Last summer, in a video blasted on the jumbotron at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Rich Logis called his years of supporting Donald Trump a “grave mistake.”
Until 2022, the Florida dad of two was a red hat-wearing, Make America Great Again pundit who wrote call scripts for the Trump campaign, hosted a right-wing podcast and sponsored a local GOP club.
Now, Logis wears a different red hat, emblazoned with the slogan “Leaving MAGA,” the name of the nonprofit and online community he founded to support other former Trump followers who found themselves lost in conspiracies, losing friends, even committing crimes in Trump’s name.
At the DNC, Logis said he was “all in” for Vice President Kamala Harris and throughout the 2024 election cycle warned that Trump “would not end but permanently damage our democracy” if he made it back to the White House.
Trump made it back. Logis told Raw Story he “sadly” felt he’d been proven right by “chaos” unleashed, from the administration dismantling government agencies and using aggressive immigration enforcement tactics to attacks on free speech in the name of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist murdered in Utah last week.
“The damage that has been caused will take many, many years to rectify,” Logis said.
“I will say I am not surprised at the pace at which this has been done. I have to emphasize that when in MAGA, chaos is welcome, because we always felt that if we were wreaking havoc, we were on the offensive, and that's exactly how I think the President and his advisers approach governing.”
‘Everyone against us’
Prior to the 2016 election, Logis considered himself a “very politically lonely person.”
“The two parties were the same,” he said.
In 2015, he was “curious” about Trump. By early 2016, Logis was a “full-fledged supporter.” After Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Logis went “deeper and deeper” into the MAGA community.
He “consumed only right-wing media.”
“Everybody who wasn't with you was an enemy,” he said. “Any information that didn't comport with the pervasively held beliefs and mythologies of the MAGA community, we shunned that information.”
Logis found community and a sense of belonging, calling MAGA his “second family.”
“As much as I'm embarrassed to admit it, my second family often took precedence over my own blood family, and that's the gravitational pull of MAGA as a community, is that it does make it hard to walk away from it,” Logis said.
In October 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Logis paid $350 to attend a Republican fundraiser at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Fla.
Logis hoped Trump would show up. He didn’t. Then-South Dakota governor, now Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem headlined the event instead.
Looking at a photo from the Mar-a-Lago event was one way Logis convinced himself to stay loyal to Trump through August 2022, as his doubts grew about the president and the GOP.
“I was unapologetically in the MAGA movement, and I felt that we were real Americans on the right side of history, and that everyone against us, they were on the wrong side, and they were the fake Americans,” Logis said.
‘Lies and falsehoods’
For Logis, doubts started accumulating at the end of Trump’s first term, between his handling of COVID, the lie that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrat Joe Biden, and the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol that lie inspired.
“I started to realize, albeit slowly, that a lot of my beliefs that I had held may not have been accurate, and I had to have this reckoning with myself that I might have allowed myself to believe a lot of lies and falsehoods,” Logis said.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was also an “accelerant” of Logis leaving MAGA.
“I supported him because he was the MAGA-endorsed candidate, and all of a sudden, this person I felt who was sensible was giving at his official press conferences megaphones to people who are anti-vaxxers,” Logis said.
“It really shocked and confused me.”
Logis “vacillated.” In May 2022, a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. For Logis, that was the “final straw.”
He began by “quietly” departing from MAGA. In August 2022, he decided to publicly apologize for supporting Trump.
“There was something that was gnawing at me at the time because I was always so very unapologetically public in my support for Trump and DeSantis and MAGA that I felt I needed to be public in my renunciation of it,” Logis said.
‘Never been busier’
Logis said diversifying his sources of news was one thing that “changed my life for the better,” because, “People in MAGA are not getting a full picture of all of these complex issues.
“I'm not saying that people in MAGA are the only info-siloed group, but I would argue that there's probably no group more info-siloed than those in MAGA.”
Logis said his community was steadily growing, to a few dozen people. Some come on their own. Logis finds others online.
Some Trump 2024 voters have recently started conversations, Logis said.
Leaving MAGA became a tax-exempt nonprofit in August 2024, bringing in a little over $34,000 last year, according to ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.
“We've never been busier,” Logis said. “We have never been more active than we are right now.”
Logis works in sales. He wants to run Leaving MAGA full time.
“This is a very unlikely, accidental, unintended place that I find myself in,” he said.
“I never sought out to be an activist. I never envisioned that I would be going around recounting my story to others.
“But I felt it was incumbent upon myself in the process of making amends, that if telling this story brought a little bit more hope and optimism for friends and family of those in the thrall of MAGA, I felt an obligation to do that.”