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Stephania Messina kept birthing boys. In the Quiverfull conservative Christian church she belonged to outside Detroit, Michigan, that made her a community celebrity. Your quiver, as the church taught it, is your womb, meant to be filled with as many arrows – a metaphor for children – as you can shoot unto the Lord. She shot five. “They treated me like I was Mother Mary, like I was this gift to the church,” she said.
But while she was quickly pushed into leading worship and Bible study groups for women and children, she wasn’t permitted to talk about politics.
“It wasn’t my job to vote or to know who to vote for. I was just supposed to submit to my husband and do what he thought was necessary,” Messina said. “I was being indoctrinated into Christian nationalism.”
Messina quit her job, yielded to household voting, and took on home schooling and homesteading in a farmhouse, as part of an early 2010s precursor to the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) movement. When Donald Trump launched his first presidential campaign, he was suddenly “God’s chosen one” in the church, she said.
Though Messina was never a “red-hat wearing” Maga supporter, she didn’t start questioning the movement until the early days of the Covid pandemic. Trained as a respiratory therapist, she watched Trump reverse course daily – from claiming the Covid vaccine was good to questioning its effectiveness. Meanwhile, her pastor preached that Covid lockdowns were a “demonic deep-state attempt to keep people out of church”.
After a few other instances left her with doubts, she expanded her news sources beyond the church’s approved media, and then, she said: “The dam broke.” She sought mental health support and began to understand her years inside Maga as what she calls “a religious psychosis” built on fear, isolation and control. When she finally turned away from the church in 2021, she was casted as an outsider but felt the need to proclaim her Maga exit on social media: “I started speaking out to spread awareness. I was in so deep.” She felt alone. A few years later, she connected with the group Leaving Maga.
“Leaving Maga is about normalizing leaving,” said Messina. “And it’s especially important now, since I think the Maga [bubble] is bursting.”
Many Americans, like Messina, have drifted away from Trump in the past decade, but have done so quietly. Leaving Maga offers an exit ramp from Trump’s rightwing movement that has reshaped the Republican party and platformed political extremism. Launched in 2024, the movement turned non-profit is built on the premise that abandoning the Maga identity – and the community surrounding it – functions less like changing one’s mind and more like leaving a high-control religious group, fighting a disease or breaking an addiction. It requires not just rejecting a set of beliefs but rebuilding an entire structure of belonging and identity.
Leaving Maga has touched thousands, operating on multiple fronts: weekly support meetings for the friends and family of people still inside Maga, monthly in-person meet-ups for those who’ve already left, a nationwide billboard campaign built around invitation rather than confrontation and a budding media literacy program meant to help people recognize disinformation. The goal isn’t to start or win a debate – it’s to give people somewhere to land once they’re ready to leave on their own.
“There are more people than ever who are in Maga who are starting to have doubts and confusion,” said Rich Logis, who founded the group. “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.”
How Leaving Maga works
Logis was drawn to Trump’s “burn it all down” energy in 2016, voting for him that year and in 2020. He spent nearly a decade as one of Maga’s most committed foot soldiers, writing the campaign’s call script for the first presidential election, helping register new voters for Trump, donating money and appearing on Fox News as a Maga pundit. But his decisive break from the movement came after the Uvalde school shooting in 2022 – he could no longer square his own values with the response he knew was coming from Trump supporters.
Months after the Texas shooting that claimed the lives of 19 children and two teachers, Logis published a public apology online for supporting Trump and hurting people with his actions and rhetoric. The response was overwhelming – people commended him and criticized him – leading him to start the movement. He figured others had also left Maga and wanted to repair the damage they caused.
“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,” Logis said.
He built Leaving Maga the way he poured into Maga years prior – by writing countless online posts, speaking out on social media and reaching out to others. On any given day, Logis is on Instagram Live explaining how and why he left and how others can do the same.
Maga leaders have defined the movement as one that calls for economic nationalism, secure borders, “America first” foreign policy and traditional conservative values, said Laura K Field, a political theorist and author of the book Furious Minds: The Making of the Maga New Right. “But an element of Maga that gets underestimated is its community-building dimension,” she said. “There’s a kind of appeal – a fascist and contrarian element, a deep religiosity to it – that unifies different parts of Maga, including the ordinary voters who aren’t DC beltway types, the elites, the high-powered Catholic intellectuals, or those in the manosphere, for example.”
Logis was one of those people who saw Maga as a community more than a political ideology. “I think that it’s where people find vindication and validation,” he said. “It’s where they feel seen and heard and respected and appreciated.”
But the glue holding the community together is “lies and falsehoods” and an “addiction to fear and rage” fueled by misinformation and disinformation, he said. “[In Maga], I had a dangerous belief in a ‘they’. A ‘they’ who were trying to abridge my rights and indoctrinate my children and take my guns and replace white people with brown people and foreigners.”
Logis argues that leaving Maga requires more than distancing yourself from the president; you have to actively renounce Maga’s underlying conspiracy theories and also commit to building democracy that understands “we as Americans agree on important issues more than we disagree.”
Logis and Messina describe leaving as a project of rebuilding empathy that Maga has deliberately suppressed. “As I began to listen to the people I had been told not to – the feminists, the people who they called ‘race baiters,’ trans creators – my empathy came back,” Messina said. Logis put it similarly: leaving means you “no longer need to dehumanize and vilify and demonize those with whom we once disagreed”.
They also don’t try to change the minds of Maga supporters. The idea is to let those who are already questioning it know there is support on the other side. “It is my philosophy that I do not engage in debates with people who are in Maga,” Logis said. “I don’t try to bombard and inundate people with facts and with policy.”
Instead, he and other representatives for the organization spread the word through Instagram livestreams and TikToks that receive thousands of likes. They go on cable news programs to speak out against the movement that once dominated their lives. One of the most effective methods is billboarding. Nearly 40 billboards have gone up in 27 states this year, with a simple message: “Having doubts? You’re not alone.” Logis said more than half a million visited the group’s website last year, and just as many have visited so far this year.
Through the website, people can sign up for a newsletter that shares testimonies about people’s journeys out of Maga, access a guide on how to talk to family members and friends still engaged in Trumpism and join online group chats and monthly meet-ups with others who have left.
Carter Brown, a former self-proclaimed tradwife who voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024, said Leaving Maga has helped her realize she needed to do more than just speak out online after leaving; she needed to help rebuild. “It has taken deconstructing my religion and the dogma of western theology and realizing that I wasn’t even living like Jesus,” Brown said.
She has changed her views on women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, capitalism and immigration. Brown said she now votes according to her new beliefs, volunteers with groups she harmed with her votes and has conversations with people she harmed. She also seeks friendship with people who have different lived experiences than her own.
Leaving Maga is growing, Logis said, as polls show Trump’s increasing unpopularity. In recent months, Logis has spoken with people who left after being fired during “department of government efficiency” (Doge) cuts. Others have been turned off by Trump’s broken promises on foreign policy and rising costs. Messina said the people she has met in Leaving Maga come from all kinds of backgrounds.
“We got into Maga for different reasons and got out for different reasons,” said Messina. “This is a space to learn other people’s stories and reckon with our own. Though the right knew how to capture us in its algorithms, I feel like the tide is turning.”
How the group supports friends and family of Maga supporters
Leaving Maga’s weekly online support group isn’t for people in Maga – it’s for the people who love them. That includes spouses, adult children, parents, siblings, friends and extended family who have watched someone close to them become “not the person who they once were”, said facilitator Julianna Forlano.
Forlano, a therapist, has worked with families of people with narcissistic personality disorder and in addiction recovery, and said the ruptures she sees every week aren’t really about ideology. “What’s happening in families and in marriages, and between mothers and daughters and fathers and sons has to do with behavior,” she said.
Forlano and her group borrow a framework used in addiction and recovery circles, treating the psychological grip of constant fear-based media and conspiracies like a disease. The mechanism is neurobiological, she said: people who consume a steady diet of fear narratives become fearful in general, adopt a “with us or against us” mentality and start treating loved ones as threats.
“The mind is functioning as a dope seeker,” she said, craving the next piece of alarming news the way an addicted brain craves its next hit. Forlano is careful to note that holding certain political beliefs doesn’t make someone diseased; the compulsive, threat-seeking pattern layered on top of those beliefs is what the group tries to address.
The stories members share reflect how the rupture disrupts daily life. One member married into a Latino family with her parents’ blessing, only to watch those same parents tell guests to “speak English” at her child’s birthday party and use slurs about mixed-race people; she has since decided her parents can no longer be part of their lives. Forlano said even conversations that start out ordinary can snap into political conflict without warning. “You could say something as simple as: ‘The tomatoes in my garden aren’t growing,’ and that person will respond by saying: ‘Well, climate change is a hoax,’” she said.
Instead of encouraging members to cut ties, or to keep engaging in the kind of fact-based debate Forlano believes is useless, the group teaches patience and creates a space for members to see they aren’t alone. Members are coached to “hold the door open”, staying present in case a loved one ever starts to notice cracks in what they’ve been told, without continuing to push, argue or send articles that only further entrench the divide.
The first step, Forlano said, is admitting that everything they’ve already tried hasn’t worked and to stop warring. Conflict often de-escalates once one party stops pushing back, she said. From there, the work isn’t about holding out hope that loved ones will turn on Trump and the movement he built; it’s about grief – mourning the relationship as it was, finding solidarity with others living through the same struggle and rebuilding a sense of self. Members stay in touch through group chats between sessions, trading techniques and support in real time.
“The supportive nature of the community has been healing,” Forlano said. “It helps people find their footing again.”
What life after Maga looks like
Coming out on “the other side” is different for each person leaving Maga. Logis now supports Democrats. Messina has gone further. “I consider myself a democratic socialist now 100%,” she said. “I’m a member of the DSA. So is my son.” She has become an outspoken supporter of Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for US Senate in Michigan, and describes watching her husband and her 20-year-old son’s friend group all turn decisively against Trump within the past two years.
But that doesn’t mean everyone in her family has left Maga. Her mother, 64, voted for Trump twice and still struggles to fully let go of messaging that casts Democrats as enemies. However, Messina has slowly had influence. She has talked to her mom about misogyny, intersectionality and the privilege that white women in Maga wield. “Now we’re working on Islamophobia because she can’t say Abdul El-Sayed without cringing because of these deeply ingrained biases,” Messina said. Their arguments used to end in screaming matches, but Messina has learned, slowly, not to cut her mother off. “Cutting them off completely just furthers the divides,” she said.
The group continues to grapple with questions about forgiveness and grace. How much grace does the rest of the country owe people who spent years amplifying conspiracy theories before denouncing Maga? Logis said Leaving Maga regularly receives hostile messages from people who see forgiveness as unearned. Logis understands the anger, he said, but argues that a movement built entirely around punishing defection offers no incentive for anyone else to leave.
“I am not asking anyone to like me. I’m not even asking for forgiveness,” said Messina. “I just hope that you’ll take what I have to say and believe it because I don’t have anything to gain except to hope that we can make a change.”
