MAGA’s cause of death will be MAGA itself, one defector has alleged.
Pedro Gonzalez, a conservative commentator who was among the first media personalities to break ranks with Donald Trump, is no longer confident in the longevity of a movement he once championed.
“When your movement revolves around taboo-breaking and boundary-stepping, but then you decide there are some boundaries that are worth respecting, it’s a joke. It’s going to fail,” he told Vox. “It’s going to collapse under its own weight.”
In March, Gonzalez penned an essay explaining exactly why he went from MAGA mouthpiece to organizer. The Ohio-based writer said he had a change of heart ahead of the 2024 election, after the now-president infamously sputtered during a debate against Kamala Harris: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
The president was pushing a radical conspiracy that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, a small Appalachian town in Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets—an accusation that thrust the area into the national spotlight and made it a target of far-right groups, including the Ku Klux Klan.
Vice President JD Vance was one of many prominent MAGA figures to seize on the abhorrent conspiracy, later telling CNN: ”If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Gonzalez, for his part, traveled to Springfield to write about the toll the debunked conspiracy theories had taken on the town, which counts roughly 58,000 residents.
“The time I spent in Springfield made it clear to me that I was on the wrong side,” Gonzalez wrote.
“That November, I chose not to vote for Trump.”
The writer went even further, accusing Donald Trump’s party of abandoning “debate and careened toward outright enmity not only for immigrants but also for Americans who refuse to partake in their hatred of them.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Gonzalez for comment.
The broad coalition that returned Trump, 80, to power for a second term has shown other signs of fragmentation. Gonzalez is just one of a growing number of right-wing commentators who have turned on Trump over a range of issues, particularly affordability, his war on Iran, and his Department of Justice’s botched release of the “Epstein files.”
Notably, leaders of the right-wing “America First” movement—including former Fox News firebrands Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, as well as conspiracy theorists Candace Owens and Alex Jones—have become prominent dissenting voices.
More moderate podcast personalities, such as Theo Von, have also appeared to abandon the movement. Von, who is among several podcast figures credited with helping Donald Trump return to the White House, has criticized Trump’s “authoritarian energy” and maintained that the need for a third political party in the United States is greater than ever.
At the same time, some polling suggests Gen Z—whose voters swung decisively toward Trump in 2024—is now moving away from him.
