Breaking with Trump and the Republican party he dominates was a slow and challenging process, Vilchez said, particularly since Trump surged back to power this year.
Vilchez has found support in Leaving MAGA, an online community of former Trump supporters of which, he said, he’s by far the youngest member.
Setting out to tell others about his experiences, Vilchez told Raw Story: “I'm doing much better now than I was when I was in MAGA.”
‘The other side’
Back in 2016, while classmates played video games, Vilchez obsessed over politics and the U.S. presidential election.
He couldn’t vote. Just 13, he was still a middle-schooler in Berwyn, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. But he saw himself as a “very staunch Democrat,” all the same.
He called himself a “Bernie bro,” backing Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, for the Democratic presidential nomination. When the party nominated the former New York senator and U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Vilchez swallowed his disappointment, excited to witness the anticipated election of the first female U.S. president.
History had other ideas, so when Trump won, Vilchez decided to give him a chance, first by learning more about “the other side.”
“I was a little bit concerned about how my future was going to be, how my parents’ future was going to be,” said Vilchez, who says he is a "Hispanic, first-generation immigrant.”
Steve Vilchez (Photo courtesy of Steve Vilchez)
“But … I wanted to see if maybe Donald Trump really isn't as bad as the Clinton campaign would say.”
Vilchez decided to do some research. That led him down a rabbit hole, lined with YouTube videos and social media posts.
Drawn to younger conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens, he also found Tucker Carlson, then a primetime Fox News star.
“Very quickly,” Vilchez “abandoned” his previous news diet of NBC, ABC, Vice, Vox and CNN, in favor of Fox News, One American News Network and Breitbart.
“It quickly became like an echo chamber for myself. I was only willing to hear things that supported Trump and Trump only,” Vilchez said.
“It was kind of like a downward spiral from there.”
As Vilchez became a “very, very hardcore Trump supporter,” some friends stopped talking to him.
Still, he found half-a-dozen other Trump fans to eat lunch with at school.
“Each day we would all talk about Trump, saying how he's this great person, and just repeating the same things over and over, just parroting each other and saying like a bunch of ‘what ifs’, and ‘Trump's gonna drain the swamp. He's gonna find the corruption,’” Vilchez said.
Vilchez listened to the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. He came to believe some “conspiracies that MAGA was saying.”
“If someone says a lie enough, people are going to believe it, and this lie was propagated so many times that I bought into it,” Vilchez said.
“I bought into this lie that there was this somehow a deep state that Trump was going to expose, and Trump keeps talking about it to this day that there's a deep state, but he hasn't done anything about it.”
‘Question my allegiance’
Vilchez stayed on the MAGA bandwagon throughout Trump's first term.
But in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, he began to “really question my actual allegiance to Trump.
“Seeing Donald Trump practically downplay it, and in a sense calling it ‘Kung Flu,’ ‘the China virus,’ and ultimately, when he reached a point where he was telling people to inject bleach in the body, [advising taking] hydroxychloroquine [and other medicines not proven against COVID], [and saying,] ‘You could shine a light through the body,’ that made me very upset.”
“Even though I didn't know much about immunology and disease prevention, I knew that these things were dangerous. I knew that some people might get hurt, and in rare cases, they might die.”
Vilchez said he started to further “question my faith with MAGA” when he considered the movement’s climate change denialism.
Despite such doubts, Vilchez remained a supporter through the 2020 election and at first “bought into” Trump’s claims the election was stolen by former vice president Joe Biden, the victorious Democratic nominee.
Vilchez liked a thousand tweets in three days, as “so-called evidence,” he said.
Now, he wants to “unlike those, so that I don't have to remind myself of those, but also I kind of do like seeing those in my memories because it reminds me of the change I've made.”
A “seed began to plant” in terms of doubts about MAGA, Vilchez said, and “as the days got closer to the insurrection, more water was being added to that plant.”
Watching the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, on live news coverage shown in his high-school English class, Vilchez said he was struck by the hypocrisy of Trump and his supporters.
Both said they “back the blue, blue lives matter,” Vilchez said, but “at the same time, they were completely complacent and tolerating many rioters and insurrectionists violently attacking and ultimately causing the death of Capitol police officers, so I was very taken aback by that.”
After that, Vilchez “made a vow to myself to not support Trump, but I still remained a pretty firm conservative.”
He didn’t fully leave the Republican party until the 2022 midterms.
“I was seeing the evidence happen real time, and as much as it pained for me to realize that maybe Trump was wrong, I had to take that pill,” Vilchez said.
“Very reluctantly, I made that choice to realize Trump isn't this godly figure that people claim him to be.”
‘I’m done’
Vilchez said the last straw was continued false claims of election fraud.
“Seeing [Trump Senior Adviser] Kari Lake kind of go back to that 2020 tactic of, ‘Oh, I lost, so it must be rigged.’ At that point, I was like ‘I'm done with the Republican Party,’” Vilchez said.
“This is what you're going to keep doing? You guys lost 2020, just admit that as much as it sucks, you guys lost.”
Lake lost her runs for Arizona governor and the U.S. Senate. Still a fervent Trump supporter, she is now overseeing the attempted closure of Voice of America.
Vilchez voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris in his first presidential election and considers himself a “center left-leaning” voter.
But he retains some “conservative-ish” beliefs.
He’s a “big supporter of guns,” and “pro-life,” but he also wouldn’t “force my opinion” if his future wife wanted an abortion, he said.
He believes in health care for all, the need to meet the challenge of climate change and the benefits of giving children free school lunch.
“As much as people might call that socialist, I disagree,” Vilchez said. “I think it's called being a good person.
“In MAGA, we were all kind of living in fear of other people. That's the way that MAGA seems to operate is they like to run by fear … Donald Trump knows how to weaponize fear very, very well. It's very scary that he knows how to do it.”
Under the second Trump administration, Vilchez said, raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have prompted tough conversations with his parents.
“It reached a point where my parents sat me and my brothers down and talked to us, saying, ‘Hey, if we get deported, this is what's going to happen,’” Vilchez said.
“I never thought that I’d have to have that conversation, but given that it's a reality from any point until Trump's term ends, it's kind of grim.”
His previous support for Trump, he said, “goes to prove that very young minds are very impressionable, and if they're not guided correctly, then these things can happen.
“Since I'm trying to become a teacher, I should make sure that I teach students how to check their sources.”
