Most frameworks for political persuasion assume the problem is information: someone believes a false thing, you supply the true thing, and the belief updates. The people running Leaving Maga assume the opposite. Their founding premise is that abandoning a political identity works less like changing your mind and more like leaving a high-control religious group, quitting an addiction, or recovering from an illness — that it requires rebuilding an entire structure of belonging, not swapping out a set of opinions. The non-profit, launched in 2024, has built its whole method on that premise.
Rich Logis, who founded it, spent nearly a decade as a committed Trump supporter — writing part of the 2016 campaign’s call script, registering voters, donating, appearing on Fox News as a pundit. His break came after the 2022 Uvalde shooting, when he could no longer square his values with the response he expected from the movement. Months later he published a public apology. The reaction persuaded him that others had also left and wanted to repair what they had done.
The model is exit, not argument
What Logis and his collaborators offer is infrastructure for the leaving rather than persuasion of the unconvinced. There are weekly online support meetings — not for people inside Maga, but for their spouses, children, parents and friends. There are monthly in-person meet-ups for people already out. Nearly 40 billboards went up across 27 states this year carrying an invitation rather than an accusation: “Having doubts? You’re not alone.” There is a newsletter of exit testimonies, a guide to talking with relatives still inside, and a media-literacy programme.
Logis describes it in therapeutic vocabulary: the aim is “a community where people can become what I call ‘a born-again human being’ and can reclaim their individuality, their empathy and their agency.” He and the people he works with generally refuse to debate. “I do not engage in debates with people who are in Maga,” he says. “I don’t try to bombard and inundate people with facts and with policy.”
That refusal is not indifference to truth. It is a bet about how identity works: that arguments are the material identities are built to repel, and that what changes a person is a community that stays available.
The addiction frame, and its limits
The most psychologically specific part of the operation is the family support group run by Julianna Forlano, a therapist who has worked with families of people with narcissistic personality disorder and in addiction recovery. Forlano’s observation is that the ruptures she sees weekly are not really ideological. “What’s happening in families and in marriages, and between mothers and daughters and fathers and sons has to do with behavior,” she says.
She borrows a framework from recovery: the psychological grip of a steady diet of fear-based media and conspiracy treated like a disease. Her mechanism is neurobiological and deliberately plain — people who consume fear narratives constantly become fearful in general, adopt a “with us or against us” stance, and start experiencing loved ones as threats. “The mind is functioning as a dopamine seeker,” she says, craving the next alarming item the way an addicted brain craves a hit. She is careful to add the caveat the frame needs: holding certain political beliefs does not make a person diseased; what the group tries to address is the compulsive, threat-seeking pattern layered on top of the beliefs.
The guidance that follows is counterintuitive for anyone who has tried to argue a relative out of a position. Members are coached not to cut ties and not to keep pushing; instead, to “hold the door open” — remaining present in case the person notices cracks in what they have been told. The work is framed not as hope that a loved one will renounce Trump, but as grief: mourning the relationship as it was, finding solidarity with others living through the same rupture, and rebuilding a sense of self.
What it costs to be the one who leaves
The piece is candid about the price. Stephania Messina, raised in a Quiverfull church outside Detroit, describes years inside what she now calls “a religious psychosis” built on fear, isolation and control, and her exit in 2021 left her cast as an outsider. She has since moved to the democratic left — she is a DSA member, as is her son — while her 64-year-old mother still voted for Trump twice. Their arguments used to end in screaming matches; Messina has settled on not cutting her off, because “cutting them off completely just furthers the divides.”
Leaving Maga also regularly field hostile messages from people who regard forgiveness of defectors as unearned. Logis concedes the anger and makes a pragmatic counterargument: a movement organised around punishing defection gives no one still inside a reason to come out. It is the harder version of the same question the group’s whole method rests on — whether political identity is best understood as a set of positions to be defeated, or as a structure of belonging people have to be given somewhere to leave.