Commuters on I-24 may have noticed a new billboard offering to help people extricate themselves from the Make America Great Again movement. “Having Doubts? You Are Not Alone,” reads the ad for Leaving MAGA, which went up on May 18. The organization was founded by Florida resident Rich Logis, a former Trump supporter who knows how isolating it can be to exit Donald Trump’s zealous cult of personality. He wanted to give other doubters a destination and support network.
“Depending on how deep one is in [MAGA], it will be really, excruciatingly difficult for some people to leave,” Logis tells the Scene in a web call. But he’s proof it can happen.
Logis himself was deep in the MAGA movement. As a political independent disillusioned with democracy, he says, he was attracted to Trump’s “outsider status as someone without any political, military or government experience.” Logis was a grassroots campaigner, and after the 2016 election he used his own money to produce a Trump-boosting podcast and penned articles in conservative media.
“It was my belief back in 2016 that the way to save democracy was to destroy it,” says Logis. “I was wrong about that. And I realized that it’s much easier to tear something down than it is to build it back up.”
Logis thinks frustrations about the economy helped fuel Trump’s rise and electoral success in 2016 and 2024. The president also validated those frustrations, which earned followers’ fealty, says Logis. “I don’t defend anyone’s ignorance — mine or anyone else’s — but I do think that all of us are susceptible to being influenced,” he says.
Logis began to harbor doubts about the movement after Florida’s MAGA-affiliated Gov. Ron DeSantis rebuffed vaccine mandates in 2021. The governor’s policy shift — he previously promoted the COVID vaccine — coincided with a surge in the highly transmissible Delta strain of the coronavirus, which infected many children. Logis, a parent of two small kids, was troubled by the development. So he did “something that sounds very simple, but was profoundly life-altering and -changing for me”: He diversified his news sources.
“I spent the next year really struggling with the reality that so much of what I had believed turned out to be false,” says Logis. That included grasping the severity of the Jan. 6 insurrection — a violent raid on the U.S. Capitol that Logis previously believed, thanks to right-wing media, Democrats and mainstream outlets had exaggerated.
What happened yesterday at the United States Capitol was beyond shameful, beyond regrettable, beyond disappointing — beyond whatever mush-mout…
Logis is blunt about the prominent role conspiracy theories have within the MAGA movement. There was always a “they,” he says, who were out to abridge American rights or replace white people with brown immigrants. “I came to realize that there was no ‘they,’ and that I was addicted to rage and fear for the seven years that I was in MAGA,” he says. “I always believed that there was some devilish liberal or Democrat behind every tree. And I realized that actually isn’t true.”
Logis left the movement in 2022 after the Uvalde school shooting, which resulted in the killing of 19 students and two teachers. His exit was quiet, but he later issued a public mea culpa, renouncing the movement. He founded Leaving MAGA in 2024 and sees it as a way to continue making amends.
“It’s my opinion that the GOP and Trump made acceptable avoidable death, suffering and trauma,” says Logis. “Whether we’re talking about the pandemic, anti-vaccine sentiment, January 6th, Uvalde in particular, and mass shootings more specifically. … And as a parent, I knew that children were victims in that acceptance.”
Logis hasn’t swung all the way to the left — he now identifies as a centrist — but other members of Leaving MAGA became involved with the Democratic party. Logis himself chaired a Republicans for Kamala Harris chapter in Florida during the 2024 election.
Trump maintains a stranglehold on Republicans from the federal level down (despite occasional fits from the congressional GOP caucus). Tennessee’s supermajority is all-in: State Republicans worked with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller — a proponent of white nationalism — on rigid immigration laws and kickstarted the gerrymandering of Memphis following calls from Trump and U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a MAGA loyalist.
Speaker Sexton celebrates state's aggressive immigration actions with gift to Trump adviser
Logis says MAGA may be the most powerful voting bloc in the GOP, but he expects an exodus as midterms approach — and as Trump fails to deliver on campaign promises. The president’s approval rating and consumer-sentiment numbers hit all-time lows across several polls in May.
If Trump voters do jump ship, Leaving MAGA is there to offer support. The organization has 34 members — Logis calls them his fellow leaders — and the website provides information about support groups for those who have left MAGA or have loved ones involved in the movement. In addition to Nashville, the group also set up billboards in 20 cities including Austin, Texas; Des Moines, Iowa; and Tallahassee, Fla.; attracting local and national media coverage. The campaign has so far targeted red and purple states, and Logis says thanks to billboards, the organization has “more people than ever reaching out.”
“We want them to know that it’s OK to have doubts,” says Logis. “It’s OK to be afraid. And it’s OK to change your mind, and that they’re not alone.”
