Some Trump voters are sneaking away

A decade into our collective Donald Trump nightmare, most of the reality-based population has given up on hoping MAGA voters will wake up and see the light. We’ve come to realize that he could eat a live kitten on TV and they, unwilling to admit his critics were right all along, would argue that kitten was “antifa” and liberals are the ones who are stupid for not seeing the threat the kitten posed to our safety. I predicted this miserable state of affairs back in 2017, after interviewing psychology experts on cognitive dissonance. For Trump voters, the pain of saying “I was wrong” is too great. They would rather burn the country to the ground than accept fault. If anything, the worse Trump acts the harder they cling to him because the psychic price of saying “liberals were right all along” grows steeper.

The situation can feel hopeless, especially in the face of events like the recent killing of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis. A woman is dead because of Trump’s racist obsessions; children have lost their mother. But all his voters seem capable of doing is protecting their own egos by telling lies to justify the indefensible. Most them will go to their graves with this sin on their consciences, protesting until the end that they were good people even as they defended kidnapping, murder and fascism.

But there is a small ray of light in all this darkness. Polling suggests that a small but important number of Trump voters are trying to pull an Irish exit, abandoning the coalition quietly rather than continuing the miserable task of pretending what he’s doing is okay.

On Friday, data journalist G. Elliott Morris analyzed and compared the past year’s polls to Trump’s first term. “Backlash to Trump has been more severe in his second term,” he found. This is visible in many measures, from approval ratings to who people plan to vote for in the midterms. But the most telling statistic might be the number of people quietly dropping “Republican” from their self-identification. According to Morris, “Republican identification dropped from 46% in 2024 to just 40% in Q4 of 2025 — a 6-point decline, triple the 2-point drop during Trump’s first term.”

It’s still a small number, but it’s significant because it suggests people are starting to find it embarrassing to say they are Republicans. They’re looking for a way to distance themselves from Trump and the MAGA movement without admitting fault.

Conservatives and centrists may claim to be above “identity politics,” but the labels people give themselves matter a lot. That’s doubly so when it comes to the MAGA movement, which uses a blunt “us vs. them” frame for everything, giving their own followers a model of tribalism so fierce you’d think “Trump voter” is a religious or ethnic category. (And as MAGA becomes more openly white nationalist, the movement is also increasingly trying to collapse the difference between being MAGA and being white.) Declining to identify to a pollster as “Republican” allows Trump voters a way to abandon the movement while still avoiding the psychological pain of saying “I was wrong” or even “I’m sorry.”

It’s not very satisfying for those of us who spent the past decade warning folks that Trump really is a fascist liar, only to be dismissed as having “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” But if these folks were capable of true self-reflection and growth, they probably wouldn’t have been Trump voters to begin with. So this is what we have to settle for: at least a small number of them are feeling embarrassed enough to slink away and pretend that they were never that gung-ho Republican.

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While it’s not enough, on a pragmatic level, this matters. Being embarrassing is the worst thing you can be in politics, which is why Democrats continue to underperform, despite having a policy platform that’s far more popular than the Republican one. Even if most of these quiet defectors aren’t going to vote for Democrats, this polling shift — especially taken with Trump’s declining approval ratings — suggests that enthusiasm for Republicans is sliding downhill. That means lower turnout for those voters, fewer donations and less advocacy. Democrats have seen time and again what happens when your base is demoralized. It results in losses, even if the opposition party doesn’t gain voters.

Trump’s team certainly seems worried about it. The targeting of Minneapolis for a hellish ICE invasion is clearly being done strictly as a political move. The goal is to draw out protesters and, ideally, a few who break windows or topple police cars so that Fox News can clutch their pearls and declare that “the left” is out of control, invariably ignoring that most protesters are peaceful. Trump can’t make people like him more, but he clearly hopes he can demonize the left so thoroughly that the quiet quitters of the GOP get back on board.

It makes a certain amount of sense. Trump’s popularity has always been driven more by loathing of the left than genuine infatuation with his repellent personality. A lot of his voters have always found it easier to paint him as a necessary evil to put down the fictional “woke mob” than attempt to pretend, at least to those outside their tribe, that the man has any redeeming qualities. If Trump can turn progressive protesters into a scary villain, that could work to give people the cover to rejoin the MAGA movement.

There’s no telling if it will work this time, but there is reason to hope it won’t. Good’s killing is already taxing the ability of Republican voters to pretend they’re good people while they support the administration’s actions. That Trump started the chaos in Minneapolis is also indisputable. The only gambit they have is to whine, “Why won’t you people submit to jack-booted federal thugs?” It’s a stance that is hard to square with decades of conservative claims to the “don’t tread on me” small government types.

As he always has, Trump is asking for a level of loyalty from followers indistinguishable from self-debasement. Many would happily roll around in manure to please him, of course, even as their MAGA stench alienates friends and family members. But a small number will likely keep turning away, pretending they were never involved in the first place — and hoping no one calls them out for it.