For Ashton Reed, President Donald Trump dominated his political consciousness for more than half of his life — until he suddenly realized he was being lied to.
The 22-year-old “literally grew up in MAGA” under the influence of his grandmother, who was “a huge sympathizer for the Tea Party movement” and started bringing politics to the dinner table when Reed was around 6 years old.
“When Trump announced his candidacy, at this point, I was being fed a whole bunch of false information, skewed information, and I really thought because my grandma thought this way, and I guess because she was the most trusted adult to me at the time, I figured that her judgment must be good,” Reed said.
“Plus, I really did think that Trump was going to help bring America into an economic golden age.”
Reed grew up in Jackson, Missouri, about 10 miles from Cape Girardeau, the hometown of the late conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh.
Reed’s grandmother learned that Limbaugh was immersed in political conversation at a young age, with his grandfather serving as a state representative and ambassador, and other family members serving as federal and state Supreme Court judges.
She aspired for Reed to be “the next Rush Limbaugh,” he said.
“I was taught to absolutely fear Muslims and to fear Democrats because I really thought that they were trying to get me killed, basically,” Reed said.
“I was 6 years old, very very scared.”
By the time Reed attended high school, he considered learning about political beliefs outside of MAGA, encouraged by his mother, only to face the COVI9-19 pandemic.
“My mother did a huge political relapse, essentially, and she actually went from being this very nuanced person to being a very ultra far-right extremist, essentially,” said Reed, now a controls engineer for a radiopharmaceutical manufacturer based in St. Louis.
“I was back to a ‘MAGA is the way. MAGA is life.’ situation … my grandparents, my mother, they definitely really influenced how I got into it, and then that continued for a couple of years.”
Reed continued to dive deeper into the MAGA movement, even arguing that “MAGA was not extreme enough.” He drifted into neo-libertarianism after high school but returned to MAGA once again and voted for Trump in 2024.
Ashton Reed.(provided photo)
But, in spring 2025, an AI chatbot started to give him a new perspective when he wanted to learn more about the pushback against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s raids across the country.
“I started asking ChatGPT why there's been a bunch of uproar, and what are people saying about it?” Reed said.
What he discovered left him sick.
“I was absolutely disgusted with how the operation went down because, for the first time in my life, I actually saw how dehumanizing, how ICE was being used by the Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration. I was appalled. I was horrified.”
Watching federal agents kill and detain U.S. citizens made Reed turn on Trump and the Republican Party.
“That's when it was enough for me,” Reed said.
“At that point, I realized that I supported a really bad cause. I really meant well, and I did wrong. I really did.”
'GOP deserves to suffer'
Reed said he had the choice to live with “cognitive dissonance” or speak out about his mistake in following Trump.
“The best thing I thought that I could do at that point was to further educate myself on why there has been an uproar against MAGA and to then use that newfound information for me to go ahead and actually do something about it,” Reed said.
While researching, Reed found Leaving MAGA, a growing online community of former Trump supporters whose allegiance to him is blamed for issues including losing friends, family relationships and marriages, committing crimes in Trump’s name, embracing Christian nationalism, and believing conspiracies.
Joining Leaving MAGA was “the first time I ever saw a community that allowed people to connect based on the same grounds, being we all once supported MAGA and now we are done,” Reed said.
Unlike others who left MAGA after the Trump administration’s policies directly affected them in a negative way, Reed said he turned away from the GOP for how Trump and the party hurt others.
“The pattern was voting for Trump, something happened to them directly due to a result of the Trump administration, whether it be the first or second terms, and then they were done with MAGA because the Trump administration directly affected their quality of life,” Reed said.
Instead, Reed “saw what was happening to other people across the country and felt awful about it.” The Trump administration’s policies didn’t really hurt him except for rising gas prices, he said.
“Since then I've been very vocal against the Trump administration, and I will continue to be until the administration is out of office. And then, even after that, I will continue to denounce this regime that we have because, unfortunately, I don't know if MAGA is going to necessarily leave after Trump leaves office,” Reed said.
Looking to history, Reed said he doesn't believe MAGA will die out because “when extremism has been brought into a government, into society, it is bound to come again."
But he thinks Republicans will pay the price in the midterms.
“The House of Representatives, they are for sure going to lose big time, and there's nothing that the GOP can do to help anything,” Reed said.
“When the GOP decided to officially adopt MAGA into their doctrine, basically their success became solely dependent on worsening economic and social factors.”
Reed began voting for Democrats in Missouri’s primary election.
“I do think, with full faith and confidence, that there will be a blue wave,” Reed said.
“The question is, I don't know how big of a blue wave is going to be, realistically speaking.”
Reed predicts the power of Republicans will not only be weakened after the Nov. 3 election but for future presidential elections — unless the party distances itself from Trump and MAGA.
“If the GOP nominates [Vice President JD] Vance, the GOP may as well kiss goodbye to any sort of chance of having a Republican president between 2028 to 2032 because people are getting sick of MAGA,” Reed said.
“The GOP deserves to suffer because this is the consequence of adopting an extremist ideology into your political party. You risk absolutely losing every ounce of your credibility if what you're fighting for is not what most people want.”
When people are considering abandoning the MAGA movement, they often don’t know where to start, which is why the Leaving MAGA community is so vital, Reed said,
“There are people who were absolutely scared to leave MAGA because they didn't want to feel alone. They didn't want to be villainized. They didn't want to be completely separated from both the right and the left, or from any political group, really, because MAGA really satisfied the human desire for tribalism — in a very extreme form, of course,” Reed said.
“It's awesome that there are groups like Leaving MAGA that will welcome anyone with open arms, despite how involved they were in the Trump campaign."
