Meet the Maga diehards who changed their minds

Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here. • $120,000 should be a great salary. In these US states, it isn’t• Maga’s worst nightmare: a child-free, unmarried female president• The more America spends on healthcare, the sicker it gets When Courtney Rosenberg was part of the Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, she was all in on conspiracy. During the years she supported Donald Trump, Rosenberg believed false narratives including that slaves who were brought to America in the 1800s were coming for a better life and that Democrats were trafficking children through cabinets sold by Wayfair, the US homeware retailer. Trump was the “perfect candidate” who won her over with his charisma and promise to “drain the swamp”. Now Rosenberg, 38, an telecoms account executive from Detroit in Michigan, feels very differently about the President, and is embarrassed by her former beliefs. “I hate him and I have a bottle of champagne in the fridge for when he leaves office,” she told The i Paper. “He is an evil person. It feels like he wakes up every day and thinks: ‘How can I needlessly hurt people?’” Rosenberg’s U-turn was so dramatic that she joined a group of ex-Maga devotees who are now speaking out against him. The “Leaving Maga” network comprises a few dozen former Trumpers who meet every Tuesday for a support group they jokingly call MA, or “Maga Anonymous”. Founded by ex-Maga activist Rich Logis in 2024, the group has put up signs in 27 US states to attract new members who have soured on Trump. “Having Doubts? You Are Not Alone” read the billboards, which include a link to the website LeavingMAGA.org. For Logis, the group is about replacing the camaraderie people felt while they were Maga with another set of friends: repentant Trumpers. “The way to look at Maga is not through the prism of ideology but through the community it provides,” he said. “It’s a community where [many] feel seen and heard and appreciated for the first time. We don’t refer to Maga as a cult because we want to get people out of it. Calling them cultists makes them dig their heels in deeper. We want to give them a pathway to leave.” Courtney Rosenberg, Rich Logis and James Hicks all left Maga Leaving Maga is gaining prominence just as Trump’s popularity is falling across the US amid sticky inflation caused by the Iran war, which he started in February. The President’s approval rating stands at a dismal 33 per cent, according to a Reuters poll from last month. For the first time in a decade, voters believe that Democrats are better stewards of the economy than Republicans. The price of petrol stands at $4.15 a gallon compared with $3.20 this time last year, according to the AAA. With Republicans expecting to lose the US House and potentially the Senate in November’s midterm elections, some candidates have told Trump’s team they don’t want him to campaign for them. The breaking point Rosenberg says she had long been attracted to strong, powerful men like her early boyfriends and their fathers. She had seen The Apprentice TV show, and thought that Trump would run the country as well as his real estate empire. Back then, Rosenberg wanted to be Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host who has since become a firebrand right-wing commentator, and she believed much of the TV network’s messaging. “I thought feminists were gross, undesirable, they couldn’t get a man and were so obnoxious,” she said. “I had a lot of internalised misogyny and my entire self-worth came from being chosen by men.” At the time, Rosenberg was so invested in Maga-world she believed the baseless QAnon claims that Democrats were trafficking children for sex. But she began to have doubts during the pandemic, when the President told people to come to his rallies even while the virus was spreading. “I’m an educated person, I believe in science,” she said. “That was an existential moment for me. Trump was encouraging everyone to do the exact opposite of what the scientists are saying. The ultimate job of the President should be to protect his people.” Rosenberg couldn’t bring herself to vote for Joe Biden in 2020, but any remaining support she felt for Trump evaporated during the January 6 riots at the US Capitol, which she called “mortifying”. Rosenberg experienced what she calls an “awakening”, spent two years educating herself on the history of racism and capitalism and switched political sides. She says she is now closest to a “Democratic socialist”, adding: “Trump is the personification of what a lot of this country was built on, greed and selfishness.” Looking back at her time in Maga, she thinks she was “conditioned” to follow Trump. “I really thought he was very charismatic,” she said. “I loved his candour … regardless of all the things that were rough or crass … It charmed me.” The community organiser Logis joined Maga after leaving New York and moved to Florida, where he ran a company selling computer hardware. The 49-year-old father of two was drawn to Trump because he was willing to “obliterate the political order”, he told The i Paper. Logis became a Trump campaign volunteer, helped write call scripts and showed people where to vote. “I viewed Trump as the titular leader of a new movement that I considered to be something akin to a second founding of America,” Logis said. “There was a very militant mindset within Maga. Our point of view was, if you’re not 100 per cent with us you’re 100 per cent against us. Now I realise I was addicted to fear and rage and that fear and rage kept me in these perpetual states of despair, panic and paranoia.” Logis thought that Democrats were trying to take away his guns and rights and turn America into a communist country overrun by migrants. His media diet featured right-wing voices including Breitbart and Tucker Carlson. He even wrote articles for fringe pro-Trump websites. He says the “feelings of belonging” were “intoxicating”. At Trump groups, he added, people would “say they’d read my articles and I felt appreciated … I had never had a community like it”. As with Rosenberg, cracks began to appear in Logis’s beliefs during the pandemic when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis began giving platforms to anti-vaxxers and opened up the state, causing a surge in deaths. The final straw was the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022, which left 19 pupils and two teachers dead. “Republicans responded by calling for more guns and that was so offensive to me. I privately, quietly, walked away.” Founding the Leaving Maga group was a way for Logis to process his “remorse, embarrassment that I allowed myself to believe so much mis- and disinformation”, he said. “There’s some anger, regret over my actions. More than anything else, I’ve tried to make amends by apologising.” A misguided attempt to appease white people James Hicks wept with joy the night that Trump was elected president in the 2016 election. Hicks, who was raised in a strict apostolic pentecostal household in West Helena, a small town in Arkansas, had dropped out of college and was struggling with depression. Trump was an outsider who was going to “fight back”, said Hicks, 31, who works in a call centre. “He gave me a purpose to live because at the time I didn’t have anyone I was talking to.” Hicks, who is black, agreed with Trump when it came to the Black Lives Matter protests, which he saw as “misplaced”. Hicks concurred with right-wing talking points, including that victims of police violence were to blame for getting mixed up with law enforcement. “I would disregard the fact they got killed,” said Hicks. “I was just was like, ‘oh they shouldn’t have been doing whatever they were doing, they were strengthening stereotypes for black people’.” Hicks even defended the Confederacy (the group of states that protected slavery), wearing a Confederate wristband to work, and arguing with black co-workers. He now sees this as a misguided attempt to appease white people to get along with them. His break from Maga came during Covid when Hicks was cleaning tables at a restaurant and Trump supporters would come in without masks because the President told them it was OK. Hicks was also appalled at the violent clearing of protesters in Lafayette Square beside the White House in 2020. But he couldn’t bring himself to support Democrats in 2020 – and voted for Kanye West in that election, a decision he now regrets as well. Nowadays, Hicks sees Trump as a “terrible guy” who once had a powerful sway over him. “People who are just on the outs, people who are down … people who are busy trying to survive – they want to feel like somebody is fighting their fight.”As November’s vote approaches, more people could soon be deserting Trump – and leaving Maga.