Trisha Hope, a Houston resident who says she attended 42 of Donald Trump's MAGA rallies and sold her belongings to follow his campaign, says she turned against the president after his response to a question about Jeffrey Epstein.

Hope shared her account in a CNN feature in an interview with correspondent Donie O'Sullivan. She traced her political break to 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 at the time.

“I swear to you, a light went off. The shades lifted, and I saw him in a completely different way,” Hope told CNN, adding, “And I've not been able to unsee it.”

Hope said she was sitting in a parking lot before attending 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 had, by her account, largely given up their lives to support the MAGA movement. The couple sold all of their belongings, bought an RV, and traveled across the country to attend rallies — sometimes 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.

According to Hope, it was the Epstein exchange that woke her up and led her to question other things about the president.

“I started looking at everything critically,” she said, adding that what she uncovered included “a lot of lies, a lot of deception.”

As part of the CNN video feature, Hope visited the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, an installation displaying monuments, documents, and images of the president's relationship with the convicted sex trafficker. When O'Sullivan asked how she felt seeing the materials — including a birthday card Trump wrote to Epstein that stood out to her — 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 more than a year after being sent to the financier's New York townhouse. The encounter brought Hope to tears as she offered Bensky her support.

“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.