A self-confessed ’MAGA junkie’ from a red-voting city devastated by Department of Government Efficiency firings has said she regrets voting for Donald Trump.
In the lead-up to the election in November last year, Jennifer Piggott, from Parkersburg, West Virginia, flew a Trump flag outside her house. She was not the only one; her community in Wood County voted overwhelmingly for the Republican candidate, who scooped 70 percent of the votes in the area.
But just weeks into Trump 2.0, the president let Piggott and others like her down by firing 125 probationary civil service workers. The Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service—which effectively acts as the government’s day-to-day bank—was gutted, and so was Piggott.
Speaking to CNN Live in a broadcast shown Thursday, Pigott said she cried after she was axed. “I was a MAGA junkie, a MAGA junkie who thought her government job would be safe with Donald Trump in office. I cried. It’s scary, you know, it’s a really scary thing, and I was embarrassed,” she said.
Piggott and her colleagues were let go based on alleged poor performance. But in her final review just 21 days before she was axed, Pigott, who has voted for Trump in the last three elections, got “the highest rating you can get on review,” she told CNN.
She added that she now “regrets” voting for Trump. “To cut the knees out of the working-class Americans just doesn’t make sense to me. I expected more from President Donald Trump,” she said.
Her woes have not stopped. Pigott, who has spoken to the national press about the issue before, has been targeted by vandals and has even received death threats since speaking out.
“I expected better from you. I really did,” Pigott said, when asked what she would say to Trump if she got the chance. “I expected that you would do what was right and cut waste and fraud and all of those things that you promised us before we elected you in office, but you’re not doing that—you’re creating a disaster and I don’t know what America is gonna look like if this continues.”
CNN spoke to a second woman, afraid to reveal her identity for fear of retribution, who retired from the Bureau of Fiscal Service because she feared losing her health insurance if she was axed.
“I’m not sure that I would have [voted for Trump], and the way that it’s been done... I’m for balancing the budget, that type of thing, but not, not in this context, it’s just not right,” she said.
The Bureau employs some 2,000 people in the city of 29,000.
Earlier this month, a federal judge stood in the way of the spate of firings—ordering agencies, including the Bureau of Fiscal Service, to give fired probationary employees their jobs back. However, the Trump administration took the matter to the Supreme Court this week, asking it to overrule the federal decision. The 125 fired individuals, like thousands of other federal workers, are now in limbo, on paid leave.
