MS NOW spoke with a small but growing group of former Trump supporters who have left the MAGA movement. They reveal the depths of their experience and, in some cases, their lack of knowledge about basic events — like the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“I was as deep as anyone could have been,” Rich Logis, founder and CEO of Leaving MAGA, told MS NOW’s David Noriega. “I was an aspiring MAGA pundit. I had bylines in places like Fox and The Federalist. I spoke at Trump groups, I was a donor on the campaign. I was unapologetically a MAGA and Trump supporter.”
MS NOW says Leaving MAGA is “a nonprofit for those disillusioned by the movement.”
“I really wanted acceptance with my father, and my father was very much into Fox News, so that was something that we would connect on,” another Leaving MAGA member told MS NOW.
One said that she had become “heavily indoctrinated into trad wife culture.”
“We were all absolutely fine with household voting,” she said, declaring that Trump’s SAVE America Act bill “is to take that right [to vote] away from women.”
Another explained that she met her “husband in 2021, and they made me watch a documentary on January 6th, and I didn’t even know what happened on January 6th prior to the PBS documentary.”
“And I looked at him, and I said, ‘Scott, did that really happen?’ And he was like, ‘Where have you been?'”
Noriega says that Trump voters diversifying their news sources had a lot to do with their exit from MAGA.
“You know,” another explained, “I had believed that when Trump ran, that he would be somebody who would be different as an outsider. I think that he was correct in pointing out a lot of the flaws of our political system. It just turned out, unfortunately, that he didn’t try to solve those or remedy those ills, that he exacerbated them.”
One agreed when Noriega told them that, “Hearing you guys talk about MAGA and about supporting Trump, it sounds like you’re talking often about, like, a cult that’s damaged.”
“What MAGA does provide is a place where people feel seen and heard and validated,” one told MS NOW. “We used to say, ‘We’re not in the cult, the outside world is the cult, and we’re not the crazies, the outside world are the crazies.'”
Another explained that when he left MAGA, he “kicked the door open and jumped through.”
“I had a heart full of hate, so I would just go on the offensive and attack anybody and everybody that still supported it. And I learned over time that that’s not gonna change anybody. In fact, it’s gonna push people over. So I’ve learned to be that empathy, that voice of concern, the caring voice. ‘You can do this. I did it,'” he said.