Rich Logis was deep into Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. Very, very deep.

Among the hardest of hard-core supporters for seven years, he bought into the rhetoric, and espoused it as his own.

Logis shunned those who disagreed, and developed bonds with fellow believers.

He spent hours at the computer, posting on social media and writing pro-Trump missives. In person, volunteered for the Trump campaign, he spoke at events and helped develop a Broward-based political club, Americans for Trump.

He ignored sources of information that didn’t echo MAGA viewpoints, and castigated journalists and news outlets that didn’t parrot the party line.

No more.

“It turned out that I was wrong,” Logis said in an interview. “I should not have supported this person. I should not have supported other MAGA candidates.”

Having done a 180 almost two years ago, Logis is now focused on creating a community for people like him, onetime true believers who have left the MAGA universe, or are contemplating leaving it behind.

Leaving MAGA

What is now widely known as MAGA started as the acronym for Make America Great Again, the slogan Trump used during his successful 2016 presidential campaign, a phrase emblazoned on the red hats frequently worn by the candidate and his supporters.

The vehicle for the community Logis hopes to create is a new organization, Leaving MAGA. It has a nascent presence online at leavingmaga.org, with organizers preparing for a public launch around the Fourth of July.

At launch, people will see the faces of Leaving MAGA via recorded video testimonials from those who were heavily into the movement and who, like Logis, changed their views and left. Also in the works, a downloadable e-book, a social media campaign, and efforts to generate news coverage.

Leaving MAGA’s website lists three objectives:

Empower others to leave MAGA and tell their stories.
Foster reconciliation with their friends and family.
Develop movement leaders to help others leave.

In essence, the plan is to extend a hand.

Logis said shouting or lecturing his former cohorts would be counterproductive. The idea of Leaving MAGA is to provide a place where people can find the sense of community they had within the MAGA movement.

“We want them to have a place to go. That is one of the most difficult parts — and for some will be the most difficult part of leaving — that they’re going to walk away from a community that they’ve been completely emotionally connected to for probably several years,” Logis said.

The positive approach — “an exit ramp of sorts” — to a non-MAGA community is essential.

“Without a new place to go, I could not realistically expect people to leave, even if deep down they know that they should.”

Logis also has a message for those who don’t like Trump and get agitated at his supporters.

“I really implore people who are anti-Trump, anti-MAGA to consider and think about how they speak about Trump voters,” Logis said. “If you refer to Trump voters as cultists and you say that they’re Nazis and you say that they’re racist and you say they’re misogynists and that they’re homophobes and that they’re Islamophobes …  you’re pushing them closer. You’re giving them reasons to stay.”

Community

Logis said it’s impossible to overstate the feeling of community that enveloped him, and others in the MAGA world.

“We were true believers and we invested all of our being into MAGA. We had our tight-knit community, we’d go to birthday parties and holiday dinners and, and kids’ events sometimes, all the events people do in social circles. We were unified as MAGA-Americans,” Logis said.

“My MAGA second family, as much as I’m embarrassed to admit this, oftentimes took precedence over my actual blood family,” he said. Looking back, he said his immersion in the world of MAGA strained relationships, including in his family.

Logis, 47, has a wife and two children.

“I want us to be a destination,” Logis said, adding that right now “there’s nowhere for them. They don’t have a feeling of anywhere to go.”

Kevin Wagner, a political scientist at Florida Atlantic University and co-director of the PolCom Lab, which conducts public opinion research, said that the sense of community Logis described is a part of its appeal for some.

“They see people who are similar to them or at least have the same values as them and it creates a sense of camaraderie. And that is an effective organizing principle for political movements historically, and it shows up here,” he said.

Conceptually, he said the idea of “a different community with a different political direction does make some sense.”

Not so fast

Wagner cautioned the organization’s plan would be exceedingly difficult to execute, noting that groups such as the Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump, among other well-funded efforts, are working in a similar space.

“It’s pretty clear that they haven’t had the kind of traction that the MAGA movement has had,” Wagner said.

Logis said Leaving MAGA’s effort isn’t the same as the others, which are more focused on the coming election.

It’s also difficult, he said, for people to differentiate among groups that are genuinely civic-oriented as opposed to those that are run primarily for online traffic and ultimately profit.

Scott Newmark is even more skeptical.

“It’s tilting at windmills. It’s fanciful,” Newmark said. “The effort is misguided.”

Newmark is the founder of Americans for Trump, a Broward political organization that has been on hiatus since he moved to Palm Beach County shortly after the 2020 election.

Newmark said the number of people who share Logis’s current outlook and are thinking of departing the movement is infinitesimally small, if it exists at all.

“What kind of legs does this kind of a movement have?” Newmark asked. “I don’t know a single person who is contemplating leaving MAGA to go over to (vote for President Joe Biden). That’s not going to happen.”

Newmark said he still considers Logis and his wife friends. “It saddens me that he’s gone away from the MAGA movement because he was a very good, articulate spokesman for it. He was a big part of the events. We were very close,” Newmark said.

Rich Logis, seen in his home Wednesday, has now started Leaving MAGA, providing a community for people who’ve changed their views. (Amy Beth Bennett / South Florida Sun Sentinel)

Potential

Logis believes there are many more people like him.

And there is evidence of dissatisfaction with Trump among at least some Republicans.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, the most anti-Trump unsuccessful candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, received more than 4.2 million primary votes — more than a quarter of which came after she dropped out. (She subsequently said she’s supporting Trump for president.)

In the Florida primary, Haley received 155,560 votes or 13.9%.

Steve Vilchez, a resident of suburban Chicago, is among those who have left MAGA.

He was enthralled with the movement, but never voted for Trump because he was too young.

Now, 20, Vilchez said, “I will never vote for this man.”

He’s recording one of the videos for the Leaving MAGA launch.

Drawn into MAGA via social media, “I started to slowly but surely embrace the MAGA agenda even though in retrospect, internally, I knew that it was wrong. But I just didn’t know that. I was so convinced that all of Trump’s policies are right, even if I still somewhat disagreed,” he said.

He dropped news outlets that presented a broad range of information and devoured content from Fox, One America News and Newsmax, along with even more right-leaning websites and personalities.

Vilchez, currently a student at Illinois State University hoping to become science teacher, said he started to have doubts during the pandemic when Trump raised the prospect of warding off the virus by injecting bleach or shining a light in the body.

Still, he said he believed the untrue claims that the 2020 election was rigged.

Vilchez, whose parents immigrated from Mexico, said he didn’t like Trump’s unfulfilled 2016 campaign promise to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. “But since I started to listen to these right-leaning conservative outlets, I slowly began to embrace it and support that policy,” he said.

“Looking at it now, it just doesn’t make sense because why would I support a strict border and strong deportation policy when my parents came to America from the country that Donald Trump seems to despise so much?” adding it was “a contradiction that I never really wanted to admit.”

Entering MAGA

Practically from the moment Trump entered his first presidential race in 2015, Logis was drawn to him.

“Here’s a person who it felt like was willing to take a flamethrower to the system, someone who would be an actual true disruptor in Washington,” he said. “I just saw him as the right person for that job at this moment in our history.”

Enthralled with Trump and viewing the prospect of Democrat Hillary Clinton winning the presidency as “an existential threat,” Logis said he ignored controversial statements and policy pronouncements.

“It sounds delusional to me today,” Logis said. “I had a lot of fear, and I listened to that fear and that was really how I got swept up into the entire MAGA movement and community.”

He volunteered on the campaign in Broward County, and on election night “felt vindicated and validated.”

“I thought at the time that our victory was akin to a second founding of America,” Logis said.

He began devoting more and more time to the efforts — “I never took an hour off” — writing freelance articles for right-wing websites, posting on social media, creating a podcast, and participating in events.

“I was a MAGA true believer,” he said. “We were the real Americans. Anyone against us were the fake Americans,” Logis said.

“I had adopted this approach of being this MAGA patriotic soldier in an existential war of good versus evil,” he added.

He contributed to ultra-conservative sites The Federalist and The Daily Caller. On social media, he once described Democrats as “malignant cancerous cells that seek to overtake healthy cells.”

He regrets those statements.

“The level of dehumanization that I stooped down to is something that I’m honestly ashamed and embarrassed of. But my works remain in the public realm because I am going to own them. I’m going to own up to them and I’m going to continue to take responsibility for them,” he said. “No one coerced me into supporting Trump. No one coaxed me. I take accountability for that.”

Making the exit

From 2015 through the 2020 election, Logis said he sometimes had glimmers of doubt, which grew stronger when Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, hoping to prevent certification of Biden’s election victory over Trump.

Months later, those feelings intensified thanks to Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Logis said he voted for DeSantis, based largely on Trump’s endorsement, and liked the way the governor handled the first stages of the COVID pandemic.

By summer 2021, when the Delta wave of the pandemic was spreading infections and death, and he started looking at a broader range of news and information sources, including mainstream media outlets and often found himself saying, “I didn’t know that. I didn’t realize that had happened.”

Finally a year later, on Aug. 30, 2022, he publicly broke with the movement, publishing an online article declaring his split.

“I left one community, and I now felt a little bit like a man on an island. You divorced the community. Now what’s next?”

The organization

Leaving MAGA incorporated at the beginning of the year, is awaiting action from the Internal Revenue Service on its application for nonprofit status, and hasn’t yet started raising money.

He said organizers hope to hire staff, a plan they see as requiring raising $250,000 to $500,000 in the next six to 12 months.

So far, he said people are volunteering for roles as editorial director or working on visual presentations, social media and legal advice.

So far, people find Leaving MAGA through social media or when they come across a podcast or video. Someone who knew Vilchez read Logis’ social media posts and connected the two.

Though he has lived in Broward and Palm Beach counties since moving to Florida from New York in 2012, Logis said Leaving MAGA’s focus isn’t confined to Florida.

And, he said, it isn’t aimed at the November election.

It’s a longer-term effort because, Logis said, regardless of whether Trump wins or loses, the MAGA movement isn’t going away. “It’s going to stay.”

Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.