Once part of Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, 28-year-old Victoria Hurst now fights against it.
The Tennessee resident had just reached legal voting age in 2016 when Trump was campaigning to be president, and she was starstruck.
“When Donald Trump came along and ran for President, 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 told The i Paper.
In her own words, Hurst came from a deprived background. Her father was an alcoholic who beat her and her mother, causing her to leave her hometown in Smyrna, Tennessee – just outside of Nashville – when she was 14 to live with her grandfather in Cape Coral, Florida.
Her parents moved down later, but her father got them kicked out of her friend’s house due to his behaviour and the family were forced to stay in motels, regularly living off food stamps, as her mother and father were periodically unemployed.
She moved in with her boyfriend at the time shortly after her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer.
“It was there my Maga journey slowly started,” Hurst said. “My then-boyfriend’s best friend’s parents really took me in. They paid for my prom dress, offered me food, and bought me jewellery.
Hurst and a placard ahead of an anti-Trump rally“They had nice things, and I thought to myself ‘if they have nice cars and houses and are Republican, then maybe I want to be Republican, too’.”
It was there that Hurst said she became indoctrinated, posing with an AK-47 in a prom photo and pointing the finger at her parents for abusing the system.
“So when Trump first ran, it went wild here. Most people here have a boat as it’s a canal city, and on random Wednesdays, you would see floats with ‘vote for Trump’ on them and people donning flags.
“It made you feel like you belonged to something, and I wanted to be included.”
She spent the next five years going to Maga rallies, organising events in private groups, posting on social media, buying Trump merchandise and donating to him. Meanwhile, in her personal life, her mother and grandfather died, she divorced, and she was a single parent.
It wasn’t until she met her now-husband, an African American, in 2021, that she began asking questions. After the two hit it off after meeting on Tinder, one of his friends “stalked” her Facebook profile and saw that she had a Maga flag in the background.
“He messaged me saying I should read the book White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, a book that I had had no prior interest to due to Maga shunning it,” Hurst added. “It made me horrifically uncomfortable and I had to think. I told him it was reflective and said thanks.”
She then started to question other things Maga members had said were “nonsense” and looked at herself more. Having informally identified as a Democrat in her teens, 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.
Hurst speaking at an anti-Trump rally in San AntonioShe 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.
“I was going through so much then that I didn’t understand how grave they had been,” Hurst continued. “I was in my own bubble. People were killed. People look at me in shock when I said I couldn’t believe they were this bad.
“I was unravelling everything.”
Hurst briefly served in the Army, so when she found out that the rioters tried to overthrow the government and throw the US Constitution out of the window she said she found it hard to defend Trump.
“That was the hardest line in the sand for me. You can stare at your hypocrisy for so long before you must accept you are being a hypocrite.”
She came out publicly as a Democrat in 2024.
The married couple, along with Hurst’s child, now live in the Democratic-leaning San Antonio in Texas, which is considered a red state. She describes the city as a hotspot for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Just recently, a vendor she works with called her in tears saying that four of his employees had been taken by the agency.
“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 neighbourhood apps asking if it’s safe to come out.
“It can’t be ignored forever.”
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She campaigns with Leaving Maga, a group founded by ex-Maga member Rich Logis, to help people transition away from the movement. She knocks on doors, attends marches and organises events, but often gets threats, saying she sometimes leaves letters behind for her husband and child in case the worst happens.
While she takes full accountability for the choices she made in the past and is embarrassed by them, she said real harm has been done by people who voted for Trump.
“No one owes me forgiveness. I get why some Democrats are wary of me. But let’s fight the beast first. I want it so my great-grandchildren can read about me with pride and say I stood up to Trump. I want him to hate me.”
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