When James Hicks still supported President Donald Trump, he took to showing his coworkers a Confederate flag wristband he was wearing.
Hicks, who is Black, became one of Trump’s Make America Great Again devotees after moving from a mostly Black town to a mostly white city — Conway, Arkansas — while in high school, and was taught that Arkansas was not a pro-slavery state, but joined the Confederacy as a states’ rights issue.
“I really was never actually able to be really a part of the community that I came from, and so at that point, I really just gravitated towards being someone who was acceptable to the white kids around me, and they were into the more conservative things,” said Hicks, who is now 31.
Hicks wearing confederate flag wristband (James Hicks/provided photo)
Hicks, a call center worker, said he used to rationalize Trump’s actions during his first term, like when he failed to initially denounce white supremacists who led the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“Trump and MAGA … it aligned on me being maladjusted and me being a fundamentalist Christian,” said Hicks, who is now no longer religious.
Hicks once attended a Trump rally, recalling other MAGA supporters being “so excited” he was there — the only Black person. Even then, Hicks said he heard racist comments from Trump voters there.
While dealing with mental health struggles, Hicks said he lived for seeing Trump elected in 2016.
“I would say I would just survive to see Trump become president. I just didn't have much of anything to live for at that time, and I just gave it all to one person,” Hicks said.
“Why would I give so much of my life to this one person? I was arguing with family and friends all the time, like ‘just support him.’”
After a series of breaking points, Hicks’ has now left Trump behind and joined 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.
'Really destructive'
When he was taking college classes, Hicks said he learned about bias and fact-checking in a journalism class. That’s when he stopped watching Fox News and reading Breitbart.
Hicks’ first major breaking point from MAGA came during the COVID-19 pandemic when he was working at a restaurant and encountered an old man who refused to wear a mask, saying, “If I die, I'll be with Jesus.”
Throughout the pandemic, Trump mocked mask wearing, held large rallies and contradicted his own public health experts’ medical advice, promoting dangerous remedies for the virus, including injecting bleach.
“I was just like, ‘Well, President Trump, say something. Why do you keep saying not to wear the mask? Why are you saying things against the social distancing? Why are you letting everybody die?’” Hicks said.
“That was really frustrating to me.”
His MAGA allegiance continued to weaken when Hicks watched the video of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin.
“It was undeniable when I actually saw the video … you could just see the person die on camera, and I couldn't argue with that,” Hicks said.
“No matter how Fox would spin it, I could not really rationalize it.”
Watching Trump promote “really destructive” policies to weaken LGBTQ+ rights, and then hearing Trump spread the lie that President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, were his final straws, Hicks said.
He recalled a friend who called him distressed that Democrats “stole” the election.
“Somebody lied to him, and they are driving him into a depression. He actually is crying, and he's scared, and he's panicking,” Hicks said.
“Trump doesn't care. He's hurting my best friend, and he doesn't care, and so, that was when it really clicked to me … it was like he really is a bad guy.”
By the time 2024 came around, Hicks ended up voting for former Vice President Kamala Harris and “Democrats up and down the ballot.”
“That's what I'm going to be doing in this midterm,” Hicks said.
Hicks is confident that Democrats will at least take back control of the House, particularly as voters are upset over sky-high gas prices under Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress.
But, he wishes that more people would vote for Democrats for the sake of democracy and standing up for immigrants’ rights in order to “hold off this movement in the future."
