Former fan describes exit from MAGA

Hannah Phillips

Palm Beach Post

USA TODAY NETWORK

Rich Logis stood before a crowd of 300 Democrats and said the thing they least wanted to hear.

'MAGA was exciting,' he said. 'It was exhilarating, and it was enthralling. It was new. It was novel. And, most importantly for myself, it was a community.'

'Or a cult,' an audience member said. They’d gathered at the invitation of Indivisible Boca Raton – a Florida progressive group formed in opposition to Donald Trump’s 2016 election – to learn why Logis left the Make America Great Again movement, and how to convince those still in it to leave.

Many hoped to rekindle strained relationships. Others wanted to stanch a Republican surge that threatens to overtake Democrats in places like Palm Beach County, Florida, where Trump remains wildly popular among his MAGA base.

'Tell us how!' cried a woman, shouting at Logis from the back of the auditorium. 'We are ready to forgive!'

It doesn’t start with name-calling, Logis said; no one ever left a movement after being called a cultist. He argued that understanding what the movement provides – belonging, certainty, identity – is key to helping people leave it.

Logis had grown disillusioned with both political parties by 2015. Trump’s promise then to burn the system down was an attractive one.

While attending his first Trump campaign event in 2015, Logis said he met people who felt like lifelong friends. They welcomed him into a movement that filled a void even a happy marriage and a successful business hadn’t.

'It was my being. It was my personhood,' Logis said. 'I had a second family, my MAGA compatriots who sometimes – I’m embarrassed to admit this – took precedence over my own blood family.'

For seven years, the Parkland resident served as a grassroots organizer and right-wing pundit for the likes of Fox News and Breitbart. He posed for photos at Mar-a-Lago. He created a podcast, warning listeners that liberals were poised to take their guns, indoctrinate their children and replace them at the ballot box.

'When I was in MAGA, I was certain of everything,' Logis said. 'I was on the right side. Everyone against us, they were on the wrong side. We needed to crush our enemies before they crushed us.'

Conflicting facts didn’t matter, Logis said. Any information that might challenge the group’s beliefs got shunned entirely, dismissed as liberal propaganda.

Logis described his exit from MAGA as a wall that came down brick by brick. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pulled the first one, he said.

It happened in the summer of 2021, when the governor platformed vaccine skeptics at a news conference during the COVID-19 delta variant surge. Logis, never a vaccine opponent, said the move rattled him enough to read outside the right-wing media ecosystem for the first time in years.

'As I incorporated more and more news sources, I started to have this painful realization that so much of what I believed turned out to be false,' he said.

But to leave MAGA would mean admitting that he was wrong, Logis said, admitting that he’d spent years supporting something that didn’t comport with his values. He vacillated for a year, too proud to renounce the persona he’d built for himself, afraid of losing the community he loved.

'I would listen to Trump talk about Jan. 6, and I would say, ‘I’m out. This is not for me,’' he said. 'But then I would look at a photograph of an event at Mar-a-Lago that I went to, and I would think, ‘No, no, this is exactly where I belong.’'

The murder of 19 children and two teachers at Uvalde Elementary School in Texas was the final brick. Months later, on what he now calls his 'leaving MAGAversary,' Logis published a mea culpa online, apologizing for amplifying the conspiracy theories that 'resulted in unnecessary death, trauma and suffering.'

The fallout was instant. His second family became strangers. Actual strangers said he’d never belonged to MAGA, had never supported Trump and was a paid Democratic operative.

But just as quickly, his inbox filled with messages from people desperate to reconnect with friends and family still inside the movement. He founded Leaving MAGA, a support group for people trying to exit the movement and those with loved ones still in it.

About two dozen people make up the first group: ex-MAGA supporters who now define themselves as traditional conservatives, moderates like Logis, or liberals 'left of Bernie Sanders.' One went to prison for his participation in the U.S. Capitol riot.

Far more of Logis’ members belong to the second group: Democrats with loved ones still in MAGA. As many as 50 meet weekly during free, 90-minute sessions over Zoom, where they discuss self-care, boundary setting and tools for reconciliation.

It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous, except the first step isn’t admitting you have a problem; it’s admitting your uncle does.

When asked how many in the audience could relate, almost all raised their hands. A dozen of them approached the microphone to ask the questions they could never broach with those still in MAGA.

Some were incredulous ('Did you know you were supporting a criminal?'), others imaginative ('Do you sleep with one eye open?'). One, posed by a young woman ostracized by her MAGA mother, was tearful.

'She promises she loves me and she wants to change, but she recently told me I have Trump Derangement Syndrome,' she said. 'How do you love me if you support people that hate me?'

Logis’ advice for reaching MAGA relatives was not to lead with facts but instead to ask a person why they believe what they do.

Ask where they heard it. Offer to read a source they trust if they agree to read one you provide, too. And make clear to MAGA loved ones that if their certainty ever wavers, they have someone to talk to without fear of being shamed.

'Because folks, I’m telling you: That’s one of the reasons people who want to leave MAGA might not,' he said. 'They feel they’re going to be judged.'

Logis said he believes more and more people within the movement are grappling with the same doubts he did. What they need now, he said, is an off-ramp and somewhere else to go.