A supporter of President Donald Trump in Des Moines, Iowa on January 30, 2020 (Image: Shutterstock)
During Donald Trump's first presidency, then-Tennessee resident Victoria Hurst was an enthusiastic supporter of the MAGA movement. Hurst, now 28, attended MAGA rallies, purchased MAGA-themed merchandise, and made Trump donations.
But Jessica Lionnel, in an article published by the iPaper on the anniversary of Trump's second inauguration, explains why Hurst went from being passionately pro-MAGA to turning against Trump and becoming a Democrat.
Hurst, according to Lionnel, fell hard for the MAGA movement in 2016, the year she became old enough to vote.
"When Donald Trump came along and ran for president," Hurst told the iPaper, "my only knowledge of him was that he was on 'The Apprentice' when I was a kid. I thought he had to be the smartest guy to have a job like that, just firing people."
Hurst, Lionnel notes, was very pro-MAGA for about five years. But she started questioning MAGA in 2021, according to the iPaper reporter, after meeting her now-husband, who is Black.
"Having informally identified as a Democrat in her teens," Lionnel explains, "Hurst says conversations with her now-husband began to help change her political views back. His uncle had marched with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and was in the House of Representatives in Alabama…. She enrolled in an online college in Detroit, Michigan, where her politics professor got the class to watch a PBS documentary on the January 6 insurrection on the Capitol in 2021."
Hurst, according to Lionnel, came to realize how bad the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building was — and she went on to abandon the MAGA movement and become a Democrat.
Hurst and her husband now live in San Antonio, Texas — a blue city in a red state — and she is highly critical of the second Trump administration's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.
Hurst told the iPaper, "If you want to ignore it (ICE), you can. But I think sooner rather than later, it will be in everyone's face. If you pay attention, you can see it: you can see the increased ICE presence, you see the supermarkets less full, you see people posting on neighborhood apps, asking if it's safe to come out. It can't be ignored forever.'"
Read the full iPaper article at this link.
