'It’s about to collapse': MAGA defector forecasts end of Trump movement

According to one prominent former supporter of President Donald Trump, the MAGA movement is about to “collapse under its own weight.”

This is according to conservative commentator Pedro Gonzales, who told Vox, “When your movement revolves around taboo-breaking and boundary-stepping, but then you decide there are some boundaries that are worth respecting, it’s a joke. It’s going to fail. It’s going to collapse under its own weight.” While Gonzales had been a dedicated MAGA loyalist, he was turned off by the movement following comments made by Trump while on the campaign trail in 2024.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump infamously declared during a debate against Kamala Harris. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

As the Daily Beast explained, “The president was pushing a radical conspiracy that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, a small Appalachian town in Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets — an accusation that thrust the area into the national spotlight and made it a target of far-right groups, including the Ku Klux Klan. Vice President JD Vance was one of many prominent MAGA figures to seize on the conspiracy theory, later telling CNN: ‘If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.’”

For Gonzales, an Ohio resident himself, this was a bridge too far. He has since visited Springfield to write about the impact the debunked conspiracy theory has had on its residents.

“The time I spent in Springfield made it clear to me that I was on the wrong side,” Gonzalez wrote in an essay on why he left MAGA, arguing that Trump and his allies had abandoned “debate and careened toward outright enmity not only for immigrants but also for Americans who refuse to partake in their hatred of them.”

“That November,” wrote Gonzales, I chose not to vote for Trump.” Later, he “felt fully vindicated” in doing so after the Trump administration “embraced shockingly cruel tactics that culminated in out-of-control federal agents killing two American citizens in Minneapolis during the immigration crackdown there.”

According to the Daily Beast, “Gonzalez is just one of a growing number of right-wing commentators who have turned on Trump over a range of issues, particularly affordability, his war on Iran, and his Department of Justice’s botched release of the ‘Epstein files.’ Notably, leaders of the right-wing ‘America First’ movement — including former Fox News firebrands Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, as well as conspiracy theorists Candace Owens and Alex Jones — have become prominent dissenting voices.”

All of this is happening as Trump’s polling numbers have cratered and he has lost the support of demographics that were essential to his 2024 victory, such as young men who are increasingly turning away from the MAGA movement.