He embraced Donald Trump, and then abandoned him. How did he do it?

Rich Logis was, as he puts it, a MAGA-American — a reference to Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again. He wrote think pieces on conservative news sites. He hosted a podcast where he excoriated Republicans who weren’t, by his definition, sufficiently loyal to Trump. From his Palm Beach County home a half-hour drive from Mar-a-Lago, Logis hoped to become a famous pro-Trump pundit.

“The Democratic Party is the most dangerous group in the history of our republic, foreign or domestic — more than the Islamic supremacists, more than the Nazis,” Logis wrote in 2019.

But today, with Trump seeking another term in the White House, the 47-year-old married father of two has a different way of seeing things.

He’s publicly decried his former hero and called the Republican Party irredeemable. Earlier this year, he founded a group, called Leaving MAGA, aimed at creating a community of people who have abandoned Trump.

Logis exemplifies a rarity in the U.S. political landscape of 2024: a man who changed his mind. A 2022 Pew Research study found that Americans are increasingly polarized, more and more likely to view those with different political views as “close-minded,” “dishonest” and “immoral.” In an age of toxic partisanship and echo chambers, Logis says he’s broken free.

But if Logis’ story offers hope for those who want to believe in the power of persuasion, it also comes with a major caveat. Changing politics for Logis wasn’t as simple as swapping bumper stickers or voter registration cards. It was a process of personal reinvention. Of changing communities. Of losing friends.

There are reasons beliefs are so unshakable, social scientists say. Political viewpoints don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re part of a larger network of ideas that are shaped by a person’s environment.

It wasn’t enough for Logis to change his mind. He had to change his life.

From Ralph Nader to Donald Trump

To the extent that Logis was political as a younger man, he was anti-establishment.

Disillusioned by the two-party system, he never voted for a Democrat or a Republican for president, he says. Ralph Nader earned his vote in four consecutive elections.

So alienated by mainstream politics was Logis that, by the 2016 election, he was ready to hear what Trump had to say. Here was a New York businessperson bemoaning how millions of American voices had gone unheard.

Even better, Trump seemed to freak out all the right people — Democrats and Republicans alike. By the fall of 2015, Logis was telling friends and strangers that Trump would win. The Donald was his guy.

There were unpleasant moments at first. Logis didn’t care for Trump’s pronouncements about Muslims, or his smack talk about the war record of U.S. Sen. John McCain.

But the deeper into the Trump movement Logis went, the more he said he felt all other alternatives were unacceptable. He said he came to believe that if Trump didn’t win the 2016 election, Democrats would keep consolidating power — to him, a horrifying prospect. No Republican would ever become president again, he believed.

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This belief system was partially rooted in paranoia, but Logis saw it as progressive. To Logis, Trump was trying to build the America of the future.

Logis’ turn to Trump was confounding to some of those close to him.

“The whole political thing just became strange for me,” recalled Eugene Driscoll, a friend who covered government in Westchester County, New York, with Logis for a local newspaper in the 2000s. “I thought he went off the rails.”

Logis, a bespectacled gentle giant type who keeps his salt and pepper beard neatly trimmed, found himself living in the comments section of conservative news sites like Breitbart. He cut people like Driscoll, who says he’s not particularly partisan one way or another, out of his life.

After Trump won in November 2016, Logis’ social calendar filled with Republican club dates and MAGA meetups. He posed for pictures with conservative media heroes like the podcaster Dan Bongino and the commentator Dinesh D’Souza. In the picture with Bongino, Logis rocked the same haircut and goatee as the conservative media star.

He began tracking the right-wing news cycle obsessively, firing his thoughts at whatever conservative site would publish them. When Trump endorsed Ron DeSantis in the 2018 Florida governor’s race, Logis took up the DeSantis cause. To him, Trump’s word was gold.

Logis says he woke up every day thinking about MAGA. He went to sleep thinking about it.

“I probably dreamt about it,” Logis said. “I did that day after day, year after year.”

While running a small but modestly successful technology company, Logis made his politics a second career. He launched a podcast in 2017, “The Rich Logis Show,” which was similar to other, more successful, in-your-face right-wing programs. YouTube snippets came with a disclaimer warning that the program “has been deemed dangerous and inappropriate to Democrats.”

He trademarked the term “Democrat Media Industrial Complex,” certain that it would take off among the MAGA masses. He wrote a book draft about the dangers of liberalism and devised ideas to get it in front of Trump himself to juice sales. It was never published.

The barrage of political content Logis consumed and created kept his fight-or-flight sense perpetually activated. There was little time for self-care or long-term planning, he said. In his version of MAGA, the present was everything.

Cracks begin to form

Even as a diehard supporter, Logis wasn’t an uncritical observer of the Trump experience.

The president’s wishy-washy response to white nationalists rallying in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 made Logis uneasy. When Trump began to claim the 2020 election was stolen, Logis said he didn’t buy it. He wished Trump would stop saying it. Then came Jan. 6, 2021.

“I knew the insurrection wasn’t good,” Logis said.

The beginning of the end for Logis came in the summer of 2021. The delta wave of the coronavirus was ravaging Logis’ home state, and hospitals all over were inundated with patients. It would prove to be the deadliest COVID-19 wave in Florida.

Logis was watching the actions of DeSantis, Florida’s Trump-approved governor, carefully. After previously pushing Floridians to get vaccinated, DeSantis backed off of that recommendation, preferring instead to steer the infected toward treatments like monoclonal antibodies.

A believer in the vaccines, Logis thought DeSantis downplayed the shots in order to pander to Trump supporters.

“When he did that, it became an immediate reflection of MAGA itself,” Logis said.

DeSantis and Trump would have their own public and messy falling out in the fall of 2022. But before that, Logis started to think about the nature of MAGA.

He withdrew from his friends at local Republican clubs. He reflected on the influence of fringe groups like QAnon and the Proud Boys within the Trump community. He broadened his information diet beyond right-wing news outlets. He wondered whether he might have been wrong to support Trump at all.

By the fall of 2022, Logis decided he was done with MAGA.

Who else wants to leave MAGA?

Christopher Gergen met Rich Logis in February 2017 at a meeting of Broward County Republicans.

The two men talked for hours that first night. They were like-minded conservatives, but their friendship quickly transcended politics. For years, over dinners and at Trump events, Logis and Gergen would talk about their marriages, their businesses, everything. Gergen’s wife baked one of Logis’ daughters her first birthday cake.

But in 2022, when Logis decided to leave the MAGA movement, he abruptly stopped talking to his old friend, Gergen says.

Gergen struggled to understand it.

“There’s not really any way he can reconcile, in my opinion, the things he espoused prior to this transformation versus the things that he says he believes now,” Gergen said.

It once seemed hard for Logis’ friends to imagine the Nader voter nodding along while Trump proposed banning Muslims from entering the country. Now, MAGA friends saw the reverse happen. Did Logis really abandon Trump because DeSantis wasn’t pushing COVID-19 vaccines hard enough?

Gergen, who produced Logis’ MAGA podcast, wonders whether the move away from Trump is just his former friend’s most recent attempt at media relevance.

How much has Logis really changed? Gergen wonders.

Philip Fernbach, a cognitive scientist and a professor of marketing at the University of Colorado in Boulder, said it makes sense that Logis’ MAGA friends would be alienated by the transformation that Logis seems to have undergone.

“Fundamental beliefs are the scaffolding or the infrastructure for our other beliefs. So it’s not like you can just change something that’s foundational. A lot of things have to change,” Fernbach said. “It’s going to have a lot of implications for who you affiliate with, who you hang out with.”

Logis, for his part, insists his metamorphosis is genuine. But there is also some uncomfortable truth in what his old conservative friend said. Logis is continuing to make his politics into a sort of side hustle.

He registered Leaving MAGA as a nonprofit corporation in Florida in January. Its website is barely functional, and Logis hasn’t fully fleshed out his plans yet, but he’s already been interviewed by a Norwegian television station about the effort. He’s still writing freelance political pieces, but now they’re about how he changed his views.

He says more targeted efforts from Leaving MAGA are coming. For now, Logis is trying his best to reach people on social media while he awaits the final approval from the Internal Revenue Service to raise money.

“Those feelings of wanting to influence, wanting to impact, wanting to be known, wanting to be seen as a leader in the movement, those really exist the same now,” Logis said.

What seems to have genuinely changed about Logis is his outlook. When he was in MAGA, he felt he was in a war. He says he no longer feels that way. When he stopped supporting Trump, Logis says his wife, Bozena, voted Republican in 2016 and 2020 not because she wanted to, but because she thought it important to support her husband. He wants to be the kind of husband whose wife will feel comfortable voting however she likes.

Will Logis be able to bring any other MAGA converts into the fold? It’s going to be tough. Exit polls conducted by CNN show about 4 in 10 Republicans consider themselves a part of Trump’s MAGA movement. That’s millions of voters who remain quite comfortable with their love for Trump.

Logis is also not the first to try something like this. In 2018, the #WalkAway group, which launched with the purpose of reforming liberals, failed to inspire widespread electoral change.

But Logis is sure there are others like him. If everything breaks his way, he believes he can help build a valuable — if seldom used — bridge between the two Americas.

Changing a mind is a messy process. Logis would know. He has some mess on him. He’s hoping that his fellow Americans will see that as a good thing.