President Donald Trump's supporters have been so loyal to him, despite his many flaws, that some observers have compared them to a cult. Yet a recent interview on MS NOW reveals at least one Trump voter in Iowa expressing regret over the state of the economy.

"It's hard," the Fort Dodge woman explained. "It makes me feel like I'm a horrible mother sometimes because I'm stressing about what I'm going to do — do I have enough money to put gas in, or do I need to buy eggs and milk for my child? Or do I need to not go to work every day to make that money because gas prices are so expensive?"

She added, "And mind you, it could be my fault — I do work in cleaning, but still, that's a 45-minute drive. We're putting 80 bucks in every three days, tops, maybe. It's just hard to feel good when everything's going downhill, I feel like. It's supposed to be going up, and sometimes, yes, it is up, and then all of a sudden it just goes down. And then we're always told, you know, 'this is going to change' or 'I'm going to make this better' or 'we're going to make this better' — but where's it at? We're not seeing it at all."

Her math reflects pressures visible in the wider economy. Egg prices set records in early 2025 as the nation's worst avian influenza outbreak on record forced producers to cull tens of millions of laying hens; prices later eased, but grocery bills have stayed well above pre-pandemic levels even as overall inflation cooled to around 3 percent. Gasoline has averaged roughly $3 a gallon nationally in 2025 — the cheapest in several years — though for commuters with long drives like hers, repeated fill-ups add up the way she described.

Cost-of-living frustration helped fuel Trump's return to the White House in 2024, and he promised voters that prices would fall quickly once he was back in office. The woman's complaint about being told "this is going to change" — "but where's it at?" — captures how those pledges are landing with at least some of the people who backed him.

MS NOW anchor Katy Tur, the veteran MSNBC host, then asked Basil Smikle, a political strategist, whether the Iowa woman might actually vote for a Democrat.

"Well, the Democrats — I have to make the case to her, but I think she'll be open to that," Smikle told Tur. "I mean, I think there are a lot of diehard Republicans who, if they don't vote for Donald Trump, will probably just stay home. But there is an opening there. And it's an opening that is about acknowledging, as we've been talking about before, what they're going through — number one. Number two, creating that permission structure to be able to vote for a Democrat, especially if they've never done that before."

He added, "And, honestly, I would also add — talking in a very specific way about the kind of guardrails you'll set up to make sure that the institutions around us are actually supporting you. I know that a lot of progressive voters and a lot of younger voters don't necessarily support institutions the way older voters do, but there are a lot of people who actually do get support."

The Fort Dodge woman is not the only Iowan voicing such frustrations. Earlier on Wednesday, Iowa resident Shane Foot — who admitted to having voted for Trump three times — expressed similar disillusionment to the network, observing that "the prices haven't gone down. I don't know, I'm just, I'm over it, I think, over the Trump thing, the Trump wagon — whatever you want to call it."

The grumbling draws attention because of the map. Trump carried Iowa in all three of his presidential campaigns — most recently by double digits — and Republicans hold the governor's office, both U.S. Senate seats and, after the 2024 elections, all four of the state's U.S. House seats. But the governorship and longtime Senator Chuck Grassley's seat are back on the ballot in the November 2026 midterms, when Republicans will also be defending narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress — the sort of arithmetic that makes even deep-red-state discontent worth watching.

Speaking with AlterNet earlier in August, cult expert Dr. Steven Hassan discussed how people can start to leave cults like the one surrounding Trump.

"I like to phrase it more as helping people to reality-test and start thinking for themselves," Hassan told AlterNet. "I did a TEDx talk on how to know whether you yourself have been brainwashed. But I wrote a whole book called 'Freedom of Mind' on how to talk to people in cults. It starts with the assumption that it's a dissociative disorder — brainwashing — where, for example, 'Steve Hassan' the real person is replaced by a 'Steve Hassan the Moonie' identity that got created and installed in someone's head. When you're talking to a cult member, never attack the leader, the doctrine, or the policies head-on — especially with facts or logic — because it will empower the cult identity to defend itself and shut down, and it will make the cult member perceive you as the enemy."