He Was a MAGA Pundit — Now He Helps People Leave the Movement

Leaving MAGA founder Rich Logis discovered why so many stick with MAGA: "It was excruciating to even consider...cutting myself off from what had become my community."

Rich Logis had always been a political independent. He saw the two major parties as “essentially two sides of the same coin: organizations more motivated by power, fame and riches than public service.”

His alienation grew when many in both parties backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. When the Great Recession hit, Rich couldn’t believe the government had let such a crisis unfold. As campaigning began for the 2016 presidential election, it appeared to him that the Democratic and Republican nominees would be a Clinton (Hillary) and a Bush (Jeb).

“As I saw it, this was not just further proof of a uniparty,” Rich writes in his e-book, My MAGA Odyssey. “[I]t would usher in a quasi-monarchy. In the span of less than three decades, we’d already had three Bush administrations and two Clinton administrations.”

After Donald Trump entered the race in 2015, Rich realized that both major parties considered him a threat. He eventually concluded that “Trump was the candidate I’d been waiting for: Someone who not only was willing to obliterate the established political order, but seemed able to do so.”

Rich’s media diet became Fox, Rush Limbaugh, and a heavy dose of Brietbart, which “fed my growing panic about the creeping socialism and communism that would take over the country if Trump lost…Soon, I believed that Clinton and the Democrats — in fact anyone who opposed Trump — posed existential threats to my life, livelihood, family, and nation.”

After Trump’s election, Rich completely enveloped himself in the MAGA information bubble. He became a devoted reader of The Federalist, WorldNetDaily, American Greatness, and The Daily Caller. He published many op-eds on these sites, and even started his own MAGA podcast. Meanwhile, his MAGA community grew.

Rich didn’t believe everything Trump said. But he kept his doubts to himself. “Going public with even a mild rebuke of the president would mean exile from MAGA,” he writes. “You would be branded as an apostate and a traitor to the cause.”

Rich didn’t think the 2020 election was stolen, but after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, he adopted the narrative that “the Democrats and most of the national media had hyperbolically elevated January 6 to a position of historical importance equal to Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11.” He stopped paying attention to coverage of the insurrection.

Oddly enough, it was another politician — Ron DeSantis — who started Rich on his journey out of MAGA. When the pandemic hit in 2020, DeSantis initially was an advocate of public health measures and a staunch proponent of the vaccine. Then his position abruptly changed. DeSantis appeared alongside people who falsely claimed the vaccine could change a person’s RNA and posed more of a threat of death or injury than Covid did.

“I couldn’t get out of my mind the images of desperate parents of Covid-stricken children in intensive care units, and of the parents of kids who were in morgues,” Rich says. “I kept thinking, what if that had been one of my girls?”

He felt he had run “face first into a brick wall. I didn’t understand what was happening.” That led him to take a fateful step: “I returned to reading outlets in what I once categorized as the DMIC — the Democrat Media Industrial Complex: the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and even The Guardian of London.”

As he learned more and his doubts grew, Rich educated himself about Jan. 6. He had always dismissed the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers as “fringe hobbyists.” But his research led him to the realization that the militias “were not irrelevant groups. That’s why Trump did not renounce them. They were his allies, and they had the blessing of the most powerful person in the world. That meant they had been my allies, as well.”

Rich felt complicit in the Jan. 6 violence. “I felt rage, confusion, shock, and, most acutely, shame. I deserved to be inextricably linked to the domestic terrorist groups I had once yawned at.”

He had reached his breaking point, but it still took him a full year to renounce MAGA. He calls it “my Year of Heaven and Hell.”

For Rich, “[t]he true challenge lay in cutting myself off from what had become my community. It was excruciating to even consider it. I had become wholly invested in MAGA with all of my being. It was my family, my purpose. My identity and social status depended on it.”

The May 2022 school massacre in Uvalde, Texas was the last straw. Rich grew incensed as he “listened to one Republican politician after another prattle on about mental health and hardening school doors.”

He publicly left MAGA in the summer of 2022. But Rich felt so remorseful about the damage he felt he had inflicted on the country that he wanted to do more. So he formed Leaving MAGA. (I'm Editor-in-Chief.) Here is our mission statement:

• Empower others to leave MAGA and tell their stories.

• Foster reconciliation with their friends and family.

• Develop movement leaders to help others leave.

Our approach is predicated on the premise that millions of intelligent Americans — people like Rich — were hoodwinked into embracing MAGA. Tellingly, a number of his fellow activists were accountants, attorneys, public sector workers, and Ivy League-educated professionals.

Leaving MAGA provides an off-ramp, a safe space, and a community for those who are considering turning away from the movement. More than a few folks dismiss us as naive idealists fighting a Sisyphean battle. To be sure, we are under no illusions about the enormity of the task we’re taking on. But we are certain there are a lot of people in MAGA who are having doubts, and for one reason or another don’t feel they can act on those doubts. 

Besides Rich’s story, you can read the testimonials of a number of others who left MAGA on the Leaving MAGA site. (I’ve also been publishing a series of Substack posts with condensed versions of their stories.) You can catch Rich’s videos on the MeidasTouch Network. The interviews are also on our podcast.