Victoria Todd had “a pretty normal childhood” growing up in the 2000s in Smyrna, Tennessee. One big memory: Walking from her elementary school to the former plantation next door for field trips a few times a year. “They would have petting zoos,” she writes in her testimonial for Leaving MAGA. (I’m Editor-in-Chief.) “The whole atmosphere was fun. They would have the kids go in the fields to pick cotton. At Halloween they would have haunted hay rides through the cotton fields.”
Victoria remembers being told the family that ran the plantation “was good to its slaves.” She says those field trips “fed my racial ignorance and normalized my internal racism.”
When Victoria was about 14, her dad started drinking again after being sober for many years. The next couple of years were marked by frequent moves and deep poverty. “ We were in and out of motels for a while,” she says. “I remember on my 16th birthday we were flat broke. A social worker who was helping us asked what I wanted, and I said, ‘A grilled cheese sandwich.’ She got us a frying pan so my mom could make the sandwich.”
Eventually, the family got a rent-subsidized apartment. “When I was 16 or 17, my boyfriend moved into our apartment,” Victoria says. “And that really marks the start of my MAGA journey.”
Her boyfriend’s best friend “was pretty well off; his family had a boat, and he had his own car, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. (My parents couldn’t afford a car.)” The friend’s mother “treated me like the daughter she never had; she bought me jewelry from the Home Shopping Network.”
Victoria “really looked up to this family…They told me my family was in the situation it was in because we were Democrats. I vividly remember a coffee mug in their house that had a picture of Paul Revere saying, ‘The liberals are coming!’”
The family “drilled into me the idea that Republicans are financially responsible; that if you want to have a nice life, you have to be a Republican.”
Victoria was also heavily influenced by her best friend’s family, which “was super heavy into conservative Republican politics. In one of the pictures of her the night of her high school prom, her dad is holding an AR-15 rifle.”
Victoria’s family got evicted from its apartment when she was 17. She and her boyfriend moved into “a rundown, dilapidated trailer” on his great grandmother’s property. During this time her boyfriend’s best friend’s family — the one with the boat — “became even more influential in my life. Looking back on it, I was like the frog in the boiling pot; I didn’t realize I was becoming fully indoctrinated” into conservative Republicanism.
Donald Trump started his first run for president not long after Victoria graduated from high school in 2015.
“My only knowledge of him was that he was on The Apprentice when I was a kid,” she says. “I thought he had to be the smartest guy to have a job like that, just firing people.”
Victoria says she was the perfect target for Trump’s MAGA message. “I was a resentful kid. I hated the system. I felt really left behind and ignored. So I was a sucker for an underdog story, and Trump seemed like an underdog.”
She liked how Trump said government was broken, that it “was only for the rich, and how he loved America so much he wouldn’t take a dime in salary if he were elected. As a poor person, I couldn’t fathom someone saying they wouldn’t take a salary. That was a big selling point for me.”
Victoria also responded to Trump’s talk about how “he loved America. I was very gung-ho on America; I loved the idea of what America could be. I was the type who would wear American flag cowboy boots with an American flag shirt. I even served in the Army for a short while.”
Her main sources of information were social media influencers like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro. “I enjoyed watching these well-dressed men rip into college students,” she says. In retrospect, Victoria says “part of my problem was that I looked only to men for information; I assumed men knew better than me. Also, I never looked into things. I never took the time to fact check anything. If it sounded good, I believed it.”
After Trump was elected the first time, “I didn’t follow politics much,” she says. “Having come of age in Obama’s America, I felt the country was safe and secure. I didn’t feel the need to tune in.”
But she considered herself “a full-blown, Trump-loving MAGA member. I thought he was the coolest. I turned him into a regular guy in my brain. He was my next door neighbor, just a normal dude.”
Victoria broke up with her boyfriend in 2018 and moved to Texas to live with her sister and her husband. “Just before Covid became huge headline news in the spring of 2020, my mom passed away,” she says. “We never knew if it was Covid, but she already had breathing problems from her lung cancer, along with COPD and emphysema.” Two weeks later, Victoria’s grandfather died after contracting Covid from someone who went to her mom’s funeral.
“The people around me were saying, ‘Covid’s not real, that’s not how your grandpa died,’” she says. “I was consumed with grief, and pregnant, but I still knew Covid was real. My son was born that August. I was really checked out from politics after that, consumed with my newborn and a husband who was cheating on me.”
Victoria didn’t know Trump was claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him “until I learned about it from Facebook MAGA groups. People whom I considered really smart were telling me, ‘You wait, any day now you’ll see that the election was stolen.’
She was unaware of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, too. “A co-worker who was a Trumper told me there were patriots at the Capitol who were arrested for protesting. I had no reason to doubt it. In my mind, if the election was stolen, they had every reason to protest.”
Although no evidence ever surfaced proving the election was stolen, “I continued to believe it,” Victoria says. “I convinced myself it was true because it’s so rare for incumbents not to be reelected. But I paid no attention to the court cases, the recounts, or the audits.”
And so in early 2021, she went back to not paying attention to politics. The thunderbolt that shook her out of her apathy struck in the fall of 2022, when she and her boyfriend — now her husband — took a road trip to spend Thanksgiving with his family in Montgomery, Alabama.
“I was taking online classes at Wayne State University, and my politics professor had us watch a PBS documentary on Jan. 6,” Victoria says.
“I can vividly remember going through downtown Atlanta, watching the documentary on my iPad while my boyfriend drove,” she says. “I paused it and asked him, ‘Did this stuff really happen?’ And he said, ‘What do you mean, did this happen? Of course it did.’”
She asked him, “Did people really go in and say they wanted to hang Mike Pence? Were they that disruptive? I thought they were just outside the Capitol.” He said, ‘No, that’s why they were arrested.’”
That prompted Victoria to start doing research. She learned about the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers. “These were not good people,” she says. “They said things like, ‘I don’t care what the Constitution says.’ I thought, ‘What do you mean? That’s the most important thing. I love the Constitution.’”
She goes on: “Thanks to that road trip, I was 100% done with MAGA. I was really mad that I missed what actually happened on January 6. I felt really, really dumb. I wondered how any politician could allow me to miss something like that. I lost all respect for Trump when I learned what happened.”
That Thanksgiving trip “turned out to be revelatory for me in other ways as well,” Victoria says. “I got to talk with my future husband’s uncle-in-law, who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and was serving in the Alabama House of Representatives. I pestered him with a lot of questions about politics.”
Then the family took her to The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, where she learned about the slave trade, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. “It was really powerful; it was the first time I learned the full truth about slavery,” she says.
“I was starting to see the ugly side of MAGA,” Victoria says. “Besides learning that Trump was a liar, I learned America was partly a lie. America prides itself on being the melting pot — but we haven’t treated immigrants the same. I came to understand that there’s a duality: A lot of beautiful things have happened in America, but we can’t pretend that it was all good for everybody all the time.”
She says she “faced another uncomfortable truth: I had became so hardened to life that I lost a lot of empathy, and I lost the willingness to learn how to be empathetic.”
Victoria’s “period of learning and discovery” led her to become a liberal Democrat. Since it came during the Joe Biden presidency, she “felt safe. And I figured once we got far enough removed from Trump, we would move on.”
After Trump was elected the second time, “I jumped on social media and figured out how to get involved in the resistance,” she says. “I work with Indivisible and with 50501, and I’ve done trainings with Mobilize. I’m even a Democratic Party precinct chair — I knock on neighbors’ doors to talk about issues.” Victoria is about to take the LSAT; she wants to become a lawyer and fight for social justice with a group like the ACLU or the Equal Justice Initiative.
What angers Victoria the most about Trump and MAGA “is the overarching theme of the lies.” She thought Trump’s treatment of Ukrainian President Zelensky was “an embarrassment,” and “the whole DOGE thing really grinds my gears.”
Victoria is financially secure now; she makes good money and owns her home. “The further removed I am from poverty, the more I feel every person deserves dignity,” she says. “That’s the opposite approach of MAGA.”
Because Victoria was in MAGA, “I feel personally responsible to help other people get out,” she says. “A lot of people are really angry at Trump voters. But it takes patience, not anger, to get people out of MAGA…You have to speak to people kindly; they have to feel accepted before they can admit they were wrong.”
Now that she’s left MAGA, “I’m a happier person now. I no longer have to hate so many people.”
You can read the stories of many others who have left MAGA on my Substack, The Paulemic, and at Leaving MAGA, where we also have a guide for talking to friends and family who are in MAGA.
