A devoted Donald Trump supporter who attended 42 of his MAGA rallies and sold her belongings to follow his campaign says she turned against the president after a response he gave to an Epstein question.
Trisha Hope, a Houston resident, was featured on CNN, where she was interviewed by Donie O’Sullivan.
She explained that the turning point was on July 8, 2025, when Trump was asked during a cabinet meeting about the missing minute in the Epstein jailhouse surveillance footage.
“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” Trump responded.
“I swear to you, a light went off. The shades lifted, and I saw him in a completely different way,” Hope told CNN, continuing, “And I’ve not been able to unsee it.”
Hope said she was sitting in a parking lot before a funeral when she watched the moment that changed everything.
“I thought he cared. And it didn’t seem that he did,” she said.
Hope and her husband basically gave up their lives to support the MAGA movement. They sold all their belonging and bought an RV to travel across the country and attend rallies, sometimes even making two different Trump events on the same day.
“We were just driving, sleeping in the car, doing whatever we needed to do,” she recalled.
However, it was the Epstein moment that woke her up and made her question other things about the president.
“I started looking at everything critically,” Hope said, adding that she went on to uncover “a lot of lies, a lot of deception.”
During the CNN video feature, she visited the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, which is an installation showing monuments, documents and images of the president’s relationship with the convicted sex trafficker.
When O’Sullivan asked about how she felt seeing the comments, including a birthday card Trump wrote to Epstein that took her back, she replied: “Sick. I feel sick.”
“I put my life on hold to support this man that I clearly didn’t understand who he was,” she said. “I should have looked harder.”
Hope also met Epstein survivor Dani Bensky, who said she was abused as a teenager for over a year after being sent to the financier’s New York townhouse. The emotional moment brought Hope to tears as she offered support to Bensky.
“I was a Trump supporter for a long time,” she told Bensky. “Really hardcore Trump, 42 rallies. And I am so sorry for any pain.”
Hope told CNN she still supports many of Trump’s policies and continues to believe the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen; however, she acknowledged she could be wrong.
Today, she considers herself politically homeless: “I’m a bit of a fighter,” she said. “And I’m in this fight now,” she said.