years because of what the president has been doing,” Leugers said.
“The MAGA movement itself is very shallow, but it's based in this sense of community and banding together, almost of ‘Oh, they hate us. They hate our president, but we have each other, and we have God, and everything's gonna be OK because this is God's will,’” Leugers said.
“It does turn into this little echo chamber of everyone believing all the same things and no one challenging anything.”
Leugers said she believes MAGA started with good intentions with people seeking community, but “it lacks nuance, and it lacks education, and that is what turns into this slippery slope, because it's like the hills they choose to die on.”
MAGA’s anti-abortion stance is one example, she said.
“You have the anti-abortion on one hand. They also have like ICE is killing people in the streets right now, so it's like it becomes very closed-minded, narrow, blinders-on type of thinking that ignores a broader picture,” Leugers said.
The second Trump administration’s policies have been of particular concern to Leugers and her roommate, especially the aggressive actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has led to “people getting killed in the streets, shot in the streets, kidnapped in the streets, U.S. citizens being taken into detention centers without due process," she said.
At least 52 people in ICE custody have died since January 2025, and at least 23 people have been shot by ICE in that time, six of them fatally.
Other concerns include food contamination and recalls alongside the historic lows of food inspections by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and "propaganda" coming out of White House, Leugers said.
“We kind of laugh it off every day … but it kind of is getting to feel pretty dystopic,” Leugers said.
Leugers said she knows firsthand “admitting you're wrong sucks,” but she hopes that sharing her story will help others who are considering deconstructing their MAGA beliefs.
“If I can be one person to do my little part in this grand scheme of what is 2026 politics, then that's enough for me, and maybe even one person will see it and be like, 'Well, if she can change, I can change.’”
As the midterms approach, Leugers hopes for historic voter turnout in November.
“I hope that we, the American people, decide to get stuff done, and we decide that enough is enough,” Leugers said.
