A former MAGA pundit who wrote Donald Trump's 2016 campaign call scripts, donated money, and went on Fox News to sell the movement now runs a non-profit dedicated to helping people escape it. The organization is called Leaving MAGA, and it treats quitting Trumpism less like changing your political opinions and more like getting out of a cult, breaking a drug addiction, or recovering from a disease. Which tells you something, if you're paying attention.
The Guy Who Built It Used to Build MAGA
Rich Logis spent nearly a decade as one of MAGA's most dedicated true believers. He voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. He wrote campaign call scripts. He registered voters. He donated. He appeared on Fox News as a MAGA pundit. By any reasonable measure, he was in deep.
Then came the Uvalde school shooting in May 2022. Nineteen children and two teachers killed in a Texas elementary school. Logis watched the response from the movement he'd spent years building and found he could no longer make the math work. As The Guardian reports, months after the massacre he published a public online apology for supporting Trump and causing harm through his rhetoric and actions.
The response was huge enough that Logis realized he wasn't alone. He started Leaving MAGA in 2024, which has since become a registered non-profit. The logic was simple and damning: if it was this hard for him to get out, other people needed somewhere to land when they were ready to leave.
What Leaving MAGA Actually Does
This isn't a think tank putting out white papers about political polarization. According to The Guardian, Leaving MAGA runs weekly support meetings for friends and family of people still inside the movement, monthly in-person meetups for those who've already left, a nationwide billboard campaign built around invitation rather than confrontation, and a media literacy program to help people recognize disinformation.
The billboards are worth sitting with for a second. Not attack ads. Not "MAGA is bad" messaging. Invitations. The whole philosophy is that you don't argue people out of a high-control community by screaming at them. You make sure there's a door, and you make sure they know where it is.
"We're trying to counter the toxicity of the Maga community by providing an exit ramp and a community where people can become what I call a born-again human being and can reclaim their individuality, their empathy and their agency," Logis told The Guardian. The phrase "born-again human being" in a story about people escaping Christian nationalism is doing a lot of work.
The Woman Who Was Treated Like the Virgin Mary for Having Five Kids
Stephania Messina's story is the kind of thing that sounds like a documentary pitch until you realize it's just Tuesday in modern America. As The Guardian reports, she was a member of a Quiverfull conservative Christian church outside Detroit, a movement where women's bodies are described as quivers and children are the arrows you fire unto the Lord. She had five boys. The church celebrated her like a celebrity.
She wasn't allowed to discuss politics. Voting was her husband's job. She quit her career, homeschooled her kids, homesteaded a farmhouse, and was living a proto-MAHA lifestyle before the acronym existed. When Trump launched his first campaign, her church declared him God's chosen one.
Messina was a trained respiratory therapist. So when COVID hit and she watched Trump reverse himself daily on vaccines while her pastor preached that lockdowns were a "demonic deep-state attempt to keep people out of church," the professional part of her brain started sending up flares. She expanded her news sources beyond church-approved media. The Guardian reports she described what happened next simply: "The dam broke." She found mental health support, left the church in 2021, and eventually connected with Leaving MAGA. She now describes her years inside the movement as "a religious psychosis built on fear, isolation and control."
Why the Cult Comparison Isn't Hyperbole
Political theorist Laura K. Field, author of Furious Minds: The Making of the Maga New Right, told The Guardian that MAGA's community-building dimension is chronically underestimated. The official platform is economic nationalism, border security, America First foreign policy, traditional conservative values. Fine. But Field says there's "a fascist and contrarian element, a deep religiosity to it" that holds the whole thing together beyond policy positions.
That's exactly the problem Leaving MAGA is trying to solve. You can refute someone's position on tariffs. You cannot simply argue someone out of their entire social world, their identity, their community, and their sense of meaning. When leaving a political movement means losing your church, your friends, your family's approval, and your entire framework for understanding reality, that's not a political disagreement anymore. That's closer to what deprogramming looks like.
Logis was blunt about his own experience with The Guardian: "I had to go through a reckoning and acknowledge to myself that I had been culpable and complicit in assisting the president in dividing our country and amplifying conspiracy theories that resulted in unnecessary death, suffering and trauma." That sentence takes some guts to say out loud. It also takes some genuine cognitive work to arrive at, which is the whole point.
More People Are Ready to Walk Than You Think
Leaving MAGA's pitch isn't that MAGA is collapsing. It's that the cracks are there, and they're growing. "There are more people than ever who are in Maga who are starting to have doubts and confusion," Logis told The Guardian.
Messina put it more directly: "Leaving Maga is about normalizing leaving. And it's especially important now, since I think the Maga bubble is bursting." That's a significant claim from someone who spent years inside it and still has the social scars to prove it. She's not some liberal academic theorizing about deprogramming. She was in the farmhouse. She was the one submitting household votes to her husband while pastors told her COVID was demonic.
The non-profit reaches people on multiple fronts, according to The Guardian, and operates on the understanding that the goal isn't winning an argument. It's making sure that when someone's ready to leave, there's actually somewhere to go.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that everyone who went deep into MAGA simply made a series of rational political choices that they will now rationally reconsider once presented with the correct information. That is not how any of this works, and at some level everybody knows it. The people building Leaving MAGA know it. The researchers who study high-control groups know it. The respiratory therapist who spent years in a church that called her womb a quiver definitely knows it.
What Logis built is, by any honest description, a counter-radicalization organization. That's not an insult. It's a description of what's actually needed when a political movement has absorbed the psychological architecture of religious extremism. The accountability piece matters too. Logis didn't just leave MAGA and quietly move on. He published an apology. He acknowledged that his participation caused real harm. That's not a model that scales easily, but it's the right instinct.
The darkest comedy of this whole story is that the most effective anti-MAGA organizing happening in America right now might be a support group running monthly meetups and putting up gentle billboards. Not the Democratic Party. Not cable news. A non-profit founded by a guy who used to write Trump's call scripts, built on the radical premise that when people are ready to leave, they deserve somewhere to land. If that doesn't tell you everything about how badly the institutional opposition has fumbled this decade, nothing will.
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