Trump Defectors Are on the Rise. Do We Welcome Them?

There are moments when a system fails so completely that it reveals its design. For me, that moment was in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. I watched from Newark as floodwaters submerged New Orleans, Black families were stranded on rooftops and packed into the Superdome while the state and national media moved with a deadly indifference. As a young adult, I learned something important: Systems don’t collapse; they are disinvested in and allowed to fail when people are deemed expendable.

I have been thinking about what it means to come back from harm; not to leave it behind, but to repair what was broken. And, in this political moment, this thought leads me to an urgent question: What do we do with people when they leave the Make America Great Again movement?

That question has me reflecting on the aftermath of Katrina, when a pre-Nazi era Kanye West (who now calls himself “Ye”) took to live television to proclaim: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” and it was like a flare had been lit. Unpolished and not exactly strategic, his words were from the heart and true in a way that felt almost forbidden.

I was a fan of Ye; his music helped me bridge generations of Black art. Which is why what came later felt less like disagreement and more like treason. That treason has stayed with me, as I’ve watched Ye’s turn toward harm—the anti-Blackness, the antisemitism, the alignment with authoritarian politics.

The question is, what does accountability look like when harm is public and repeated? Ye has attempted to make amends with his family, and while mental health deserves care, it cannot excuse ideologies that traffic in harm. He has also written an apology for his antisemitism (but not his anti-Blackness), published in the Wall Street Journal. Is that enough to atone for the harm he’s caused? He may think so: He’s started playing shows again.

But what unsettles me is not only what he said or did. It’s how quickly the culture moved to metabolize it.

As a Black man and an artist, Ye deserves the dignity of being held in complexity—neither reduced to his worst moments nor shielded from them. But we as a society do not yet know how to hold the space between harm and healing. We rush to exile or embrace, skipping the harder work of accountability, repair, and transformation. And in that rush, harm doesn’t disappear; it gets absorbed, normalized, and, often, rewarded, especially when it lands on those already pushed to the margins.

Ye is not the only one we’re being asked to reckon with. As the MAGA movement crumbles, we will be faced with a growing crowd of political evacuees. Figures like Olivia Troye, a colleague in the advocacy world, have stepped away from MAGA politics and entered a new phase. This demonstrates that while it matters that people are leaving harmful systems, leaving is not the same as transformation.

Something is cracking within American political discourse. We seem to be entering a new phase. People are exiting the most harmful corners of our system. Some loudly. Others quietly. Many imperfectly. Troye, a former aide to former Vice President Mike Pence, has spoken out against the January 6 insurrection and the dangers of Trumpism, and is facing relentless social media backlash for her defection.

At Sojourners, I support democracy work that holds space for unlikely allies without diluting accountability. We’ve organized across faiths and partisan lines, always insisting that solidarity is not easy. As an organizer, I have seen this tension up close. We need to hold space for allies who were once enemies without disregarding accountability. And as more people defect—and they will—the real question remains: What do we actually do with them? 

Across movement spaces, I have been part of the necessity of truth-telling and repentance in this political moment. We have resisted the seduction of superficial love, which the writer bell hooks said “devalues and degrades [love's] meaning” because it fails to “openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust." But we have not yet fully grappled with how we show up for those we know have caused harm. This largely exists because defection, while indispensable for democratic renewal, is not the same as transformation.

Defection is leaving the system. Transformation is a spiritual, cultural, and ideological reckoning with harm, relinquishing power, and committing to repair. It requires understanding the harm you caused or enabled, relinquishing the privileges it afforded, and committing to repair with those who have been impacted. 

While leading the Shabazz Center, the site of Malcolm X’s martyrdom, I often considered that when Malcolm broke from the Nation of Islam, publicly naming abuse and exploitation within the movement, it wasn’t just a political shift; it was a spiritual rupture. He called out trauma, relinquished power, and risked his own life to tell the truth. It was a costly decision. It changed him, widening his political imagination, forging global solidarities, and opening new paths to interracial, interfaith justice.

I wrestle with that in my own work. We are constantly making decisions about proximity: Who is inside, who is outside, and under what conditions will we work with certain people. Defectors complicate that calculus. They arrive with histories, access, and sometimes influence, but also with thick residue. The question is not whether they belong, but what belonging requires of us. And for defectors themselves, the question is just as stark: Are you simply seeking refuge, or are you prepared for responsibilities that have been crafted by your past and are required for the future? Because our movement doesn’t need more witnesses to harm. We need participants in the demolition of harm, the construction of freedom, and the ongoing delivery of healing.

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History warns us about what happens when reconciliation doesn’t include material weight. In both American Reconstruction and post-apartheid South Africa, change was instituted without economic redistribution, leaving inequities intact. These moments expanded Black power either briefly or with limitations but without restitution; those gains were violently reversed or quietly stifled. In both cases, symbolic progress failed without concrete material commitments. Even our violent breaks from oppressive systems—like war, rebellion, and mass uprisings—have failed to repair them without material transitions.

This process of transformation goes by many names across faith traditions. In Christianity, it’s repentance—not just confession, but change. In the Jewish tradition, it’s known as teshuvah, the concept of turning back, making amends through action. Ubuntu theology, rooted in African communal ethics, insists “I am because we are,” binding individual transformation to collective healing. And in the work of James H. Cone, Black theology of liberation calls for repentance as liberation: God sides with the oppressed, rejecting reconciliation that sidesteps justice. Cone’s prophetic voice demands accountability, not reductive grace; inequity and oppression must be named, power relinquished, structures upended.

Look at Zacchaeus in Luke 19: The tax collector doesn’t just repent; he repays fourfold what he stole, redistributing wealth to the poor. This is an adjustment; material and visible.

Today’s defections test this. Olivia Troye’s break from President Donald Trump’s election lies—and her move toward a congressional run—have raised real questions for liberal and progressive audiences. In plain speak, folk want to know: Does she deserve an invite to the cookout? Or more broadly, should MAGA defectors be trusted with leadership in the very spaces they once opposed? These aren’t clean breaks. They’re messy, incomplete, and unfolding in real time. Defection may signal distance from harm, but it does not yet account for it.

And an even more subtle danger lurks: The centrist impulse to recentralize power in the name of unity. In liberal spaces, there is a rush to elevate white, male defectors as saviors of progress, prioritizing electability over the experience and leadership of Black and Indigenous women, trans people, and incarcerated communities who have long sustained democracy. This confuses defection with legitimacy and mutes those whose analysis actually charts the future. In my work as an organizer, I’ve seen the difference. Coalitions don’t thrive when defectors recenter themselves; they thrive when those most harmed are centered and trusted. Anything less risks reproducing the very conditions we claim to resist.

If defectors are serious, it will show in how they move resources, how they leverage power, and who they choose to follow. Faith communities, at their best, can model this, dismantling harmful systems and creating space not just for confession, but for restitution; to be like Zacchaeus, modeling both return and repair.

I believe we are entering a period where more people will defect. That is necessary. But if we mistake departure for transformation, then we will only recycle harm under new names, treating the symptoms while letting the disease continue to spread. As a movement builder of faith, I work within Sojo Action among a team that facilitates dialogues where former ideologues confront their role in division and then contribute to mutual aid networks or policy, narrative shifts, or collective action. I’ve seen how hard it is to hold that line, to resist both exile and easy absolution. But there is no liberatory future that is not anchored in the lives of those most harmed.

If we take seriously that Black people exist in the future, then repair cannot remain theoretical. It must take form: public support via systems, mutual aid resourced by those who once opposed it, debt relieved, land returned, communities reinvested, abolition. This is not charity. It is the cost of a future that is already being imagined, and, in many places, built. The question is not simply who is willing to leave MAGA. It’s what they are willing to restore.

Because only when defection bends toward repair does it become something more than escape. Only then does it interrupt the cycle, rather than extend it to future generations.

The question is not simply who is willing to leave MAGA. It’s what they are willing to restore.