Done With MAGA? There's a Support Group for That

0:00Hello again from Newsweek headquarters at the top of the World Trade Center in beautiful New York City. I am Carlo Versano, and this is another edition of The 1600. This country was stone cold dead. So here we are in April 2026. We are just about 11 years into the great Donald Trump experiment. Now, you or somebody you know might be finding yourself at this point questioning your vote for the man. Well, frankly, if you're watching this or listening to this, you probably didn't vote for him, but maybe you know somebody who did. And maybe they're questioning, maybe not their first vote, maybe not even their second vote, but surely the third vote, right?

0:37Whether it's the prices that Trump promised to lower and hasn't or the American citizens killed by the ice, the goons in his ice brigade or the new war in the Middle East that he explicitly promised not to start, there is perhaps no better time than the present to finally break with the MAGA movement. And lucky for you, there's a support group for that. My guest today is Rich Logis. Rich is the founder of Leaving MAGA, which is a, what I said, a support group for people who were once in this movement and now won out. Rich was a one-time Trump true believer whose buyer's remorse led him to create this organization, which is meant to help others who are considering hanging up the red hat for good.

1:21Rich, thanks so much for taking the time, man. Yeah, it's my pleasure, Carl. Good to be with you. Thanks for having me. And if you're listening and you're not watching, Rich came decked out in his red MAGA hat, although it says I left MAGA, not the MAGA hat that we all know, and the red shirt too. So he's a walking billboard for his organization, and we appreciate that, Rich. Okay, Rich, on your website, I was perusing your website the other day, and you have on there an open letter to, I guess, anybody who's interested in joining this organization. I want to read a quote from what you wrote. So this is quoting Rich now.

1:54I was a devoted member of MAGA Nation for seven years. It made me feel I was part of something important, of movement that was trying to save American democracy. But starting in 2021, I realized I had been mistaken. It took me a full year to finally break away. During that time, I came to understand that MAGA is sustained by a series of myths that are intended to create perpetual feelings of desperation and panic. I want to get to the panic thing in a minute. But can you first just talk me through what specifically made you sort of change your mind about the movement? And what broke the bubble?

2:25You know, the first accelerant for me was actually not Donald Trump. It was my governor here in Florida, Ron DeSantis. And I would just like to say, Carl, to preface everything. Please. For those who are going to see this, that I would like to apologize for my past MAGA activism. um when ron de santa is in the summer of 2021 platformed covid anti-vaxxers it shocked and confused me because he had been a proponent of the vaccine i had i have never been an anti-vax person but when he did that it caused me to do something that sounds very simple but was very profoundly life-altering and changing for me which is i diversified my news and information sources.

3:16All I had consumed up to that point was MAGA-friendly media. It was media that I even wrote for as a MAGA pundit. I had bylines in places like Fox and The Federalist and American Greatness, sites like World Net Daily, which were one of the original propagators of the Obama birther conspiracy. So when that happened with DeSantis and I started to expand my information aperture a little bit, I started to slowly realize that so much of what it was that I had believed were falsehoods and were mids and mythologies and lies and conspiracy theories that didn't hold up upon closer scrutiny. And I went through an entire year, which I talk about in my memoir, which I call the year of heaven and hell.

4:07And it was a time where I vacillated between being in MAGA and out of MAGA. And I went through this year of just myself in solitude with just my thoughts and I having to come to a personal reckoning that so much of what it was that I created a persona around turned out to be false. And for me, the final straw was May 24th, 2022, which was the day of the Uvalde Texas school shooting. Talk to me about that. And even though Trump was not in office, I knew exactly how he and the Republican Party were going to respond to that massacre. And I knew there would be no calls for additional sensible gun safety regulations.

4:55If you recall, Trump showed up to an NRA conference three days after Uvalde. I do remember that, yeah. And it was – what it drove home for me was one of my lines of demarcation and one of my red lines, which was that it had been my belief then, and I still believe to this day, that Trump and the GOP deemed acceptable avoidable deaths and suffering. Whether we're talking about school shootings, whether we were talking about January 6, talking about COVID, you know, January 6 was something, it was a day that I did not support when it happened, but I thought that it was hyperbolized into a bigger deal than it really was.

5:40After I started to diversify my news and information sources, I went back and did my own actual objective research and realized that Trump did, in fact, try to overturn a free and fair election. It was something that I was naive to when I was still in MAGA as that event had unfolded. So at Uvalde, what it prompted me to do was to leave MAGA quietly. So I left MAGA that day in a private way. But there was something, Carlo, that had really been gnawing at me because I was always so unapologetically public in my support for Trump. I felt that I needed to reciprocate that and I needed to renounce my support publicly.

6:25And I did that on August 30, 2022. I wrote a mea culpa. And in this article, I said that I was sorry for supporting Trump and MAGA and that I wanted to apologize to anyone I may have hurt with my words, deeds and rhetoric. and the God's honest truth is I never thought that anybody would care. I only did it for reasons of catharsis so I could close that chapter of my life, but it turned out that people did care, and I received one message after another from those who have MAGA-identified close ones who came to me very desperately and were trying to figure out ways to rekindle and rejuvenate the relationships that they had with their MAGA close friends and loved ones.

7:11And I was very oblivious and ignorant to the fact that millions of relationships had been torn asunder as a result of this MAGA movement that I had been an active participant in. I got to say, Rich, what you said already has really struck a chord with me. You know, going back to the COVID thing, it's very interesting because it feels like to me, you know, it was almost like there was this mass psychosis in that period and we've all sort of just like forgotten about it. You know, again, because it's impossible to imagine that Trump could have been reelected after his mismanagement, put DeSantis aside, but just his original mismanagement of that pandemic.

7:53That always struck me as kind of his original sin in the first term. but the Evaldi thing is really interesting to take a moment to think about too because as you said he wasn't the president at the time but there is something about these school shootings I mean I remember having a similar feeling after Sandy Hook and I was covering that for NBC News at the time and seeing Obama come out there and feeling in my bones that you know this was if you can't if the murder of little children can't be the thing that that brings us together to pass some sort of law to make that never happen again. If that can't be the thing that changes things, then nothing will.

8:36And just having this very sort of depressed sense in myself afterwards that it doesn't really matter who's president. The fact that six-year-olds can be shot in their classroom and that's just something we move on from is disgusting to me. Sorry, I'm sort of going off on a tangent here. I want to ask you a little bit about what you were like in 2015 and 2016, sort of in the pre-Trump era and that first year, after he came down the golden escalator and before he won. Yeah, you know, and just as a wrap-up point on Uvalde and also Ron DeSantis with his anti-vax stances, I'm a parent of two small children, so I just remember thinking about the parents whose kids were, they were getting sick from COVID, they were dying, and from COVID that was happening when Ron DeSantis was platforming anti-vaxxers.

9:33And then, of course, Uvalde and what happened there. So I think being a parent, it was undoubtedly an influence in my eventual leaving of MAGA. And in 2015 and 16, even though I was a successful business owner and I was happily married, I felt very politically lonely. I believe that both parties were the same. I felt that democracy had failed most of the country and that elected officials worked really at the behest of the wealthy and the powerful. And when Trump came on the scene, I wasn't an immediate supporter, but I did gravitate to his campaign because even though he ran as a Republican, he had no government, military, or political experience.

10:22And I found that to be attractive because it was my belief at the time that the way to save democracy was to destroy it. And Trump seemed like a person who was the right person for the job and was willing and able to obliterate the established political order. Burn it all down. Burn it all down. And I had that feeling. I shared that sentiment as a person who felt politically homeless. And what I found in MAGA was a sense of community and a place of belonging and camaraderie and a place of gathering where there was a shared purpose. And also there was a shared enemy, which was Hillary and the Democratic Party.

11:11And I allowed myself, and I emphasize the allowed part because no one coaxed or coerced me into supporting Trump. I allowed myself to fall prey to a lot of the MAGA and right-wing propaganda and agiprop that was saying that if Hillary and the Democratic Party had won, that they would have seized power indefinitely. And that dated back to Obama, right? And it sounds delusional to say it right now, but I didn't realize at the time just how influenced I had actually been by the media and influencer forces that helped propped up Trump's campaign. And I didn't just support Trump on the periphery. I was a grassroots volunteer.

11:59I wrote part of the call script for the campaign. I showed people where to get registered. I recruited people to vote for Trump and support him. And after the 2016 election, it wasn't a case of just good job, everyone, see you in four years. I got deeper and deeper into the community. I wrote dozens of freelance articles for which I was never paid and I never asked for money. I professionally produced a podcast that was using my own money that now I wish I could get it back and give it to my family, which is where it should have gone in the first place. I spoke at Trump groups I was a donor at Trump groups I sponsored them I was unmistakably this MAGA activist this person who believed that I was this nationalist patriotic soldier in a political battle of good versus evil and that I was a real American on the right side of history and everybody against us they were on the wrong side as fake Americans And it didn't matter, Carla, whether they were Democrats or liberals, progressives, anti-Trump, Republicans or conservatives.

13:11If you were not with us 100 percent, we considered you against us. So even if you're 99.99 percent with us, we considered that to be zero percent with us. And that militant way of thinking comes back to when you read the letter earlier about those states of desperation and panic. MAGA was exhilarating for me it was enthralling it was exciting it was new and novel it was a community but I came to understand when I left that I had been in these perpetual states of fear and paranoia and despair and rage and I was addicted to the rage I was always angry at somebody or something. And I talk about in my memoir, a they, that there was a they who was coming for us.

14:04They were coming for our guns. They were coming to indoctrinate our children. They were coming to replace white people with brown people and foreigners. And this they, there was always a devilish liberal or Democrat behind every tree. And that way of thinking - A domestic enemy, not a foreign enemy. Domestic enemy, the ones amongst us. And that way of thinking is a really, really traumatic way of life. Yeah. No, it's hard to go through life like that. So it's interesting because my next question was basically what you just mentioned, which is, you know, one of the non-negotiables in MAGA of Trumpism, you know, writ large, is that you never apologize, right?

14:44It's always, you know, you keep going. You keep going. This speaks to what you were just saying about how if you're not 100 percent with us, you're 100 percent against us. How did you see that manifest in your own sort of personal life? You know, the people I was close with, some of whom had actually worked as professional staffers in Trump's campaign, that was just an unofficial rule that – well, it was – I should say it was an official, unwritten rule, which is that we never apologize no matter what. I'll give you an example of it was Charlottesville. When Charlottesville happened, I was less concerned about the fact that a lady, Heather Heyer, had died and that there were numerous injured.

15:30my worry was about damage control and I remember being with some of my fellow MAGA compatriots and our worry was that we were all going to be called neo-Nazis and white supremacists as a result of being MAGA supporters so when that happened we knew that the president had botched his response to what happened in Charlottesville but we wanted him to get in front of it so we were more worried about the public relations aspect of it than we were over the fact that there was this march of neo-Nazis and white nationalists and that people died and were hurt. So we didn't have this sense of, well, Trump should just apologize for misspeaking and then make it right and clear it up.

16:18No, we wanted him to get in front of it and essentially clear up that we were not neo-Nazis and that we were not white supremacists because we were afraid that the press was going to do that. I had a phrase that I trademarked when I was in MAGA, which I called the Democrat media industrial complex. That's how much of a believer I was in the liberal media. We would have considered Newsweek to be part of the Democrat media industrial complex. Any media that wasn't MAGA was considered basically enemy propaganda. And so that was an example. Right, the fake news, enemy of the people. Fake news, yeah.

16:59And a media, to use a Steve Bannon term. And COVID was another time. I remember thinking and speaking with people in MAGA privately that we knew that the president was botching the national response. It even got to the point where I could no longer watch the press conferences. They became intolerable. Yeah. But it wasn't enough for me to cease supporting Trump. I also worked for his campaign in 2020, and I was all in on getting him reelected and had the same belief about Joe Biden that I did about Hillary, which was that Joe Biden and the Democrats winning meant that they would capture power permanently.

17:40And, of course, now we realize, or I should say now I came to realize that even if the Democrats actually wanted to do that, they're not capable of doing it. Right. That's what I always say. That's what I always say. It's like these conspiracy theories are always predicated on this idea that the Democrats are like this brilliant political organization that is capable of doing some of these things when it's like, look at them. They're basically useless. I've been struggling with this question I wanted to sort of pose to you. It's not even really a question. It's more of just kind of like a thought experiment.

18:13So I think that MAGA is kind of a spent political force at this time. It just seems to me like Trump is kind of, you know, past his sort of like peak of powers. It's going to continue to go down from here in November, I suspect. So, you know, the movement behind him is kind of past its prime. It will probably unravel the minute that he gets on that last chopper out of D.C. in 2029. But at the same time, I also don't think we're going back to normal. I don't think that when Trump is gone, it's going to go back to 2012 and people like Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are our presidential candidates.

18:49Can you rectify – how do you rectify that? Do you agree, I guess, is the first question. Well, when I was in MAGA, Carlo, it was a fantasy of ours to kill off the Republican Party and transform it into a MAGA party. And I think very clearly that has been achieved and accomplished. So what I think will happen with MAGA when Trump is out of office, I still think he's going to remain a force of influence because the Republican Party, whatever it was before Trump and MAGA, is not coming back. And I think lots of Republicans and traditional conservatives are slowly starting to realize that. I'm sure that there are some who are still in denial about that, who believe that there can be some kind of Reaganite renaissance that happens within the party.

19:44but it's not going to happen. MAGA was there to kill off the GOP and that occurred. But I do think that MAGA will, it will still be with us, but it will weaken. And that's the good news. The opportunity before us when that happens is there are going to be millions of MAGA Americans who are going to be at a crossroads. And it's going to be really crucial that we catch them before they get subsumed into whatever the next iteration of right-wing politics are, whether it's America First or whether it's tech bros technocracy, this type of, you know, these potential post-MAGA ideologies that we could see occur and happen before us.

20:37But I think that MAGA is going to remain for the very fact that it's now one of our two major political parties. Interesting. Okay. So you think it has more staying power than I do. That's good to note. I want to come back to that. Rich, one thing that I'm struck by talking to you is, and I hate to make these sort of like, you know, gross generalizations, but we do it anyway. I'm in the media. I mean, that's kind of our job. But, you know, the sort of like the generalization of like the typical MAGA voters, like at least in the, you know, quote unquote liberal media has always been like, oh, they're, you know, sort of like, you know, uneducated or at least economically, you know, downward, maybe not completely self-aware.

21:21You are not any of those things. You are obviously educated and articulate and smart. You don't appear to be economically desperate. You said you're a business owner. So if a critic were to say, listening to this, that actually makes your original radicalization harder to excuse. How would you answer that? I think that's a fair criticism. And while I do not say this in self-defense, and I don't defend my or anyone else's ignorance, I think these sentiments of feeling that government has failed us and let's burn it all down. I think that a lot of people who are going to see and hear this, even if they're not Trump voters to their credit, I think that there's something about let's tear down the system that will resonate with a lot of people.

22:12And I don't, again, say this in any kind of way to defend my actions of the past, but I would like my story and my MAGA life to be a cautionary tale and emphasize that all of us are susceptible to being influenced. And what I think MAGA media does very effectively is it exploits and manipulates people's natural fears and concerns. And I think if we took a pro-MAGA person and an anti-MAGA person and we brought them together, what they would discover if they had a long enough conversation is that there's actually more concurrence on important issues than there is disagreement. Completely agree with that.

23:02Yeah, and we might differ on the solutions and we might differ on the approaches, but people in MAGA and people outside of MAGA, we want high-quality health care. We want good schools for our kids. We want a safe and secure country. We want economic opportunity. But I was somebody who felt that the two parties had let us down, and I was erroneous in my way of thinking. I don't any longer believe that the two parties are the same, even though I am not registered with any party. Full disclosure, I did vote Democratic in November of 24. I worked on Kamala's campaign. I had a prominent role in Florida.

23:44I did media on behalf of the campaign. So I did vote Democratic up and down the ballot. Is that your first time voting D? With the exception of a rare vote that I cast years ago in a New York gubernatorial election, it was my first time voting D, and it was my first time voting up and down the ballot Democratic. Interesting. And I expect that I'm probably going to continue to vote that way for the foreseeable future, even though I have my own issues with the Democratic Party. And I think most Democrats have issues with the Democratic Party. Yeah, you're looking at one. You know, the demographic of political independence is the fastest growing demographic in the country.

24:33So I think those who might say that my self-radicalization was inexcusable, again, I think that's a valid critique, but I would ask them to look at perhaps more of the quote-unquote end of the story, which is that it's possible that people can change at our website at leavingmaga.org. there are dozens of stories of people who left. And while all of us share some commonalities, everybody went through the process of leaving MAGA in their own individual way. And when you leave MAGA, you're walking away from an identity that is buttressed by lies and falsehoods and conspiracies, and you're leaving behind the extremism to become what I would call a born-again human being, where you reclaim your agency and your individuality.

25:31And the reason that MAGA I consider to be an extremist group is because it encourages its adherence to vilify, demonize, and dehumanize our political opponents. I used language such, I used to call Democrats malignant in my writings. I used to say that they were worse than Nazis and worse than radical Islamic terrorists. This is the kind of language that I employed and trafficked in. And once in a while, I go back and read some of my old writings, and I don't really recognize that person. But it wasn't a performance. It was what I really believed. And thankfully, I had just enough curiosity which I think was left over from my time as a newspaper reporter years ago, where I just ever so slowly started to question what I believed.

26:27And so I would ask people out there to remember that it is possible for people to change my story and the stories of others who left. We're living proof that it's possible. It's, yeah, I just find myself nodding my head to so much that you're saying. And by the way, I don't think that that criticism that I just flowed out there is fair. I mean, people change their minds all the time. And it takes a big man or woman to do so. And I commend you for it. And I was just thinking to myself, smirking to myself, because I remember, again, in that weird sort of COVID period that we all want to forget, I remember there was a brief period when I actually thought that Joe Biden was going to be like the new FDR.

27:07I thought after he was like, this is the guy that we need. He is going, you know, he's going to do a new new deal. He's going to be the guy who gets us back on track. I was totally wrong. Biden sucked. I mean, he was better than the alternative, but he was not a successful president. All that is to say people change their minds. People change. I read things that I rewrote in the newsletter column or in my other work, and I often cringe at it and think like, oh, I can't believe I said that or I can't believe I thought that. But to me, that's just part of being human, right? We change. And if you don't change, if you're not changing based on the facts on the ground, that's when you get into problematic territory.

27:43I assume you would agree with that. Yeah, and I think that one of the goals of leaving MAGA as an organization in creating a new community for people who leave and for people who have doubts about MAGA and for friends and family is we want to work to de-stigmatize changing our mind. It's not a natural act for our homo sapien species to admit when we're wrong, to acknowledge error, and to apologize, especially publicly. But we are working to show that changing one's mind is not a sign of weakness. It's a show of personal fortitude and strength and evolution and maturation. And as part of the work that we do, we highlight these stories of people who left because I think it's important that people see that Trump supporters are not a monolith.

28:44You mentioned earlier about maybe some of the stereotypes that people might have about people in MAGA. My MAGA second family, I was around people who were successful attorneys, business people, Ivy League graduates, those who had worked in the public sector for many years. So my experience was with my second family that I was so close to them that oftentimes they took precedence over my own blood family, and I neglected my duties as a parent and as a husband sometimes because of my MAGA activism. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but that is the truth. Again, I'm nodding along because, you know, one of the other things that I've always struggled with is, I mean, obviously, I don't support Trump, needless to say, and I feel the same way you do about this movement.

29:35But at the same time, I have friends who are Trump supporters, and I have friends who would consider themselves to be hardcore MAGA. Not many of them anymore, but a couple. I don't really have any family members like that. But if I did, I wouldn't send them away, right? I wouldn't cut them off. And I remember one of the things I wrote in my newsletter column, which right before Thanksgiving of 2024. So we were just after the election. Obviously, tensions were very high. And I wrote, look, you may be upset about this, the Trump one, but go to your Thanksgiving dinner and your family is your family.

30:14If they don't disagree with you, that doesn't make them less worthy of your love and compassion. So it's like, again, how do you rectify that with a movement that, to your point, is this sort of malignancy on the body politic? Am I articulating myself? Yes. And, you know, something I want to mention is every Tuesday night we host online free support groups for friends and family and of those who are still in the thrall of MAGA. And we talk through self-care, nonviolence, and we also emphasize on a week-to-week basis that we have to relieve ourselves of the pressures of thinking that we can change another person.