"You have to be kind to people leaving MAGA because it's hard to leave cults and we want to encourage them to leave." It's not exactly like somebody got suckered into joining Jehovah's Witnesses out of a desire for community and connection to God and then got in too deep to leave, like the whole Trump thing started with calling Mexicans rapists. A pivotal moment in his re-election campaign in 2024 was accusing Haitian immigrants of stealing and eating people's cats and dogs. It's only ever been about wholesale bigotry and scamming people and there is no leaving. Those people are just trying to find new targets to scam.
That very much wasn't the beginning.
you're right, the actual beginning was Trump gaining political notoriety years before he ran for president by pushing birtherism, a conspiracy theory that insisted Obama was not a citizen and therefore not the real president on the basis of being black and having a foreign-sounding name. that collection of racists was the proto-MAGA; it was their racism that enabled them to start idolizing an aging real estate con artist, so the point still stands
Do you honestly think Trump is the first conservative politician ever to lie? This has been going on since before we were born.
Okay, can you explain how this is related to the actual thesis of the original post or are you just being contrarian for fun
