The Long MAGA Apology That STILL Isn’t Coming

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I’ve noticed a trend lately, and by “trend” I mean two schools of fish thrashing over the same bucket of chum.

In one corner: the permission essay. The one that lets you never forgive your MAGA relatives. Cut them off. Let them eat their tariffed Thanksgiving turkey alone beneath their Trump flag and truck nuts, weeping into the overpriced stuffing.

In the other corner: the empathy homily. They’re hurting too. MAGA couldn’t help being swindled by a con. Your estrangement is the real violence. Healing begins when you extend the olive branch like a good Christian. Cue the victimhood violin.

Both essays can feel cathartic, depending on your team. And both share a defect their authors rarely mention: whichever one you tape to the refrigerator, the six-year-old is still in the concentration camp. The grandmother who lost her SNAP benefits is still doing math at the grocery store. The school, the clinic, the shelter, the cancer lab, Medicaid— all the programs they called socialism until they needed them — are still on life support.

I am guilty of it too. I love a good “MAGA destroyed our country” rant. Over a year ago, I wrote an essay called The Long MAGA Apology That Is Never Coming. I argued then that the apology was never coming. Not really. Not the kind that names the harm, faces the victim, and accepts the atonement bill.

A year later, I was wrong only in scale. The apology still isn’t coming — but now, somehow, forgiveness has been placed on the table anyway.

That is the part I cannot get past. We have skipped confession, skipped restitution, skipped shame, and gone straight to seating arrangements.

But before I hand down forgiveness commandments from the mountaintop, I should confess that I fought this battle in my own MAGA-loving family.

And the person who made it complicated was my father.

My father is eighty-six years old, Sicilian, and votes Republican the way other men change their oil — on schedule, without sentiment. He also watches Fox News the way the network intended: continuously, at a volume the neighbors could vote on.

Three Trump votes. Three.

But here’s the thing nobody tells you about having a MAGA parent: you do not always get the clean escape route. The “permission to cut off your MAGA relative” essay usually imagines a racist brother in Ohio you can block, delete, and eulogize on Reddit. It does not cover the man who taught you to ride a bike and now cannot find his reading glasses without air support. You can’t excommunicate an eighty-six-year-old father. Believe me, I checked. There’s no form.

So I treated it like what it was. Not a difference of opinion, because you can argue with an opinion.

This was a supply problem.

My father was not generating the cruelty. He was receiving it…eight hours a day, from Fox News — a channel whose business model is turning grandparents into people their grandchildren avoid. You don’t argue with an IV drip. You remove the needle.

Fortunately, my father does not use a computer. His media diet arrived through only two pipelines: the television and the driveway. Fox News on one end, The Wall Street Journal on the other.

This is what military historians call a chokepoint, and I controlled both ends.

So one day, after my sister bought him a new smart TV, Fox News simply… stopped coming in. A technical difficulty. Tragic. Unexplainable. The kind of thing that happens with these newfangled devices. I am not saying I did anything. I am saying the channel and I reached an understanding about parental controls.

“I can’t get the news,” he said.

“You get The Wall Street Journal,” I said. “It’s in the driveway. Reading is better for you.”

“That’s not the news. The news is on TV.”

“The Journal is the news, Dad. It’s just the news that can’t yell racist lies.”

He grumbled for a while — the injured grumble of a man who suspects he is being managed and is correct. But notice the methadone: The Wall Street Journal is not Pravda for progressives. There is a difference between a newspaper that thinks your taxes are too high and a channel that thinks due process is a constitutional anachronism. I was not trying to make him a bleeding-heart liberal. I was cutting the cruelty out of his bloodstream and leaving the Republican in place. I was pretty satisfied with myself.

And then… nothing happened.

That is the part the movies get wrong. No epiphany. No tearful reckoning over mashed potatoes. Deprogramming an 86-year-old Republican takes about a year and looks like nothing.

But around month four, he stopped asking where Fox went. Around month eight, the vocabulary started falling away — the phrases that had never been his, the ones that arrived preassembled from someone else’s factory. The rants stopped requiring a response, then stopped arriving at all.

Underneath, like a lawn coming back after someone finally moves the car parked on it, was my father. Funny. Stubborn. Conservative as a bank vault. Mine. The man was in there the whole time. Fox News had just been sitting on him.

That is the version people want. Daughter saves father. Cue strings. Everybody eats pie.

But getting my father back and forgiving my father were two very different events. The detox restored the man. It did not settle the bill. He still cast those votes. The votes still did what votes do.

And I still secretly harbored resentment.

Then my father did something I did not expect.

Before I tell you what counted, I should tell you what would not have counted. “I’m sorry” would not have counted by itself. “Let’s agree to disagree” would have counted for less than nothing. That is not an apology. That is a request to stop keeping score while the ledger is still open. And “can’t we just not talk politics at dinner” is the worst of the three because it asks the person keeping moral inventory to serve up amnesia as a side dish.

I know this because I was raised Catholic, and unlike most people raised Catholic, I paid attention during the boring part. Everyone remembers confession as a transactional miracle: say the words, do the Hail Marys, walk out clean. Coupon-clipper theology. But the real thing has three parts: contrition, confession, and satisfaction.

Satisfaction is the part Americans keep trying to skip because it sounds expensive. If you stole the money, you return the money. If you wrecked someone’s name, you help rebuild the name. The Hail Marys were never the penance. They were the training wheels. Absolution without intent to repair is not mercy. It is counterfeit.

Hold that standard. Now watch my father clear it.

Every year, for as long as I can remember, my father writes a check to the veterans. It is as fixed as the tax bill. This year, he wrote it, same as always. And then, unprompted, he wrote a second check to an organization he had never given a dime to in his life: Peabody Promise, a local group that helps kids who have been bullied.

I asked him why that one. Somewhere in his year of detox, my father had arrived at his own diagnosis, the one I had carefully never handed him: he had spent three elections backing a bully. He could not take the votes back. So he identified the category of harm and aimed the repair directly at it. Bullied kids. From the man who voted for the bully.

Nobody assigned him that penance. He wrote his own.

That is when I forgave him. Not when the vocabulary fell away. Not when I got my father returned to me. And not even when he said one day, “That Trump is the next Hitler.” (Although I did savor it.) That was recovery, and recovery was his. Forgiveness was mine, and it stayed in my pocket until he paid.

Contrition. Confession. Satisfaction.

An eighty-six-year-old man who does not use email performed a valid sacrament without knowing it.

But here is the part that ruins the easy objection: he still votes Republican. The goal was never conversion. The goal was one check, aimed at the harm. If a man born during the tail end of the Depression can clear that bar, the bar is not too high. The people who tell you the bar is too high are telling you something else entirely.

They never intended to jump.

Forgiveness is easiest to understand at the edges, so let me enter two exhibits into the record. One is a man who should not be forgiven unless hell freezes over. The other is a woman who is owed an apology a decade past due.

Let’s start with the asshole.

In September 2025, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade looked into a camera and proposed a solution for homeless Americans with mental illness: “involuntary lethal injection. Or something. Just kill ’em.”

Of course, he fake apologized two days later — the words, the somber face, the sacrament of the on-air sorry. He kept his job and his audience. The visible cost appeared to be one uncomfortable weekend.

Here is what every person watching learned, whether their lizard brains knew it or not: you can say that now. You can look at another suffering human and make them disappear.

That is how permission works. It is not granted in memos. It is granted in consequences that fail to arrive. Every cruelty that goes unpriced resets the market. The next man does not start from zero. He starts from “just kill ’em” and works outward until another life is extinguished and another…and another.

Another woman did the math early, out loud, and we made her pay our bill.

In September 2016, Hillary Clinton offered the most carefully constructed sentence of her career, which is saying something for the most fact-checked woman alive. She said you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what she called a basket of “deplorables”— the racists, the misogynists, the antisemites, the xenophobes, the ones who had found in him permission for their cruelty. Hillary called that basket, precisely, “irredeemable.”

Then she said the part America tore off and buried: the other basket was full of people the government had failed, people desperate for change, people we had to understand and empathize with.

That was not an insult. That was triage. She was saying a movement contains two kinds of people: the carriers and the hosts. The ones cheering the cruelty and the ones swept up in it. They require two different medicines.

We all know what happened next. Every mainstream outlet quoted the first basket and burned the second. But the record should be corrected, and I’ll go first. She saw the asshole threshold. She owed no one an apology. We owe her one.

Because my father was basket two. Cut the supply line, wait out the detox, and the man came back. Then he paid his bill, unprompted, to bullied children. Basket two is curable.

Basket one — the ones who salivate over deportation flights the way other people watch football — cannot be reached the same way, because there is nothing in them for the argument to land on. Guilt is a conversation with a conscience. You cannot have that conversation with someone who screens the calls.

Which leaves us with shame.

Shame has become unfashionable, mostly because wellness culture flattened every moral category into a feeling and then sold us a journal about it. We are told shame is toxic. It never works and only makes people defensive. Shame is bad for healing.

Sometimes, yes. Shame can be used to destroy personhood.

But shame can also be the guardrail. Shame is how a society says: this behavior is not tolerated. Not because we need one man to crawl and do the walk of shame, but because the next man is watching to see what the walk costs.

Philosopher Jean Améry understood that part.

Améry crawled out of Auschwitz and spent the rest of his life refusing to heal on schedule. The pressure to forgive and move on, he argued, is just biology wearing a moral costume. Time closes wounds because time is indifferent, not because the books balance.

Améry believed that the victim who harbors resentment is not necessarily suffering self-inflicted pain. Instead, he may be the only one keeping the crime real while everyone else negotiates its disappearance for their own comfort.

That is what the forgiveness essays keep missing. The problem is not that they are too generous. It is that they are grammatically wrong. MAGA voters are not the object of forgiveness until they become the subject of repentance. Until then, what they are requesting is not forgiveness but restored status — the right to come back to the table without naming who they were willing to throw under it.

Forgiveness can be sacred. But forgiveness handed to the unrepentant is not grace. It is counterfeit currency, and like all counterfeit currency, it does not just fail. It debases the real thing everywhere it circulates.

They keep asking whether we should let MAGA back into the room.

The better question is: what did they do with their time outside it?

So what would repair even look like?

If you voted for deportation politics, go volunteer with immigrant legal aid or refugee resettlement. Help the people you helped put in danger.

If you cheered Medicaid cuts, drive someone to an appointment. Fund medical debt relief. Sit with a disabled person while she tries to navigate the benefits system you voted to make crueler.

If you spent years calling public school teachers groomers, Marxists, or enemies of America, show up at a school committee meeting and defend them when the next mob arrives.

If you mocked trans kids, donate to the groups protecting them, listen to their parents, and then perform the rarest act in American politics: shut up long enough to learn.

If you spread election lies, volunteer as a poll worker. Publicly correct the lie in the same Facebook feed, church group, family chat, or barstool tribunal where you first spread it.

That last part matters. Repair has to happen where the damage happened. A private change of heart is not useless, but it is not enough. If you lied in public, the correction is public. If you laughed in the room, the apology belongs in the room. If you made cruelty socially cheaper among your friends, your job is to make it expensive there now.

And now that I have written the cheerful little civics worksheet, let us all stop pretending.

Most of them are never going to do this. Which makes Hillary Clinton painfully right yet again.

MAGA is not going to spend Saturdays helping immigrants fill out asylum paperwork. They are not going to drive Medicaid patients to appointments. They are not going to stand up at school committee meetings and apologize to the teachers they spent years treating like predators with lesson plans. And they are certainly not going to return to their little MAGAmuffin group chat and say, “I spread a lie about immigrants, and that lie endangered real people who pay taxes just like I do.”

Because that would require shame.

Not embarrassment. They have plenty of that now. Embarrassment is what happens when the hat starts looking stupid in photographs.

Shame is what happens when you understand who the hat hurt. That is the difference between regret and remorse. Regret says: I backed the wrong man. Remorse says: I helped make other people unsafe.

Regret burns the hat. Remorse burns the lie.

Sure, watching MAGAmuffins burn their hats is entertaining. But listen closely to the whine underneath them.

I voted for you. You promised. You were supposed to hurt them. Not me.

That is not repentance. That is a customer service complaint.

Those people are not looking for forgiveness. They are looking for the old bargain: they get to keep destroying the pro-social world, and everyone else has to keep treating them as basically decent people with economic anxiety.

No.

If they do not repair, they do not get restoration. If they do not repent, they do not get the seat back on the old terms. If they will not protect the people they endangered, then they can spend Thanksgiving at home with the consequences.

That is not cruelty. That is accounting.

A society that cannot shame cruelty will eventually call cruelty a choice. A family that cannot enforce consequences will eventually call surrender peace. And a democracy that forgives the unrepentant will spend the rest of its life being asked to pass the gravy to the people still holding the knife.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. Subscribe to Conversations with Carlyn for free content every Wednesday, or become a paid subscriber to get the juicy stuff on Sundays.