My Story & Why I Switched From Republican to Democrat

It wasn't just because of Trump.

A few stories have been written by others about my journey from a former Republican Club President, attorney, and Rick Scott then Ron Desantis political appointee to activist Democrat and independent journalist. Although I thought those stories did a pretty good job covering the basics, I wanted to explain things more in my own words. I also don’t really like to talk about myself or promote myself - I prefer for my work to get recognition rather than me personally. But I think since so many of you follow me and read my work without knowing my story, it would be useful to tell it.

I was born in western Massachusetts - my dad was first generation born in Germany right after WWII to parents displaced by the war who were sponsored to come to America when he was a child. My mother is 13th generation American whose family came to the US in 1636 and was mostly Vermont farmers. Needless to say, there was quite a contrast between each side of my family - from the language spoken, culture, food, history, etc.

My parents married when they were 21 and 18 and divorced when I was 4. My mother took myself and younger brother to Cape Cod which is where I grew up. My dad was a welder and moved to Florida, where I ended up spending most summers until I started high school and decided Cape Cod was more fun in the summer than FL. We lived in a very small house in a rural part of the Cape and my mom stayed single and cleaned houses. On an income level, I was definitely one of the poorest kids growing up in my town - but that is something you don’t really notice much until you get older.

One of the best things about growing up in a place like the Cape is the public education. I’m so thankful for it, because it allowed a working class kid like me to be able to compete against kids later in life who grew up wealthier because I got the same education they did. My teachers in school growing up went to Ivy League schools, or colleges like UMass, Williams, Boston College, Amherst. They could have taken other jobs and made more money - but they loved teaching. It was amazing. It is also why I place so much value in our public schools and the dedicated people who work in them.

That said, I was much more interested in sports and girls growing up than school. Since academics was always pretty easy for me, I never had to work very hard at it, was frequently bored, and rarely applied myself. I also worked every job imaginable since I was 12 years old - delivering newspapers, shoveling driveways, chopping wood, washing dishes, waiting tables, landscaping, on and on. If I didn’t work those jobs as a kid I would’ve had no money, no car, no nothing. But those jobs taught me many valuable lessons - and also gave me a deep appreciation today for the people who do those jobs.

When it came time to graduate high school, I had no money for college and didn’t really want to go into deep student loan debt. I also knew at that point in my life I would have been pretty undisciplined and unfocused and would have underachieved. So I joined the Marines and went to Parris Island four days after I graduated high school at age 17. I never intended to make a career out of it - I mostly wanted the GI Bill for college - but I also knew it would give me an opportunity to see the world. I was also patriotic and thought everyone should serve their country in some way. Why the Marines? That’s simple - it was the toughest challenge!

I ended up in an infantry battalion at Camp Pendleton, CA and deployed to Okinawa and South Korea. The time that I was in (1986-1990) was pretty quiet relatively speaking for our military. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait six months after I got out and was in college. So I didn’t do any of the Middle East stuff. I had two near-death experiences in training. I got bacterial meningitis when I was in a very remote area of Okinawa at Jungle Warfare School. They didn’t know what it was for quite a while before I was eventually rushed the hospital where I remained for 3 weeks and almost didn’t make it. Two years later, I had a lost HUMMV drive over the middle of my back at 3 AM while I was face down sleeping in some soft sand during a training exercise. I was flown by helicopter to a trauma center and luckily survived.

There wasn’t much to do in our down time at our camp in Okinawa. Most of they guys played cards or hung out in bars, but that was never my thing. I discovered a small but wonderful base library and started holing myself up there for hours and hours. I was 18 years old and had never been that interested in politics. But I began reading everything and gravitated to history and politics. This is when I self-educated myself. I read everything from across the ideological spectrum - from The Nation to National Review. From William F. Buckley to Noam Chomsky. I wanted to learn different perspectives on everything since I really didn’t know whether I was conservative, liberal, or something else!

Eventually, I gravitated towards conservatism and became a Republican. Why? That would be a topic for a separate article, but I think the most valuable thing is that I arrived there on my own without anybody pushing me or influencing me in a particular direction. I think that gave me critical thinking skills and also made me a very independent thinker when it came to politics. I wasn’t interested in dogma or indoctrination - only ideas. And I didn’t think that either side had a monopoly on good ideas. I think the best illustration of that is that I was fascinated and obsessed with the lives and ideas of both Gandhi and Churchill - although two people could not possibly be more opposite. But I saw value in many things both had to offer and say - while recognizing their shortcomings.

I jumped into night school. I took classes everywhere I could as much as I could - nights, weekends - all while serving as an active duty infantry Marine. When I visited our “Education Officer” to sign up for the tuition assistance program which paid 70% of your tuition, he didn’t know he was the battalion Education Officer because nobody had ever come to sign up for that since he had been there (officers wear many hats and have many titles). I thought that was odd - and sad that so many young Marines could go to college for nearly free but didn’t. I guess our daily jobs were so difficult they didn’t have the time, energy, or ambition. I did.

When I got out of the Marines, I was 21 years old and had 2.5 years of college credit. I got a job as a night room-service waiter at the Marriott, enrolled in college full time in San Diego, and had my bachelors degree a little over a year later. So I had just turned 23, had a bachelor’s degree, served 4 years on active duty in the Marines, and paid every penny of my tuition with my own money and the GI Bill. I also got 37 As and 3 A-minuses and graduated with a 3.97. I knew wanted to go to law school and go into politics by running for Congress someday.

While I was in the Marines, my mother and entire extended family also moved to FL. Now both sides of my family all lived in FL while I was in Marines and CA, so I no longer had any connection to Cape Cod. I also felt if I stayed in CA and went to law school there with student loans and no money, I would not be able to buy a home for a very long time. So I applied to Florida, Florida State, and Miami and was accepted to all 3. I chose FSU for politics - I wanted to intern at the state capital and I got a coveted legislative intern position where I had to work 20 hours a week in the House and they paid all my tuition. There was never a single time during my college career when I was not also working a job at the same time I was going to school.

But the summer before I started law school I decided to return to the Cape one last time. I rented a room in a big boarding house in Hyannisport and got a job scooping ice cream cones. I will never forget that job interview. The manager said - ‘you are a college graduate, did 4 years in the Marines, heading to law school, and you want to scoop ice cream cones? I can make you an Asst. Manager for the summer.’ I told him that this was my last chance to go back and be a kid a little bit after a lot of hard work and I wanted no responsibility. So I spent that summer making $8 an hour and had a blast.

That was also when I met my wife, Jackie. She was 20 years old, from Rhode Island, and had just finished a year of college while working at a nursing home. She was also from a working class family with a strict German-immigrant mother and it was her first time away from home and I was her first real boyfriend. It was one of those situations where we both just knew right away. Yes, we were very young at 23 and 20, but at the end of the summer I asked her to come with me to law school and we got married after the first semester. Five kids and 33 years later we are still very happily together.

I graduated near the top of my class but never wanted to work for a big law firm. We started having kids right away and I had 4 by the time I was 28. I often joked that I could walk by Jackie in the hallway and she would get pregnant! I wanted my kids to have a great childhood and do all the activities that I was never able to do growing up and wanted to be very involved in their activities, and working 60-70 hours a week as a junior associate at big firm wasn’t going to work. So I became a prosecutor. A lot less money, but mostly 9-5 and very rewarding.

I also got into politics and started hitting the Republican Clubs and chicken dinner circuit. But the things you had to do to claw your way up the ladder in politics when you have no family connections was time-consuming and not for me. It was also pretty slimy and so much of it was inauthentic personal relationships from self-obsessed climbers. I decided it was much more important to be a good dad and husband than it was to set myself up to run for Congress someday.

But I still did quite a lot professionally and politically. I was a state prosecutor, then a federal prosecutor, then a Police Academy Director. I was General Counsel for the Sarasota Republican Party. Little League President. Then elected twice as president of the largest Republican Club in our area. I was appointed by Rick Scott and then reappointed by Ron Desantis to the Judicial Nominating Committee. I had no higher ambitions for myself at that point.

It was in the mid-2000s that my political views began to change, but it was a gradual process. I went into private practice doing criminal defense because I needed to make more money for my young family and I was coaching the sports teams of my kids, so I needed a job where I was my own boss and could make my own schedule. I was never going to get rich - but I had the right balance between work and family.

But in that job I started working with people every day who had struggles - growing up in abusive families and tough neighborhoods, drug addictions, mental health issues, stuck in abusive and dysfunctional relationships. I also worked with a lot of migrants because they were unable to get driver’s licenses in FL, which led to unnecessary legal troubles for them. I began to see with my own eyes the disconnect between how many of my fellow Republicans viewed people with these struggles and their reality.

I began to develop empathy really for the first time for other people. I was always one of those “up from your bootstraps” Republicans. My thinking was - if I could do it anyone can. Well, some people had it much tougher than me and were dealt a different hand of cards. I just needed to live that experience because it isn’t something you are going to learn from a book. Yes, I grew up in a family that didn’t have much - but I also got a magnificent education, grew up in a neighborhood with little crime, was healthy and not abused (although my mom did like the belt!).

Then Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, and that was another thing that was a factor in my eventual exit from the Republican Party. I was President of a huge Republican Club during that time - and I watched and listened to the things that were said in those meetings about him. I will just say that is when a lot of ugliness came to the surface. It mystified me why it was so personal and nasty. Although I disagreed with him on some policy issues, he was a family man, christian, scandal free, hard working - all the things Republicans promote and are supposed to admire. But their hatred of Obama was something visceral. Something different. It wasn’t about policy differences. I began to realize that race was the main reason why.

I have often looked back on my time as an active Republican pre-Obama and asked myself if the racism was always there and I just didn’t see it? Probably. Maybe I didn’t want to see it. But I saw it in 2008-09, and I didn’t want any part of it. When John McCain had that event where he told a questioner in the audience that he wasn’t going to go there on the birtherism and Muslim stuff and that isn’t what the party should be all about - that really hit home for me because I had many of those moments myself as a Republican Club president.

Eventually, I just simply had enough of it because it just kept getting worse not better during Obama’s presidency. I left my position and checked out of most political activities with the Republican Party. I still showed up for some things when asked out of obligation, but my kids were entering High School and I just decided they were a better use of my time than the GOP.

Then 2015 came along, and Donald Trump ran for president. Everyone who grew up in the northeast in the 1980s knew who Trump was, and most of us couldn’t stand him. I was also a fan of the USFL football league growing up, and I watched Trump come in as an owner and promptly wreck the league with his dishonesty, self-aggrandizement, arrogance and incompetence. I really didn’t think there was any way that the party was going to nominate someone like Trump - I supported Marco Rubio in that primary.

Trump was everything conservatives said they were against in every way. In his personal life, his business dealings, his character, personality - everything. He was obviously racist, pretending to be religious when he was not, pretending to be a brilliant businessman when he was not. Not a good father or husband. A draft dodger. Misogynist. You know the list. I simply could not reconcile how grass roots Republican activists could despise Obama and love Trump when one lived his life in every way how Republicans say it should be led, while Trump did the exact opposite. That is when I realized that their principles and ideals meant less to them than they did to me. They cared about power and winning much more than policies and ideas. So I checked out completely.

I did not vote for Trump in 2016. I voted ‘None of the Above’ for president and voted for Republicans down-ballot. In hindsight, I wish I had voted for Hillary, but I also still did not expect Trump to win - especially after Access Hollywood. So it was more of a symbolic protest for me. But I still sleep better at night knowing that I never once voted for him even though I was a lifelong Republican. One of the few.

I checked out until 2020 and covid. Up to that point, I avoided watching TV or reading news. I did stuff with my family and watched sports. I didn’t want to see or hear anything from Trump. What disgusted me even more than Trump himself was watching people I liked and respected, who I knew never liked Trump at all, sell out to him because of their own personal ambition. People I respected and thought I knew. I have often said that is why I ultimately left the party - not because of Trump, but because of what everyone else in the party did in response to Trump. They surrendered everything they believed in and stood for - or at least what they claimed to believe in.

But in February 2020, just like everyone else, I was at home not knowing how many of us were going to die or lose our jobs during lockdowns watching Trump conduct his covid briefings where I was looking for facts and information. And I was horrified. Day after day, when I wanted to hear from scientists and public health officials, I listened to this blowhard ramble on about his grievances, Hillary Clinton, Obama, North Korea, Benghazi, Russiagate, the Perfect Phone Call, how great he was - I was furious. I was screaming and yelling, throwing things at the TV. I absolutely could not believe this buffoon was in charge of our country at a critical time, and my friends helped put him there.

That is when I made up my mind that I was going to do everything I could to help defeat him, but I didn’t know how. I was watching CNN one day that March and a commercial came on from ‘Republican Voters Against Trump.’ It was started by Bill Kristol, Sarah Longwell, and Tim Miller. I knew who they were and respected them. They were asking Republicans who were against Trump to go to their website and make a video stating their reasons why. I was pretty stunned because I didn’t realize there were prominent Republicans out there just like me who couldn’t stand Trump and were still willing to stand up to him. Then I saw some of the people from Lincoln Project, who I also knew, on TV trashing Trump and I knew there was a small movement out there I wanted to be a part of.

But it was still hard. I stewed on it for 2 weeks. I knew once I did that, I would leave a lifetime in the GOP behind, burn bridges, lose friends. But I did it. I wrote out a script, listed 27 different reasons why I despised Trump, and made 4 minute video. A short time later, I was contacted by RVAT to do more. So I did. They put me on billboards and in some ads. I got on Twitter for the very first time - which I swore I would never do. I did it to try and convince as many moderate Republicans to vote for Joe Biden, and I did it tirelessly.

I didn’t have many followers and not that many people noticed me until the Rebekah Jones situation. Ron Desantis had agents raid her home. I didn’t know much about her or her case - we have never met. But I was appalled that he would use state law enforcement in an effort to intimidate someone. What I was most upset about was I felt he was hiding important health information from the public, and was using Jones to intimidate others inside the state government to keep quiet. So I sent him a letter resigning my appointment to the Judicial Nominating Commission, which I had held for 10 years, and posted that resignation on Twitter.

I had no idea that was going to result in huge national news. I had interview requests from national and international media from everywhere. Over the next two weeks I did as many interviews as I could - that also helped me go from 200 followers on Twitter to 10,000 and gave me a slightly bigger platform to get my anti-Trump message out to reasonable Republican voters.

My plan was to remain an anti-Trump Republican or switch to independent after the election. If Trump had conceded the election gracefully and walked away, that is probably what I would have done. But he didn’t, and I didn’t expect him to. I predicted he would never concede because he has never admitted that he lost anything in his life - despite many failures. What I did not expect was to watch a post-election press conference where Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis were going to claim that there was an international conspiracy between people in Venezuela, Italy and China to flip votes in the machines to steal the election.

Then came the Stop the Steal protests, the lawsuits, the audits, the mania. All culminating in J6. That two month time period in November-December 2020 really set up where I am today and what I am doing now. Because when I heard the stuff Rudy, Sidney & Jenna were saying I was stunned. I just didn’t understand how far the Right had gone into the world of conspiracy theories and disinformation. I was just unaware. So I dove into that world - into different platforms, following different groups and people. Some tech and social media-savvy activists saw what I was trying to do and offered to help me - and they did. Tremendously.

That is why, leading up to J6, I repeatedly warned there was going to be violence and it was going to be very ugly. I saw what they said they were going to do. They talked about wearing body armor, bringing improvised weapons, wearing masks, coordinating with other groups - doing whatever was necessary to stop the electoral count that day. When J6 played out largely like I predicted, I then gained a much larger following on social media from people who figured I might be someone who was good at figuring these people out and keeping track of what they were up to.

I also decided to switch parties, and registered as a Democrat on January 7, 2021. I felt the Republican Party was irretrievably broken and being independent was just straddling the fence when the Democratic party desperately needed clear-eyed leaders who were fearless about confronting MAGA. Although there are times when being a Democrat can be frustrating because there are different sensibilities in many areas I was not used to, I would rather have the occasional person scold me for my choice of a word than associate with insurrection apologists and habitual liars.

Throughout 2021-22 I started going to Trump rallies and events hosted by various MAGA influencers and activists. I mostly wanted to talk to the people, watch them, listen to them. I would walk through the parking lots and read all the bumper stickers on their cars. I checked out the merch booths to see what they were selling. I easily blended in because I came from that world. But I also saw that Trump brought a lot of new people into the party who were never Republican before 2016, had no loyalty to the party, and didn’t become Republican for the reasons I did - because of policy ideas. They were Republicans because they worshipped one man. And that man was repulsive.

One day I had a conversation with a very smart MAGA activist who knew who I was. Up to that point, I always believed that most Trump fans were just misguided, conned and duped and if you just gave them enough facts and reality about Trump they would come around. That was pretty much conventional wisdom among many who covered and observed MAGA from the outside looking in. But this activist explained to me that thinking was exactly wrong. He said that Trump fans were very well aware of most of the Trump traits and behavior that I abhorred - and those things are exactly what they loved about him.

I was really surprised by that take, but the more I thought about it and plugged it into my own experience with a fresh set of eyes it made perfect sense. He was exactly right. Although there are certainly misguided sheep in the MAGA movement, the vast majority are very well informed about Trump and they love all the obnoxiousness, boorishness and awfulness. They know that he lies but they don’t care. The way they see it - he lies to win and he has to do that to defeat his many diabolical enemies. Once you learn this simple truth about most Trump fans, you realize that you are wasting time trying to argue with them or convince them. You just have to defeat them.

I covered the right-wing mania at school board meetings and so many other places. Eventually, I realized that the mistake most Democrats make is that they thought they could defeat this phenomenon by defeating Trump - either in court or at the ballot box. But I felt that the focus needed to be on the movement behind Trump - the MAGA cult. The activists, influencers, media, grifters, podcasters, etc. These are the people who really drive the Trump train. And I saw in so many of them so many weaknesses - their checkered backgrounds and past positions, barely disguised racism and misogyny, lack of education, perversion of christianity, greed and shameless grifting, and how much many of them disliked each other.

So I devised a plan to combat and take on the MAGA movement heading into 2024. I put that plan in writing and pitched it to the same former Republican groups I worked with in 2020. While they saw the value in what I had in mind, they are PACs and political consultants. They make their money by raising huge sums from big donors and making ads. The project I had in mind to fight back against MAGA wasn’t going to make them any money - it was going to cost them. But I felt that the money they would have invested in my project would have been far more effective than throwing another million down the cumulative $2 billion dollar rabbit hole of ads during that cycle.

After 6 months of being unable to persuade any of them to invest in the team I wanted to put together to go after MAGA, I eventually expressed my frustrations on Twitter that I really had a great plan, wasn’t a grifter or trying to get rich, I thought that plan was a hell of lot more effective than anything else being done for a fraction of the cost, but it didn’t fit neatly into any box that would fit into a consultant’s business model. The main problem was that I was a busy full-time practicing lawyer and the only way I was going to be able to do it was to walk away from that after 29 years. I just needed someone to replace that income and hire the team I wanted.

A few months went by and Ben Meiselas called me. He said that he read what I wrote and had been thinking about it a lot. He also wanted to leave the practice of law and do this full time by starting a pro-democracy independent media company with his brothers. He had been thinking about a way to merge that idea with my plan, where the team would take on MAGA and do many of the things I had in mind, but also writing about it and chronicling our work hoping that people would support it and we could fund it with grass roots support.

I didn’t really want to work for a PAC or political consultants, because they have their own agenda that is a bit different from mine. Even though Ben’s concept wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, it was pretty close and made a lot of sense to me the more I started thinking about it. But the most important thing for me was knowing that the brothers were authentic and had their hearts in the right place. This was a big move for me and I was only going to make it if everything was right. I hate phonies, grifters and frauds - as you can probably tell from my writing. It is one of the reasons why I despise MAGA.

What I learned over time in watching them and listening to them was that the Meidas boys were the real deal. They were honest, extremely hardworking, dedicated, principled and fearless. I felt that I was those things as well and it was a perfect fit. I would not have gone to work for them if I ever felt they were any different. So we began to assemble a great team of similar people who brought different skills to the table, and got to work.

Eventually I seized upon the idea to focus on writing the daily bulletins after the election. While it is a tremendous amount of work every day, I felt it was the best way to give people a snapshot into the world that I have monitored every day since 2020 across many different platforms. I also did it because I did not see anyone else out there in any media company doing anything like it. With my column you really get such a broad spectrum of political news and events that you simply cannot find anywhere else. That was my goal.

I hope now you have a better perspective on where I am coming from and how I got here. We may not agree on everything, but I bet we agree on most things - the things that really matter. Hopefully, even when you disagree with something I write or say, you will also now recognize that it comes from a place of good intentions, and it is not that important that we agree on everything.

That is why I don’t necessarily make heroes or villains out of current or former Republicans who stand up to Trump because of their past positions. The political landscape in America continues to change rapidly. I believe that a serious realignment has been happening between the parties and will continue to happen. Some demographics and groups who have been taken for granted by each party continue to move away from them for a variety of reasons. The party that shuns people because of their past positions or current differences on one or two issues will be the party that loses this battle over time.

I think ultimately we are all trying to get to the same place, which is returning our country to some sense or normalcy and decency by relegating this toxic political movement called MAGA to a fringe party by relentless truth telling to discredit it. It is a long and difficult path, but one we at Meidas have chosen to take with you. Unlike many, I never viewed any one election cycle as being decisive in this struggle. It will take at least a decade, maybe two. But I’m in this for the long haul because I know we are on the right side of history.

Thank you for supporting my work and the work of everyone on our team.