Since Donald Trump ’s first presidential campaign a decade ago, “Make America great again” (Maga) has evolved from a slogan into an identity, one that claims to center conservative, “America first” values and relies on lies and conspiracy theories to stay afloat. And while Maga has survived impeachments, indictments and a lost election, some devotees are walking away – and doing so loudly.
Rich Logis, a former Trump campaign volunteer, left Maga in 2022, publishing a public apology to help others see that it was OK to challenge the movement. The overwhelming response led him to found the non-profit Leaving Maga , a network of support groups and meetups for people to unpack their role in bolstering Trump’s platform. Logis said he doesn’t persuade people to leave; he just gives them a place to land when they do. The group’s billboard campaign, now running in 27 states, is built around a simple message: “Having doubts? You are not alone.”
Thousands of people have since found the organization and connected with others who have left through group chats and in-person meet-ups. When they pull away from Maga, many are left reckoning with their childhoods, their value systems, their relationships and faith, Logis said. They question why they were vulnerable to hateful rhetoric and sought a place to belong. They also face criticism from all sides. Maga dismisses them as sellouts and traitors for leaving, while some on the left argue that people who once amplified conspiracy theories – and harmed vulnerable communities in the process – don’t deserve a second act. But Leaving Maga wants to be a bridge when people are ready to finally step away.
“There are a lot of us out there doing this work, and it keeps growing because it’s a safe place,” said Steven Francisci, who turned to Leaving Maga in 2024. “That’s what people really need: to feel safe enough to ask questions.”
Below, four people share what it’s like to publicly leave Maga.
‘When you lack empathy, you let the so-called red flags go’
My Italian-American dad was a huge Fox News person and Trump supporter. Growing up, I already had a lot of unhealthy beliefs around race, identity and LGBTQ+ issues. I didn’t really have a place where I felt like I belonged, and that creates the environment where you’re led toward whoever will accept you.
When I joined the military, I found people who reminded me of friends and family back home. I grew up in New York City, and after 9/11, I became Islamophobic. Around that same time, I moved down to the Bible belt, and after being raised Catholic, I became an evangelical.
In 2015, I almost died in a motorcycle accident. I had a traumatic brain injury, and every bone in my face was broken. My daughter was eight days old. I was already really unhealthy, my marriage was struggling and in 2016 I had a suicide attempt. Even after all that, I still voted for Trump. He had this tough-guy, business-mobster image, and I hadn’t yet reckoned with everything coming out about his past. When you lack compassion and empathy, you let the so-called red flags go, because it doesn’t seem that bad. By 2020, I’d bought my Maga hat and was advocating for his re-election.
After getting divorced from my second wife and remarrying a third time, I started getting into trauma-informed therapy. I started asking questions, and I spent years diving into stuff to find answers, doing self-reflection and questioning beliefs I’d inherited from childhood. I think that’s an important part of this conversation: the mental health of our country. There’s a real lack of empathy here.
Getting away from Maga and Trump did not happen overnight. It was slowly, slowly, slowly, and then all of a sudden I was like: “Oh my God, this guy is a freaking psychopath.” I couldn’t see it until I could see myself more clearly. By 2024, I had real momentum out of Maga, and I voted for Kamala Harris. I joined my local Democratic committee and even considered running for my school board. I wasn’t outspoken when my dad was alive because I wanted to stay connected to him. I felt that if I went too liberal, he might have just said: “Screw yourself.” But after he died, I felt more free to explore who I wanted to be.
My mom voted for Trump three times. My partner voted for Trump three times, too. Since I’ve changed, neither of them can stand him any more. I’ve educated them both on how he’s manipulative, how he’s controlling, and I’ve shown them the contradictions and the history. When you give people enough facts, at some point, it’s hard not to pause and say: “Wait a minute, maybe I was wrong.”
‘I was so deep in what I can only call a religious psychosis’
After having my third son, I had severe postpartum depression, though I wasn’t really aware of it at the time. I turned to faith and got “saved”. I was struggling with the overwhelm of three kids and working. I can see now that what I was really struggling with was the patriarchy. Our labor wasn’t evenly divided. I had no vocabulary for any of that, so I turned to the church instead.
I remember thinking: I don’t need to work. I don’t need to worry about how I’m going to afford these kids, because God’s going to figure it out. If I’m obedient, if I surrender to the leadership of my husband, then God is going to bless me. I took that 100% seriously. I was a tradwife, because that’s where they want to keep you. They don’t want you knowing about politics. It wasn’t my job to vote or to know who to vote for. I was just supposed to submit to my husband and do what he thought was necessary.
I never wore a red hat. I never went to a Trump rally. My Maga was “Make America Godly again.” My loyalty wasn’t to Trump. My loyalty was to God and the church. I was told: “Don’t even look at leftwing media, because it’s demonic.” I was so deep in what I can only call a religious psychosis.
Covid is what really broke it. I’m a respiratory therapist, and I watched Trump say masks work, then masks don’t work. My own pastor preached that the lockdowns were a demonic deep-state attempt to keep people out of church. Then in March 2021, my oldest son’s father died in a motorcycle accident. He wasn’t a Christian. At the funeral, the pastor’s wife told my son it was a blessing in disguise that he’d grow up without a non-Christian influence. After that, I was done.
I was afraid to speak out, because I thought everyone would hate me. But it wasn’t until my perspective became more progressive that I felt like my empathy came back. I’d been forced into this highly controlled way of thinking, and it doesn’t just come right back.
I don’t care how long it takes. I will be deconstructing the rest of my life.
‘I’d been complicit in dividing this country’
I grew up in a quintessential middle-class household in New York. My parents were as apolitical as could be. To my knowledge, they never even voted. It was really in college when I started to develop my own political sensibilities, and I spent many years voting for third-party candidates. By 2015, I was a registered independent. I felt that elected officials cared mostly about their donors and the wealthy and the powerful, and that democracy had failed a lot of people.
When Trump came on the scene, I was enticed by his outsider status. I gravitated to the burn-it-all-down ethos of his campaign, because I felt the way to save democracy was to tear it all down and start anew. I didn’t just vote for him. I worked on the campaign. I wrote part of the call script. I recruited Bernie Sanders voters to switch. After 2016, I got deeper and deeper into the Maga community. I became an aspiring pundit, with bylines at Fox News and the Federalist, producing my own podcast. I had probably every hat available from Trump’s 2020 campaign.
I don’t call Maga a cult. I refer to it as a community. It’s where people find belonging, camaraderie, a shared sense of trying to make the country great again and a shared enemy. I had a second family in Maga, and, as embarrassed as I am to admit it, that second family sometimes took precedence over my own blood family. I realized after I left that I’d been addicted to fear and rage, addicted to a belief in a “they” coming for my rights, my children, my guns. That addiction was affirmed and reinforced by the media I consumed. The beliefs in Maga are based on lies, falsehoods and conspiracy theories, even if the people who hold them don’t see it that way.
The first accelerant to my leaving wasn’t Trump. It was Ron DeSantis platforming Covid anti-vaxxers in 2021, after he’d previously supported the vaccine. It shocked and confused me enough that I started diversifying my news sources – the Times, NPR, the Washington Post – and I slowly began to realize how much of what I’d believed was false. The final straw was the Uvalde school shooting, on 24 May 2022. As a gun owner, I found the predictable response – calling for more guns – offensive. I quietly left Maga that day. Three months later, I published a mea culpa, apologizing to anyone I might have hurt with my words and rhetoric. I genuinely thought no one would care. It turned out people did.
That’s how Leaving Maga was born. I had to reckon with the fact that I’d been complicit in dividing this country and amplifying conspiracy theories that caused real suffering. So much of this work is about making amends. There are really two steps to leaving: you have to renounce and repudiate the lies, not just distance yourself from the president, and then you have to actively build back up, rather than tear down.
‘I thought the most I could do in life was be a mom and a wife’
I was born into an evangelical Christian home, very strict. I wasn’t allowed to play with Barbies, couldn’t have my nails painted for church. I was also spanked. I don’t have a lot of memories from childhood, and I now suspect that’s from complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD).
I wrote a book in kindergarten, and at the end it said: “When Carter grows up, she wants to be a mom.” I’m neurodivergent, with undiagnosed learning disabilities, and I just thought the most I could do in life was be a mom and a wife. I was like: “OK, God designed me to be that.” I went to college to be a kindergarten teacher, because I truly thought that’s all I could do.
In 2016, I was actually in rehab, getting out of an opiate addiction, so I didn’t end up voting. But my family, who had just saved me and paid for that rehab, was telling me Trump was who we needed to save the country, who Christians needed. In 2019, I learned about Save the Children and QAnon, and I fell for it hook, line and sinker. It was under the guise of helping children. Conspiracy theories got me.
My main fracture in all this was when I realized I could read the Bible differently than the way I was told to read it. I found this Harvard study that said being spanked and being sexually assaulted trigger a similar response in the brain. And I was someone who has been sexually assaulted. I was like: ‘My God would not create the brain to feel the effects of [being sexually assaulted], and then also want that to be the same form of discipline that was implemented in the Bible.’ That was the domino that knocked everything else down: hell, purity culture, all of it.
Then in January 2025, someone who knew I was into conspiracy theories sent me a video making a factual, historical case that hell isn’t real. I watched it, and the house of cards fell for me. That led to a few months of a really deep depression, an identity collapse. I had to accept that changing meant risking my husband, my family, my friends, everything I’d ever known. But I realized I had to do what was best for me in order to be best for everybody else, because living an inauthentic life has ripple effects on the people around you.
Rich Logis, a former Trump campaign volunteer, left Maga in 2022, publishing a public apology to help others see that it was OK to challenge the movement. The overwhelming response led him to found the non-profit Leaving Maga , a network of support groups and meetups for people to unpack their role in bolstering Trump’s platform. Logis said he doesn’t persuade people to leave; he just gives them a place to land when they do. The group’s billboard campaign, now running in 27 states, is built around a simple message: “Having doubts? You are not alone.”
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Fabiola Cineas. Published 1 Sept 2026, 02:00 pm.
