I used to think love was enough. Well, not just enough—I thought it was the answer. That if I loved hard enough, gave enough, showed up enough, made myself small enough and available enough and patient enough, something would eventually crack open in them. They would see it. Feel it. Turn toward the light like a plant that finally found the window.
The stuff Jesus said. Love without conditions. Love that costs you something real—not the Hallmark version, not the kind you perform on holidays and post about online. The kind that costs you little pieces of your soul every single time. The kind that makes you sit across the dinner table from someone who thinks you’re brainwashed, and you still pass them the rolls. The kind where they spit venom directly at you, and you still hold them when it all falls apart, even when they have no idea they’re the ones who lit the match. The kind that keeps you calling. Keeps you trying. Keeps you believing that somewhere underneath all of it, the person you knew is still in there.
I gave that love to people who used it as a doormat.
And I kept giving it anyway. That’s the part I’m still making sense of.
I’ve been doing that work my whole life. Long before Trump. Long before MAGA became an insidious personality. I come from hard people in hard places. A mother who was tethered to her image, a boy mom who felt burdened by motherhood and didn’t like what the stork brought her the day I was born—her only daughter. And an absentee, money hungry father always looking for his next hustle, whose idea of parenting was screaming at me over the phone from 350 miles away on the weekends because my little brother would tell him I was mean to him. The kind that wired my brain for transactional love and scapegoated the one person brave enough to call out the inconsistencies, that buried harmful secrets and mistook the burial for peace.
That person was me. I was the problem. Not because I was wrong, but because I was inconvenient. Because I kept pointing at the thing nobody wanted to look at and refusing to pretend it wasn’t there. Why MAGA points at me today.
When I finally went no contact, ten years ago, I expected relief. What I didn’t expect was the implosion. Without me to blame, there was nobody left to absorb the weight of everything they refused to examine about themselves. But the mirror came for them anyway. It always does.
So I know this dynamic. I know it in my bones, in my body, in the specific way my nervous system still braces for impact when I tell an uncomfortable truth out loud. MAGA didn’t invent this. They just scaled it. The scapegoating, the secrets, the rage at anyone who refuses to play along. I grew up inside that architecture. I know exactly how it works. I broke cycles and loved unconditionally anyway. That’s not a virtue I’m claiming. It’s just what I know how to do.
But I’m tired. And so are a majority of Americans. Nobody’s saying it plainly enough, so I will.
I’m tired of being the one who reaches.
I’ve lost people over this. Not political opponents. People. Family. Friends. My own kids. People I would have walked through fire for, who looked at what’s happening in this country and said, YES, more Daddy, MORE. People who watched a man mock the disabled, cage children, get convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records, incite a traitorous mob, whose name surfaces repeatedly throughout the Epstein files, and held civilly liable for sexually abusing a woman.
The man who lied to everyone about everything he ran his campaign on. He lied to you, MAGA. Blatantly. No new wars. Cheaper groceries. More jobs. A healthcare plan better than the ACA. He promised you everything and delivered nothing but chaos. And still, y’all handed him the nuclear codes.
Mind boggling.
Or maybe you knew he was lying and just didn’t give a damn, as long as the people you wanted hurt, got hurt. That’s the part the rest of us keep getting stuck on. That’s the part that makes this so hard to explain to each other, let alone the watching world.
Make it make sense. Because most of the globe can’t. More than 60% of Americans are looking at this MAGA movement you so staunchly defend, like you are the single most spectacular display of self-inflicted stupidity in modern political history. This is how history will record you. The history books will read, “The Movement That Ate Itself: How MAGA Voted Away Its Own Future and Fucked the Whole World Up.”
When I say I can’t pretend this is normal, they will say, I am the problem. Everyone else is lying, not him. Not the fascist orange turd that’s proving the left right one headline at a time.
That’s not a political difference. That’s a values rupture. And I can’t dress it up like it’s something smaller than it is anymore.
I wrote a piece recently called, Oh, So Now You Want to Talk, about the sudden appetite for reconciliation now that consequences are arriving.
And they are.
Some MAGA are still in denial, bless their hearts. But people are leaving the movement in droves—they just can’t quite bring themselves to say it out loud yet. Pride is a hell of a drug.
Two months ago I noticed the corner of my proud MAGA neighbor’s Trump flag stuffed inside his garbage can, flapping in the wind like the trash it was. No replacement went up. I waited. Still nothing. This from the man who used to have that flag positioned like it was load-bearing for the last six years.
My neighborhood was a whole situation not too long ago. Signs. Bumper stickers. Flags on every other porch. A full commitment to the aesthetic. And now? Nothing. Crickets. The yards are suspiciously, beautifully bare.
Every morning on the way to drop off my girls at school, I’d pass this Dodge Ram pickup truck (you know the kind, the truck that’s doing a lot of emotional heavy lifting for a very small man inside) and his entire back window read ULTRA MAGA in letters you could probably see from space along with Trump in a cowboy hat and Bible versus adorning the tailgate.
Haven’t seen that truck in a while now. Haven’t missed it either.
It’s funny how that works. All the noise, all the flags, all the performative rage… and then one day you look up and it’s just… gone. Quiet. Like it was never there.
Almost like they knew. And just couldn’t say it.
Most people agreed with the article I wrote, So, Now You Want to Talk.
Some denied it outright. Some called for unity. The comments were telling. Not because they were angry, but because of how tired the majority of everyone was. Not performatively tired. Soul tired. The kind of tired that doesn’t have many words left. Person after person saying some version of the same thing, I’m done. I have nothing left to give this fight.
But then came the other comments. The ones calling for unity. Reminding us that our anger is just another form of hate, that we’re no better if we write people off, that division is what got us here and love is the only way out.
I sat with that. I really did. I don’t dismiss it outright—I understand the impulse. I share it, somewhere underneath all of this.
But I had to be honest and ask myself, is what I’m feeling actually hate?
Because I lost a son over this. I lost my parents. Family. Friends. People woven into the fabric of who I am, people whose voices I still hear when I’m not paying attention, people I would still show up for in the middle of the night if they called.
I don’t hate them. I’m just tired of touching fire and getting burned. And they would happily continue burning me if I let them.
I hate what they chose. I hate the cruelty they decided was acceptable, the fear they let get weaponized into something ugly, the way they looked at vulnerable people and said, “fuck em.” I hate the racism that encapsulates their language. I hate that they handed power to someone who has contempt for everything I love about this country and call it patriotism. Patriotism is usually defined as love, loyalty and a sense of duty to your country and its constitutional order. Trump’s behavior and rhetoric repeatedly clash with that idea, as he claims the label, “Patriot.” He’s no patriot. He’s an authoritarian cult leader draped in a fuckin’ flag. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
But them? The actual humans? I love them. Still. Dearly. Inconveniently. In that stubborn way that doesn’t ask permission or make logical sense. I hate that I love them sometimes, because it would be so much easier if I didn’t.
So when someone tells me my anger is just hate with better PR—I push back on that, hard. Because grief looks a lot like anger from the outside. Exhaustion looks like contempt. The person who spent years reaching and finally stopped can look, from a distance, like someone who never cared at all.
But that’s not what this is.
This is what it looks like when love runs out of road. When you’ve extended yourself so far toward someone that you’ve lost your own footing, and you finally have to stop—not because you stopped loving them, but because you have to love yourself enough to stop disappearing in the process.
That’s not hate. That’s survival.
And I think a lot of us are there right now. Not hateful. Not giving up on humanity. Just finally, finally putting down a weight we were never supposed to carry alone. We’re grieving.
If you voted for this, I don’t hate you. I’ve tried to. Like I said, it would be easier. Hate is clean. Hate has edges you can lean against. Hate lets you write someone off and walk away without looking back. Hate is a door you close and don’t have to think about anymore.
I can’t get there.
Believe me, I’ve tried. Several times. I’ve sat with the anger long enough to see if it would harden into something more manageable. I’ve replayed the conversations, the silences, the moments where I watched someone I love choose cruelty and malice. I’ve experienced their wrath personally. I’ve given myself full permission to just stop caring. To let the love curdle into rot.
It doesn’t though.
What I feel instead is this complicated, exhausting, infuriating thing that doesn’t have a clean name. It’s grief that keeps getting interrupted by fresh wounds. It’s love that has no safe place to land. It’s the specific ache of knowing someone’s phone number by heart and not being able to call them. Or having their DNA literally inside your brain, feeling them energetically, throughout the cosmos and being just out of reach. It’s missing people who are still alive, who made a choice, who are somewhere right now probably convinced that I’m the one who walked away. Not seeing how they shoved me so hard away from them, that they threw me into another dimension.
That’s not hate. I don’t know what to call it exactly, but it isn’t hate.
Hate would be a relief, honestly. Hate would mean it’s over.
What I’m carrying refuses to be over. It keeps showing up uninvited. It still flinches when I see something that reminds me of who we used to be to each other.
You don’t grieve people you hate.
And I am grieving. Quietly, persistently, in the background of every political conversation, every news cycle, every time I read another disastrous fucking headline and think— do they see this? Do they care? Is there any version of this that finally gets through?
That’s not the inner life of someone who hates you.
That’s the inner life of someone who loves you and doesn’t know what to do with it now. Like shooting love into the void, hoping it somehow reaches you.
What I actually feel is messier and more humiliating than hate—I still give a damn what happens to you. Even now. Even after everything. That’s the part that wishes you well but doesn’t want to be around you while you go down with the ship. The love didn’t leave. It just has nowhere to go.
Because you don’t want it. You want to win. You want the libs to cry. You want to watch black and brown families get loaded into vans and call it safety. You want women back in their place and you want them grateful for it. You want men to be able to groom young girls without consequences. You want to steal and lie and cheat and be celebrated for the audacity. You want boots on necks. You want everything, for nothing. You want someone to finally say the quiet parts loud—and face absolutely zero repercussions for any of it.
You want to do whatever you want, while everyone else stays in their place. You want to feel powerful. But the part that just scrambles my brain the most is that the only way you know how to feel powerful is to kneel for someone who has contempt for every single one of you. You handed your dignity to a man who wouldn’t let you in the front door of his hotel or lick the dirt off his shoes no matter how much you worship him.
That’s not power. That’s the oldest con in American history.
And you fell for it in a MAGA hat.
And for a while, it probably felt like winning. I understand the seduction of that. I do.
But the tariffs are real. The teenage girls in detention centers getting pregnant because ICE agents are raping them, is real. The women dying from dangerous pregnancies because they can’t access abortion care, is real. Every disabled person, elderly person, and child who has food insecurity now, is real. The job cuts are real. The American soldiers and citizens who’ve already died is real. Twenty seven million people do not have healthcare right now and most of those people are you, MAGA. The chaos is real. And if it hasn’t already landed on your doorstep yet—because it’s coming—I won’t say I told you so, because what’s the point anymore.
What I’ll probably do is feel heartbroken, and furious, and then heartbroken again—because that’s what it is to love people who were so determined to hurt others that they didn’t mind hurting themselves to do it. But I’ll never show you that grief because all you’ll see is anger. You don’t deserve that level of genuine authenticity from me anyway. Not now. Not after everything. I need time and space from you.
I’m not writing this to change your mind. I’ve made my peace with the fact that I can’t. Pain is a powerful teacher, and you’re enrolled in that course now whether you know it or not.
Maybe this is what the rapture was actually about. Not fire and brimstone and chosen people ascending. Just love and empathy continuing forward, while hate and cruelty get left behind to reckon with themselves.
You’re being left behind, MAGA. And you did that to yourselves.
This chaos will end one day and it will take you with it.
Good luck. I hope you know it’s not too late to do the right thing. Although, I also understand that not everyone is built for bravery.
I write this mostly for the ones who are also tired.
The ones who keep reaching across tables that keep getting flipped. The ones who love difficult people and are running out of ways to explain why. The ones who lie awake at night wondering if holding onto love makes them strong or just makes them a fool. The ones who have been told—over and over—that their anger makes them no better than the people who hurt them.
You’re not crazy. You’re not weak. You’re not naive for having believed that love could be a bridge.
You’re just dealing with people who were never interested in crossing it. And there is nothing wrong with you for finally, finally accepting that.
Put that weight down. You’ve carried it long enough.
We’re still here. Still fueled by love. I don’t know how to be anything else, and I don’t think you do either. That’s not our weakness. That’s the thing they could never take from us no matter how hard they tried.
Two things can be true at the same time. We can love our MAGA counterparts and still be fucking furious with them. That fury isn’t hatred. It’s grief with no outlet. It’s love that ran out of road and had to stop. It’s justified… every last bit of it—and we don’t owe anyone an apology for feeling it. We’re allowed to feel how we feel.
I’m done performing patience I don’t have. I’m done softening truths to protect feelings that were never extended to me. I’m done making myself smaller so that people who chose cruelty can feel comfortable.
This is me. Exhausted and honest, with no performance left.
And somehow, still here. Still loving. Still furious.
Still standing.
MAGA, I wanted to reach you. Wanted to—past tense. Now I just want you to hurry up and feel everything you voted for, so the healing can begin. Because that’s the only way it happens—when it hits you directly. Something you’ve proven time and time again. I hope that time comes soon, if it hasn’t already. I hope you get everything you voted for.
Because at the end of the day, this is all your fault. I will not take responsibility for a single piece of it. I didn’t vote for a fascist dictator. You did.
In a perfect world, I want unity for all of us. But you made sure we all have to detour to get there now. You did that. Not us. You burned the entire house down and then asked us why it’s cold inside. You don’t get my coat anymore. It’s time you fend for yourself.
It’s going to be a long road. We won’t hold your hand while you walk it. We’ll already be at the finish line, waiting. As MAGA members leave the movement one by one, let them figure it out on their own. They will… it just takes the right amount of pain and lessons learned. No more coddling. No more making excuses. No more carrying what was never ours to carry.
Eevie. Damn. You’re a Picasso with the written word. Thank you again for another biting, insightful essay. I stand in awe.
I, too, have lost people very close to me who are so overcome by their own internal resentments of “the other”: Blacks, Latinos, Gays, you name it—easy targets to look down on(see my LBJ reference from our last interaction), to boost their own fragile egos. Trump is and always has been, for my friends and other MAGA, an easy mouthpiece to latch onto.
Long after I’m dead and gone, historians, psychologists, sociologists, and God knows who else will be studying this phenomenon as closely as they have studied the phenomenon of the German people and Hitler. That was actually much easier to explain.
This is the perfect description of things. Just so tired of it all...