Trump Supporters Regretting Their Votes After DOGE Cuts

Voters in North Carolina voted for Donald Trump by a nearly four-point margin in November, believing that the MAGA leader would help state residents recover from storm damage in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Then he didn’t.

Trump supporters in the Tar Heel State are still waiting for the president to direct disaster relief funds to rebuild and restore local infrastructure. Five months on since the hurricanes battered 27 counties across North Carolina, approximately “300 privately owned bridges in this county have yet to be fixed.” Those reminders are dressed with red banners, urging Trump to make the bridges “great again,” reported The Washington Post.

The residual desperation has left even Trump’s biggest champions questioning their support.

“There was a lot of desperation here and a lot of hurt at the time when he came and when the signs went up,” Robin Ollis, a local who runs a horseback riding company, told the Post. “The people that have been suffering from this storm, really, there was so much anticipation for Trump to come in.”

Trump and his allies scorched the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the midst of the disaster, spreading unfounded conspiracies that the lead response agency was out of money, and that the Biden administration had diverted funds from FEMA to assist undocumented immigrants in entering the country. (FEMA administrators have fervently and repeatedly denied this.) Conservatives, at the time, claimed that working with the White House to expedite disaster relief “seemed political,” and even conspiratorially suggested that the hurricanes were a government manipulation.

Days after his inauguration, Trump visited the damage, spouting that FEMA had failed to help the region while pitching an idea to do away with the agency altogether in favor of handing the money directly to the states. But none of that has come to fruition.

Since then, Trump has actively worked to dismantle FEMA. The administration is blocking states across the nation, including California and Michigan, from accessing preapproved relief. A coalition of Democratic-led states has sued the federal government, claiming that “hundreds of millions of dollars in FEMA grants” are still inaccessible.

“I have found myself questioning this new administration,” Gary Hicks, a North Carolina Trump voter, told the Post. “What are they going to do? … I know he’s only been in office for a month. But let’s start seeing some results.”

But North Carolinians aren’t the only ones upset with the Trump administration’s direction. Conservative voters across the country have raised their voices against Trump’s agenda, lamenting the administration’s decision to nix thousands of civil servant jobs.

“Nobody that I’ve talked to understood the devastation that having this administration in office would do to our lives,” Jennifer Piggott, a recently dismissed Treasury Department employee, told Reuters. Piggott told the newswire that she would not have supported Trump in the election if she knew then what she knows now.

An 80-year-old veteran chained himself to a sign near the White House Monday to protest Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s massive cuts to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

Richard Hobcraft Allan III, a resident of Charlottesville, Virginia, locked himself to a metal post outside of the presidential building Monday morning, holding a pipe around his hands reading “King Trump and Pres Musk are killing veterans.”

Allan said he and his fellow veterans “are marshaling on [March] 14th at noon and marching all over the country to say one simple thing: Veterans will not stand for this any longer.”

“We believe that an unelected leader is killing our fellow veterans and something must be done. All over our country, people are standing up, making noise in the streets, and stating ‘we cannot go on as usual,’” Allan continued. He later joked with one of the Metropolitan Police officers who responded to the scene.

“I’ve been told that some of you guys are real humane,” he said.

“We try to be,” the officer replied.

“If you could slip over here with just a shot of bourbon—” Allan said, causing the officer to laugh.

Ultimately, police decided to leave Allan attached to the post.

“My intention had been to be here until I was broken out of here and arrested, and I was proud to face arrest in the name of my fellow veterans,” Allan said, but would ultimately have to free himself, and called his small protest an “appetizer” for the larger veterans’ march on Saturday. 

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned ICE’s detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, calling it a “tyrannical” move.

“Violating rule of law, actually,” AOC wrote on Monday, responding to an assertion from Katie Miller, wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, that Khalil’s kidnapping was mere “rule of law.”

“You are shredding the Constitution of the United States to go after political enemies. Seizing a person without reason or warrant and denying them access to their lawyer is un-American and tyrannical,” she continued. “Anyone celebrating this should be ashamed.

“If the federal government can disappear a legal US permanent resident without reason or warrant, then they can disappear US citizens too,” she wrote in a separate post. “Anyone—left, right, or center—who has highlighted the importance of constitutional rights + free speech should be sounding the alarm now.”

ICE arrested Khalil, a leader in Columbia University’s pro-Palestine movement, as he returned to his home Saturday night, despite the fact that he has a green card. ICE initially informed Khalil’s lawyer, Amy Greer, that they had revoked his student visa. When Greer brought up Khalil’s green card—which would make it much harder to detain him—ICE said that was revoked too, and hung up on her. Khalil is thought to now be in an ICE facility in Louisiana.

Trump was delighted by ICE’s actions and took to Truth Social to warn that this is the first arrest of many.

“Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, all but confirming that advocating for Palestinian self-determination is now a crime.

“We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply. Thank you!”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been advising a holistic medical clinic in West Texas that has been distributing unproven alternative medicines during the deadly measles outbreak, Mother Jones reported Monday.  

Local historian Tina Siemens and Dr. Ben Edwards of Veritas Wellness in Lubbock, Texas, have been working to distribute alternative medicines such as vitamin C, cod liver oil, and the inhaled steroid budesonide, amid the growing outbreak. Siemens said they spoke with Kennedy last week to discuss the culture of a Mennonite community that has found itself at the epicenter of the outbreak due to its low rates of measles vaccinations. 

Siemens claimed that the Mennonites had been unfairly blamed for the spread of the disease and that not every family had made the decision not to vaccinate their children. “The media is spinning it as it’s all the unvaccinated, uneducated Mennonites, and that’s just not the truth,” she told Mother Jones. 

Last week, Siemens was involved in an online fundraiser to raise money to provide the children of Seminole, Texas, with alternative medicines, in partnership with the Children’s Health Defense, the vaccine misinformation group that Kennedy helmed until he began his failed run for the White House last year. 

The fundraiser was to “defray the cost of essential vitamins, supplements and medicines necessary to treat children enduring complications from the measles virus and other illnesses,” and directed all donations to Siemens and Brian Hooker, who is the Children’s Health Defense’s chief scientific officer. The fundraiser had garnered more than $13,000 in donations as of Monday.

“I’m very, very grateful that we live in a community that has that choice,” Siemens told Mother Jones. “We live in a state that has that choice, for the parents to make that choice for their family.”

But it’s possible that people like Siemens and Edwards could stand to profit from that choice. 

Vitamin A is found in cod liver oil, the dietary supplement being pushed as an alternative medicine and sold for a whopping $48 per bottle by Veritas Wellness. 

Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is now under Kennedy’s purview, added a new section on the use of vitamin A to treat measles—horrifying health experts who say there is weak evidence that it can be used as a treatment and that vaccination is the only proven method of prevention. Kennedy touted the additional resources about vitamin A in an op-ed published by Fox News last week. 

Meanwhile, a bottle of vitamin C costs only $38 on the site—a real steal!

Ruth Marcus, an award-winning political columnist and longtime editor at The Washington Post, has resigned after her opinion piece criticizing Post owner Jeff Bezos was killed. This is another installment in the backlash to the controversial internal changes that Bezos has made in an attempt to better align the paper he owns with the Trump administration.

“Jeff’s announcement that the opinion section will henceforth not publish views that deviate from the pillars of individual liberties and free markets threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable,” Marcus wrote in her resignation letter, according to NPR.

“Will’s decision to not … run the column that I wrote respectfully dissenting from Jeff’s edict—something that I have not experienced in almost two decades of column-writing—underscores that the traditional freedom of columnists to select the topics they wish to address and say what they think has been dangerously eroded,” she continued, referring to the paper’s CEO and publisher, Will Lewis.

Marcus had been working at the Post for 40 years.

Lewis led a severe revamp of the Post newsroom, after which the paper decided to conveniently stop making presidential endorsements last year. Then there was the paper’s painfully ironic slogan change, Bezos’s front-row appearance at Trump’s inauguration, and the Post’s suppression of an advertisement critical of Elon Musk. It’s clear to everyone—especially those within—that the Post’s leadership has placed political agendas over basic journalistic integrity.