'Trump troubadour' loses trust in president over health care: 'I feel betrayed'

Moss played guitar at more than 45 Trump rallies during the campaign.

ByABC News
March 25, 2017, 3:40 PM

— -- Once-staunch Donald Trump supporter Kraig Moss followed the Republican to more than 45 campaign rallies across the country and became known as the "Trump troubadour" for his guitar-playing at the candidate's events.

But now Moss, an upstate New York resident whose son died of a heroin overdose, says President Trump's push for the GOP health care bill caused him to lose trust. Moss said he was particularly upset by the bill’s weakening requirements for insurers to cover mental health and substance abuse treatment.

"I feel betrayed," Moss told ABC News. "I feel like I've been lied to.”

Moss said he worked with other Trump supporters to bring many people into the GOP candidate’s camp.

"People that were on the right, in the middle, and didn't really have a thought of which way they were going to go, we swayed them to come over on Donald Trump's side," Moss said in an interview Friday.

Moss said he was drawn to Trump by the candidate's promise to end the opioid epidemic in the U.S. After his son, who struggled with addiction, died of an overdose in 2014, Moss said his work for Trump's candidacy got him "off the couch."

"I went all in with Donald Trump, and put everything that I had, including my heart and soul, into what he had to say because this was the one thing that got me off the couch and got me out into the world and gave me purpose to go talk to these kids I'd meet," he said.

But the president’s support of the Republicans’ American Health Care Act made Moss lose faith.

"It really was just recent when I just all of a sudden realized that I've been duped," he told ABC News. "I can't believe that the man would even consider trying to put something like this through."

Republican leadership on Friday pulled their bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act known as Obamacare after failing to garner enough support from GOP House members for it to pass.

Even with the bill now off the table, Moss says he still won’t support Trump.

"Trust is something that takes a lifetime to achieve and one day to lose, and you just don't flip a switch and get the trust back," he said. "There's no halfway, 'Well, I trust him on this, I don't trust him on that.' Once a man shows his true colors, once a man shows that he can't be trusted on one issue, it just, it goes right across the board."

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