There’s a good deal of online dialogue lately about how we should be responding to people around us, who are finally beginning to extricate themselves from the MAGA death cult; whether due to human rights atrocities, war crimes, pedophile protection, or simply high gas prices and a decimated 401K.

Ex-Trumpers have posted tearful monologues about the vitriol they’ve experienced as they’ve stepped into the light to declare their newfound emancipation from the indoctrination they received at the hands of their parents, preachers, politicians, and partisan news bubbles. They report of the mockery, acrimony, and insults they’ve absorbed from strangers, family members, and former friends on their de-culting journey, and the way this ugliness has left them struggling to find ways to move forward.

I’ve seen moderates and left-leaners engaged in protracted, volcanic debate with one another, with passions running high and insults flowing freely.

Some demand a strict, no-tolerance policy for former Trumpers, a permanent scarlet letter, forever exempting them from full inclusion in the larger collective. Proponents of this hardline stance maintain that the injuries these MAGA foot soldiers have been complicit in are so irreversible, and the fractures they’ve helped create are so irreparable, restoration is not possible.

Others point to such intolerance as a hypocritical practicing of the very close-minded ostracism they’ve lambasted red-hatters for the last ten years, and as evidence for why the Left will never persevere in overcoming a hateful minority movement. These kinds of punitive purity tests, they say, will never allow us to create the broad coalition of resistance necessary to overcome authoritarianism.

There are very few hard and fast rules to all of this, but here’s what we owe defecting MAGAs:

Acknowledgement.

I’m a firm believer that what will soon rouse many Trump supporters from their cultic stupor will not be empathy or moral awakening, but self-preservation. They will not be rejecting this regime’s inhumanity as much as finally feeling the pain themselves, and this should not be rewarded with praise. Still, regardless of how they reached clarity about the object of their decade-long, breathless adoration, it is no small gesture to outwardly break with a movement that gave you identity, provided you a sense of belonging, and formed your community. That should be respectfully acknowledged.

Decency.

Despite a decade of almost incomprehensible cruelty toward just about everyone on the planet outside of those within their narrow, insular movement of white Republican heteronormativity, we who’ve found ourselves on the other side have told ourselves tales of our own moral superiority. We’ve subsisted on a narrative where our compassion, our code of ethics, our working morality, or our spiritual convictions made us different. To meet former MAGA cultists with unrelenting hatred and dehumanization makes such stories fiction. If we can’t bring our humanity to bear when it is most difficult, we’re not as different as we think.

Expectation.

Having spent so much time participating in the destruction of our Republic doesn’t mean these people can’t be invited into a counter-movement, but they will need to demonstrate with their voices, their activism, and their social media that they have changed. They will need to actively work to undo what they have done to vulnerable, marginalized, oppressed people, and to speak out against the dehumanization they have co-signed. It’s not enough to claim internal renovation; there must be repentance expressed tangibly. We owe ex-Trumpers the chance to prove their hearts have evolved by the work of their hands and the words from their mouths.

Having said that, here’s what we are not obligated to offer MAGA refugees:Forgiveness.We need to be honest: it's been a decade of Trump’s moral sewage: a never-ending parade of human rights violations, vile perversion, dehumanizing comments, legislative overreach, and giddy brutality. His body of work is prolific and unmistakable.One hundred percent of the people now fleeing Trump witnessed him ridicule a disabled person, watched the Access Hollywood video, experienced his incompetence during COVID, heard him say that immigrants were eating family pets, have seen the lawless violence of ICE, realized he’s been disregarding the Constitution, and have known his name is all over the Epstein files. For whatever reason, none of that mattered for a hell of a long time. At some point, grown adults need to own their choices, and these people, over and over again, have chosen illegality, immorality, and sociopathy. Nothing can erase that fact, and we are not obligated to make peace with it.

Hopefully, there will soon be a massive exodus from the MAGA-mind virus, and we’re all going to need to figure out how to fold these former cultists into the collective resistance, without forgetting how we got here. We shouldn’t avoid the inhumanity they’ve been party to, but we can’t respond with inhumanity ourselves, either.

How should we respond to family members, friends, and strangers as they begin to peel away from Donald Trump? What do you feel we owe these people, and what is too much to ask? Let me know in the comments.

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What Do We Owe MAGA Defectors?