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SINCE DONALD TRUMP DESCENDED that golden escalator in 2015, the Republican party has devolved into a cult of personality that mirrors the worst authoritarian regimes of the last one hundred years.
For ten years, the GOP has waged an unrelenting war on our civic institutions, the separation of powers, the foundation of the rule of law, and the very nature of truth itself. While Trump and his supporters in Congress have been the driving force behind the right’s descent into despotism, it would not have been possible without the thousands of consultants, aides, and politicos working behind the scenes to fully execute their systematic dismantling of American democratic norms.
That’s why I’m publishing this letter today.
For over twelve years, I worked inside the Republican ecosystem, helping the party advance its goals in several fields, ranging from grassroots voter outreach to digital fundraising. I worked inside GOP circles through Trump’s takeover of the party, his initial downfall, and his resurgence in 2023–2024. At every step along the way, I rationalized, compartmentalized, and found excuses to stay tethered to the party, even as I grew to believe it was undermining the foundations of our constitutional republic. But over the last few months, the compartmentalization and coping stopped working to silence my conscience.
And now, after more than a decade, I have decided I have finally had enough.
I quit. I quit the Republican party and my job as an accomplice to the party in the throes of an authoritarian cult. Today, I resigned from my career as a senior fundraising strategist for one of the leading Republican digital fundraising firms in Washington, D.C.
I’m not the first to take this path. A lot of ink has been spilled by former Republican politicians and staffers about why they left the Republican party. Tim Miller’s Why We Did It provides a valuable perspective from the vantage point of a political strategist at the Senate and presidential level. My journey has been through the lower tiers of the Republican party, in state-level campaigns and as a mid-level manager in a GOP-affiliated consulting firm. Mine wasn’t as high a vantage point. But when it comes to understanding the MAGA takeover, it was no less critical. It was at this level that I saw firsthand how Trumpism, as both a cultural and political force, took hold at the grassroots level, driving local politicians to make the thousands of decisions and compromises that in turn enabled Trump and GOP leadership to wedge the MAGA movement even deeper into American life.
Don’t get me wrong: My ego is not so large that I believe I played a significant role in putting Trump into office. What I mean is that it took the collective action of thousands of people in similar positions, working nine-to-five jobs, figuring out how they were going to pay for their kid’s daycare or fund their retirement, to get us where we are today. I was a part of that—until I decided I could no longer be.
MY GOAL IN QUITTING the party and writing this piece is twofold: first, to shed light on why someone would continue to work for an increasingly corrupt and authoritarian political party despite their divergent ethical and political beliefs; second, to convince any number of consultants, staffers, and former colleagues to follow their consciences and leave with their integrity still intact.
To do that, I should start by explaining how I arrived at working for the Republican party.
My self-identification as a Republican pre-dates my professional life. It took shape as a teenager in the social and political milieu of post-9/11 America, where I developed a belief in American exceptionalism derived from George W. Bush’s willingness to take the fight to terrorists in Afghanistan and bring democracy to Iraq. It was an exciting time for a kid fascinated by politics. Volunteering for a local Republican congressional candidate in the 2004 election as a high school junior is one of my most treasured memories to this day. I can still vividly remember how thrilling it was driving around the district in my 1997 forest-green Chevy Blazer putting up yard signs while blasting Toby Keith’s “American Soldier.”
I eventually became disillusioned by the Bush administration’s handling of foreign affairs. But one belief never left me: that the projection of American soft and hard power not only makes America safe, it makes the world safe. Throw in a little misguided hagiography of Ayn Rand, and you have the foundation for a deeply committed Republican.
My career as an actual Republican operative started in 2013 when I became political coordinator for Janet Nguyen’s state senate campaign in California. The job involved a lot of election precinct analysis, social media copywriting, and any gofer work my boss could think of. After Janet’s victory, I transitioned to her Senate office, ultimately becoming her district director.
Janet, who is now a county supervisor in Orange County, was known as a moderate and represented what should have been a solidly Democratic state senate district in Orange County. While she was a backbencher in a legislature dominated by a Democratic supermajority, she had a compelling story. She was a refugee from Vietnam. She came from nothing and achieved the American Dream. Her election, however, came at a moment when the Republican party had started drifting away from the very things she represented. Much of that drift can be attributed to the influence of one man: Donald J. Trump.
I’d like to say that even before Trump burst onto the political scene, my disillusionment had started to set in. Our staff had, for some time, known that there was a toxic strain of know-nothing populism festering at the ground level inside the GOP. Working on Janet’s 2014 campaign, we routinely heard volunteers sharing conspiracies over vaccines or Obama’s birthplace. We assumed they were a fringe and that keeping them happy was the cost of electing moderates like Janet. Then came June 16, 2015. We watched from our district office as Trump came down the golden escalator and announced his campaign for president. I admit, I didn’t initially think it would be a disaster for the country, because I still assumed he was a joke and would lose the primary in a landslide. My concern was over how this would impact Janet’s political standing in a district where Latinos held a plurality of the vote.
The real anxiety didn’t set in until a month later when Trump dropped the John McCain is “not a war hero” line at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa. I was walking around a street festival with my girlfriend when I got the text from Janet calling for an emergency staff meeting to discuss a possible response. Everyone was on the call. My personal outrage aside, I thought Janet’s story as a refugee of Communist Vietnam made issuing a full-throated condemnation the only logical response. She would show Latinos she’s willing to stand up to Trump, and she’d appeal to conservatives by standing up for our military. Call it a lack of imagination, but I couldn’t wrap my head around her taking any other course of action.
However, a consensus rapidly emerged that a non-response was the most prudent course of action. The thinking was that Trump’s candidacy was a joke—why alienate the sliver of voters Trump was holding when he’d be out of the race in a few months? From that point on, my anxiety began to fester.
I didn’t give up hope of trying to create distance between Janet and Trump. Later in the campaign, I proposed that she write an op-ed about the Syrian refugee crisis, again leveraging her background while calling on America, as the bastion of freedom, to open its doors to those fleeing the Syrian civil war. She loved the idea. The full staff and her consultants didn’t. The op-ed was killed.
After that, I stopped trying. For the remainder of the 2015–2016 campaign, I tried to pretend Trump didn’t exist. When he won the primary, we compartmentalized it by assuming he’d lose the general election to Hillary Clinton. And when that didn’t happen, I got drunk with my colleagues at Janet’s house.
And yet, I kept going. New rationalizations took hold. First, I was working for a moderate who I still believed represented the future of the party. She believed in the efficient use of government services, she didn’t belittle immigrant populations, and she firmly believed in American exceptionalism. Second, I was in my late twenties, with a mountain of student loan debt, and still living in my childhood home. The prospect of leaving was too overwhelming to imagine. So, I stayed.
We more or less muddled our way through the first seven months of Trump’s presidency, relying on the same head-in-the-sand strategy that got us through 2016, until the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally and the murder of Heather Heyer in August 2017. The images of young white men in polo shirts carrying tiki torches and screaming “Jews will not replace us” horrified our entire staff. With alt-right events, including one planned public book burning that was eventually canceled, popping up in our region, we knew Janet had to issue a statement condemning the rally—and President Trump for saying there were good people on both sides. This was the initial statement we drafted and had Janet post on Facebook:
Today our nation mourns as an American hero is laid to rest. Heather Heyer stood up for our most sacred of American values — equality, freedom, and individual liberty. Having fled the persecution of a fascist regime and to now see one of our fellow Americans fall victim to the very same hateful ideology is enough to bring me to tears.
We buried the condemnation of Trump on Twitter, believing that fewer of her Republican supporters would see it:
Within minutes of putting up the Facebook post, Janet received calls from supporters outraged that she would ever think to call Heather Heyer a hero. Not realizing that she had approved the post, Janet was outraged. She ordered us to revise it. The staff stressed to her that Heyer had indeed been killed by a terrorist for protesting Nazis in her city. But that didn’t matter; the text was changed, and any further condemnations of Trump or alt-right activities occurring in our district would stop. The Twitter post stayed up because she believed her most vocal supporters weren’t on Twitter. A belief we didn’t bother to contend.
I had never felt more defeated in my entire professional career. When I got home that night, I sat on the couch with my then-girlfriend (now wife) and broke down. I was angry; I hated my boss; I hated Trump; I hated what our country had devolved into; I hated myself for being a part of it; and I hated that I lacked any ability to see a way out.
It was the first time I should have drawn the line and said I quit. But, again, I stayed.
IT’S HARD TO CONVEY the emotional and mental weight one feels when one’s career suddenly conflicts with one’s beliefs. A coping mechanism I found myself reverting to several times over the course of the last ten years was to take myself out of the present moment and focus on the future. Doing this allowed me to ignore my current predicament and create plans that gave me a way out. It gave me a clearer sense of agency in an environment I felt completely lost in.
For me, the prospect of getting the title of campaign manager for Janet’s re-election campaign in 2018 kept me going. I thought that once I had the experience of managing a campaign in one of California’s most contested Senate elections, I would be able to write my ticket anywhere. I eventually did get the title I wanted and did manage the final stage of Janet’s re-election campaign. We weren’t in a congressional race, which meant we weren’t fielding a whole lot of questions about Trump. But his presence loomed over all elections that cycle. Our strategy was to juice the Vietnamese vote for Janet in Little Saigon, hope the white vote held steady everywhere, and minimize the damage in the Latino community. On Election Night, it looked like we had avoided being swept up by the Blue wave. But we kept bleeding votes as more ballots were counted over the following couple of weeks. We lost.
By December, I was out of a job, and for the first time in four years, I felt like I was finally free. But the reality was far from liberating. What followed was a nightmare-inducing seven-month job hunt. I applied to over a hundred jobs, went through multiple rounds of interviews, and was ghosted by several employers. The entire process drained my savings and left me desperate for a job anywhere I could find it, even if it meant slinking back to the Republican party.
So I did. In June, I took an RNC campaign-management course in Oklahoma, and by August, I was hired by Campaign Solutions, a digital fundraising firm based in the D.C. area.
So, my wife and I uprooted our entire lives in Southern California and moved to Northern Virginia. From a cozy office tucked away in a picturesque suburb of Washington, D.C., I assisted in and coordinated digital fundraising campaigns for political action committees, congressional and gubernatorial candidates, and House and Senate campaign committees.
After seven months of unemployment and being down to the final few dollars of my life savings, any misgivings I had about the direction of the Republican party had been eclipsed by my relief to finally have a steady paycheck again. But that quickly changed. In my new position, I became enmeshed in the D.C. Republican consulting ecosystem that was now fully orbiting around Trump.
The clients I oversaw and the emails I wrote for them were all 100 percent pro-MAGA. Every piece of fundraising content had to somehow out-MAGA the previous. It was routine to publish content that pushed election fraud conspiracies, stoked anti-immigrant sentiment, and sowed distrust in our institutions.
In D.C., I got better at compartmentalizing my work. Given all the tumult and chaos of the COVID pandemic and the George Floyd riots, our routine remained relatively simple. Our company shut down our offices during the pandemic, so for most of the 2020 election, I didn’t have to see or experience the consequences of my actions or be around others who seemingly reveled in Trump’s chaos. I also felt Joe Biden was going to defeat Trump anyway, so my work didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
In the end, Biden won. But my need to compartmentalize and rationalize would not end with his win.
WE’RE AT THE POINT in the story where I know what you’re thinking: How are you in any way a sympathetic, let alone a believable, character in any of this? Perhaps you’re asking why I should be listened to. After all, I stuck around in the muck I’m now decrying for years. I profited from it (albeit barely). That’s fair.
I’m fully aware that any excuses at this point won’t justify why I stayed so long and will only sound like thin attempts at rationalization to alleviate my personal guilt. Maybe they are. I know that the fact that I’ve finally taken action doesn’t on its own bring me absolution. That’s not what I’m looking for here. My intention rather is to try to explain how it is that people who know better don’t act on that belief—to illuminate how we justify our contributions to the degradation of our politics in real time.
Perhaps no moment can illuminate this better than January 6th.
No one in our office anticipated what was about to happen on that day. The footage of violent rioters storming the U.S. Capitol just a few miles from us left everyone in a temporary daze. A consensus seemed to slowly emerge that Trump had finally gone too far. Even Lindsey Graham, one of our company’s clients and one of Trump’s most ardent defenders in the Senate, told the nation to “count me out” following the riots.
Yet, paradoxically, January 6th gave me still another excuse to continue in my job. After all, the system had held, the courts had stood firm, Trump’s cadre of supporters had been thoroughly humiliated, and Trump was going into exile at Mar-a-Lago as a political pariah.
The bonus following the election didn’t hurt either; 2020 had been the company’s best year in history, and everyone on staff reaped the rewards. For the first time in my adult life, I was finally on sound financial footing. With my wife and I preparing to start a family, the idea of leaving the Republican party ceased to be a serious consideration.
The next few years went by uneventfully. I clocked in at the office at nine and left at five. I was treated to conventions in exotic locales and was invited to D.C. parties. I got promoted and received a sizable pay raise. At a superficial level and putting my ethics aside, I was living the life I had imagined having as a teenager.
But my comfortable position papered over a massive chasm between my personal political beliefs and the new MAGA orthodoxy of the Republican party. I had believed there was a red line that, once crossed, would force me to leave the Republican party for good and never turn back. But at this moment, I wasn’t so sure where that line was.
WHAT FINALLY BROKE ME out of my comfortable cocoon had nothing to do with Trump or his grip on the Republican party. Rather, it was the rightward lurch of the Supreme Court and the lengths to which the right was willing to go to undermine established legal precedents and access to reproductive rights.
When I was younger, I was staunchly pro-life. But as I got older, I grew to realize this wasn’t the black-and-white issue I had previously believed it was. While I slowly became pro-choice, I still didn’t consider it a personal priority when I voted. In fact, I failed to fully process the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
But in early 2023, after trying for over a year to start a family, my wife and I were finally expecting our first child. Early into the pregnancy, we were informed the fetus had stopped growing and was no longer viable. We were crushed. To see the emotional and physical pain my wife endured was agonizing.
I couldn’t begin to comprehend that there were now states where women were going through the same sorts of emotionally shattering and potentially life-threatening experiences without the safety net of legal medical care. For the first time, I started to go out of my way to avoid news articles on a political issue. I started putting up mental walls. I wasn’t just compartmentalizing my emotions around Trump; I was walling off my outrage over the contempt the entire conservative movement had toward women and families.
When my wife finally became pregnant again, the preparations of becoming a new father distracted me from any anxieties I couldn’t compartmentalize, even as Biden’s poll numbers continued to slide. But below the surface, anger and resentment simmered over the Dobbs decision and its fallout, which led to the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that created such large legal risks for fertility treatment that many clinics temporarily paused their operations. It was easy to picture my wife and me in the shoes of another couple trying to build a family in this legally fraught environment.
To a degree, I understood the selfishness of my reaction. I had been willing to work in a system and for a party that had allowed rulings like these to take hold—that had celebrated them, in fact—only to find it unbearable when I felt personally attacked. It is not to excuse my actions that I note that sometimes a personal experience is what it takes for an awakening like this to occur.
I began plotting to leave behind a decade-long career working for the GOP. But just the idea of leaving seemed like a monumental task. I wanted a clean break. But with a kid on the way and almost no professional contacts outside of organizations associated with the Republican party, I was on a tight schedule. My job hunt was perfunctory at best, limited to reaching out to other former GOP staffers who had left. The minute I became a father, my brief attempt to escape came to an abrupt end.
I spent the next six months just trying to survive as a new dad. When Biden had his disastrous debate in June 2024, I went into a full media blackout. I was balancing surviving on three hours of sleep a night and a full-time job at the peak of the election season. I only paid attention to what I needed to in order to provide the necessary level of service to my clients. I couldn’t bring myself to read the news of Trump’s inevitable-seeming return as president.
In the months immediately following Trump’s election and swearing-in, I resumed my job hunt. I perused LinkedIn and job boards, made some contacts, and sent in my resume to a few potential employers. Admittedly, I could have done more. But once again, my personal life was intervening. I now had a family to help support. The prospect of starting from scratch and blowing up my life was just too overwhelming.
Comforts set in once more. Campaign Solutions was one of the most professional, supportive, and collaborative work environments I had experienced. We routinely ate lunch together in the common area and joked over the latest movies and TV shows that had just come out. (Ironically, Andor was a smash hit around the office.) It was easy to ignore my disgust with my portfolio of clients.
So, why now—why have I arrived at this decision today? At every mile marker, I’ve rationalized, compartmentalized, and found every excuse to stay. I stayed past Trump’s migrants-are-‘rapists’ tirade. The January 6th insurrection wasn’t enough for me to leave. His lack of leadership during the COVID pandemic contributed to the deaths of over a million Americans, yet I still went into the office.
I’ve made this decision now because our nation has arrived at a moment in its history where staying silent for personal comfort isn’t an option anymore. Almost every institutional guardrail holding our constitutional republic together has either broken or has been strained to the point of failure. Seeing masked federal agents and soldiers on our nation’s streets was a visceral reminder of the small role I have played in making this moment a reality. It was the moment I fully recognized that the damage I’m doing to our country for the safety of a comfortable office job and a paycheck is no longer an abstract concept I can ignore. I’ve spent countless sleepless, anxious nights speculating about the future of our country. Questions about whether our family would have access to vaccines, quality education, basic health care, and foundational constitutional freedoms we took for granted run on repeat through my head. I know now that if I continue to stay, I won’t be able to explain to my children why I didn’t take a stand when I had the chance.
As you can tell, this was not a decision I arrived at lightly. It took hours of painfully emotional conversations with my wife, family, and friends. How will this affect my career? After a dozen years working in the trenches for Republican bosses and clients, what does my next job look like? I don’t know the answers to these questions.
Also, will I face any retribution for taking this stand? I’m not a public figure, but at a time when political violence is on the rise and when Republicans are celebrating the use of government as a tool of vengeance against perceived political foes, I can’t help but wonder whether I am putting a target on my back. These are questions no American should have to face. But if we’re going to make it through this dark period in our history, we need to be asking these uncomfortable questions and having these difficult conversations. That underscores why I felt compelled to say something rather than just walk away silently.
I wish I had realized this sooner and I applaud my colleagues who did so long before me. For those who remain and who harbor doubts about what the Republican party has become, this is my message to you: I know the thought of walking away from your career and your familiar social network is terrifying. I urge you to recognize that our nation is heading down a very dark path. But it’s not too late to change direction. If you believe in this country now is the time to refuse to ferry its destruction for a tainted livelihood. Take a stand. Speak out. Show your pride as an American who believes in the Constitution and the values we grew up with.
Today, I quit allowing my complacency to destroy America, and I urge you to quit, too.
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