Do MAGA Supporters Deserve Our Scorn or Empathy?
Grassroots Activists Engaging MAGA in Their Communities
By Kristin Battista-Frazee
ICE agents are swarming our streets and terrorizing communities. Trump is posting racist memes about the Obamas and seizing ballot boxes in Georgia. America is now at war with Iran. As grassroots activists hold our fingers in the dam of democracy, it’s inevitable that we feel anger and sadness, and may blame MAGA supporters for giving Trump the power of the presidency to ruin our country. But do MAGAs deserve our scorn or empathy?
This may not be a question some can easily answer. But right now, the MAGA faithful are questioning their loyalty to Trump and could be open to supporting Democrats. Trump’s approval rating has dropped to 41 percent. Marjorie Taylor Greene has famously left MAGA and, in a recent interview, said MAGA was a big lie. Saturday Night Live’s latest skit captured the political zeitgeist, depicting a mom coming out to her family, saying she might think Trump is bad for the country and asking for grace as she struggles to share her doubts.
Leaving MAGA
One grassroots organization, Leaving MAGA, provides support to people with MAGA-loving family members and those who are having doubts about MAGA. The group holds online weekly support sessions facilitated by Julianna Forlano, an MSW clinician, and offers communication strategies to talk with MAGA supporters. Leaving MAGA also shares stories of people who have left MAGA, providing insight into why so many supported Trump.
Leaving MAGA Founder, Rich Logis, shared his journey in his ebook My MAGA Odyssey and his memoir, One Betrayal Too Many: Why I Left MAGA. Logis described his younger self as a political independent who viewed Republicans and Democrats as the same. He is from a middle-class family in Westchester County, New York, graduated from Iona University, and became a local newspaper reporter and later a small business owner. Though he was not initially a Trump supporter, he found Trump’s isolationist policies and different personal style appealing. Logis eventually became a full-fledged MAGA supporter who wrote articles for right-wing news sites, hosted a local radio show, and created a life and community focused on supporting MAGA.
Logis began having doubts about Trump during his reckless COVID response and later when Florida Governor Ron Desantis’ supported anti-vaxxers. This led Logis to widen his media diet outside of right-wing networks. Those doubts deepened after Trump claimed the 2020 election was stolen and sparked the January 6 insurrection. The final straw was the Republicans’ response to the Uvalde, TX school shooting. The GOP’s lack of accountability and continued push for Second Amendment rights became too much to justify. Logis quietly left MAGA, after much inner turmoil, and then did so publicly in an Occupy Democrats article on August 30, 2022, which included an apology for his past support of Trump. He left behind a community, a second family, and many personal connections. The response was positive.
“This overwhelming outpouring was a wonderful validation of my choice,” Logis wrote in My MAGA Odyssey. “I felt liberated. It was as if my view of the world had been through a tiny aperture that was nearly closed, and now it was wide open, with more light shining through than I had ever remembered.” Logis added, “To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway: my personal and political epiphany occurred gradually, and then suddenly all at once.”
In 2024, Logis became the co-chair of the Republicans for Harris Florida team and founded Leaving MAGA shortly thereafter. He is often invited to share his story at grassroots events and is quoted in the media. He has said that leaving MAGA rejuvenated past relationships, improved his family life, spirituality, and mental health.
The Path Forward Through Empathy and Patience
Grassroots activists often encounter MAGA supporters online and in their communities. There is a widely held belief against engaging these voters because they can’t be convinced to support Democrats. Leaving MAGA proposes a different path and encourages giving MAGA supporters patience, grace, and empathy to help them leave.
“Liberals aren’t wrong about the dangers of MAGA, but they don’t make it easy for people to leave,” Logis told Salon.com. “Ridicule and moral superiority can too easily close the door to honest dialogue, while empathy and understanding, difficult as they may be, open the path to genuine transformation.”
On a podcast with Joe Walsh (Logis comes on at 35:26), a former Republican congressman who famously left MAGA, Logis noted that Leaving MAGA is a non-partisan group and he doesn’t give political advice. But the Democratic Party, he said, is nervous and afraid to talk with voters outside of their base, missing an opportunity to reach people in red districts.
While most people may not leave MAGA, others are urged not to give up. Leaving MAGA’s philosophy — understanding a person’s point of view and providing a friendly ear — can create an opportunity for loyalists to question MAGA. Leaving MAGA’s Reaching Out guide offers helpful tips to engage supporters. The tips could be extrapolated to wider grassroots organizing, for example, seeking common ground in conversations and inquiring about the source when a MAGA supporter shares inaccurate information.
When asked what advice he has for grassroots organizers, Logis said, “Be patient. It’s important people be made to feel that they have a personal stake in our democracy. People make decisions and vote based on their own interests, this is understandable. But Americans need to be shown that our country is a better place for all of us when we vote in support of the disadvantaged and marginalized. Change doesn’t happen in linear fashion; progress ebbs and flows and zigs and zags. The more Americans are engaged, the stronger our democracy will be.”
The Rappin’ Chaplain
Chaplain Terry Nicholetti, actor and storyteller, works with folks who are leaving or have left MAGA, supporting their efforts to publicly tell their stories. “We have to distinguish between the cynical power grabbers who are using ordinary folks to achieve their goals of power and wealth and the ordinary folks who’ve been sucked into MAGA’s communities in one way or another,” Nicholetti said. “We don’t need to reach all 49% who voted for Trump. Let’s get to know the family and community members we come in contact with. When we listen with empathy, we can find common ground and build surprising connections.”
There’s one thing we know about Democrats: they care about people’s well-being. If compassion can bring people to our side to defeat MAGA, in the name of saving democracy, you can be sure grassroots activists will give this approach a chance.
SAVE THE DATE: Thursday, May 28, 2026 at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT. Rich Logis, founder of Leaving MAGA, will appear on It Needs To Be Said.
Thank you, Kristin, for a thorough and compassionate reporting of this story. I hear the anger in the comments of those who have personally experienced the pain caused by Trump and MAGA. It is asking a great deal of them to be open to the suggestion of empathy instead of scorn or even hatred. I also found it difficult at first. But I believe Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s admonition, “Hatred cannot drive out hatred; only love can do that.” So I had to try.
First, I learned that such hatred was supposed to happen. The GOP has been working since Reagan and Gingrich to use a message of hatred and fear of “the other” as the way to grow their power. That message solidified under Trump into MAGA vs. “the radical, lunatic left.”
I also learned that MAGA is NOT a monolith of Trump supporters who voted for him three times "because of the price of gas.” Besides the millionaire/billionaire power-grabbing members of Trump’s administrations, and some very extreme far-right ideologues, there are millions of Americans who have been vulnerable to the MAGA message through perhaps the most significant influence in their lives, their churches.
I'm a former nun, and a Christian chaplain whose faith is core to my life. It has been very painful to learn how tangled up MAGA is with the scourge of Christian Nationalism. In many affected churches, members, especially women, are decent, hardworking people, whose hardscrabble lives make them vulnerable to the comfort and support of community offered by their churches.Their Christian Nationalist leaders tell them that Trump is their savior, that he is the only way to keep the evil “communist/socialist government” from destroying their churches and their lives, especially by allowing abortions. When you add to those “lessons” limited information sources and a Democratic party that for decades ignored any regions in the country where they "couldn't win elections," you have a trifecta of forces that made millions of middle Americans vulnerable to the MAGA message.
Jesus was angry at the money changers in the temple and threw over their tables in protest of their injustices. For everyone else deemed "sinners" by their communities, he showed compassion, empathy and forgiveness. I'm thinking that's how he would invite me to receive those MAGA folks who are doing the hard work of truly questioning their years of commitment to Trump, facing the deep harm caused by his presidency, and deciding whether or not to give up their communities. I invite my fellow liberals to consider this invitation as well. Blessings.
Let us consider the women and men with abusive partners who, with or without their consent, have been subjected to ritual humiliation as a tool to convince them to stay, to comply, to take the blame, or even conclude that they must stay in the relationship because the can "save" the abuser. This, it seems to me, describes many folks spouting MAGA nonsense. I say nonsense because it is intentionally nonsense--there is no way to argue your way out of nonsense because there is no cohesion and nothing ties. This is why the abuser talks in nonsense and then puts those words into your mouth. So let us imagine ourselves the friends of these victims and try to see them in this light.