Stephania Messina had five sons. In the conservative Christian Quiverfull church, on the outskirts of Detroit – Michigan – she became a popular figure.
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According to the doctrine of her Christian cult, the quiver represents the womb, meant to be filled with as many arrows – a metaphor for children – as possible to be launched to the Lord. “They treated me like the Virgin Mary, like a gift to the church,” Messina told the British newspaper The Guardian.
The congregation encouraged her to lead Bible study groups for women and children, but did not allow her to talk about politics. “It was not my responsibility to vote or know who to vote for. I only had to submit to my husband and do what he deemed necessary,” Messina said. “They were indoctrinating me in Christian nationalism.”
Messina quit her job, opted for family voting, and dedicated herself to homeschooling and self-sufficient living on a farm, as part of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, in the early 2010s.
When Trump launched his first presidential campaign, the church began to describe him as “God’s chosen one”.
Messina never campaigned with the movement’s characteristic red cap, but she began to question it in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
As a respiratory therapist, she saw Trump change his stance daily on the vaccine, while her pastor called quarantines “a demonic attempt by the Deep State –Deep state– to keep people out of church.” She sought psychological help and came to describe those years within MAGA as “a religious psychosis”.
She distanced herself from the church in 2021, according to her account to the British media. They considered her a stranger, but she felt the need to proclaim her exit from MAGA on social media. “I started speaking out to raise awareness. I was very involved,” she said. She felt alone.
Years later she contacted the group Leaving MAGA. “Leaving MAGA tries to normalize leaving,” Messina said. “And it’s especially important now, as I believe the MAGA bubble is bursting.”
Started in 2024 and later turned into a nonprofit organization, Leaving MAGA offers a way out of the movement that transformed the Republican Party. The central premise is that leaving the MAGA identity works less like a change of opinion and more like leaving a strict control religious group.
Rich Logis, founder of Leaving MAGA, was attracted by the destructive and refounding energy Trump projected in 2016 and voted for him that year and in 2020. According to The Guardian, he spent almost a decade as one of the most committed militants of the movement, writing scripts for campaign calls, registering voters, and commenting on the Fox News television network.
His break came after the Uvalde, Texas shooting in 2022, which left 19 children and two teachers dead.
Logis said he could no longer reconcile his own values with the response he anticipated from Trump’s followers. Months later he published a public apology for having supported the president, which led him to found the movement he now leads.
“I had to do a reckoning and acknowledge that I had been guilty and complicit in helping the president divide our country and amplify conspiracy theories that resulted in unnecessary death, suffering, and trauma,” Logis said.
With that self-criticism he built Leaving MAGA on social media.
“There are more people than ever inside MAGA who are starting to have doubts and confusion,” Logis assured. “We try to counter the toxicity of the MAGA community by providing a way out and a community where people can become what I call ‘a reborn human being’ and regain their individuality, empathy, and decision-making ability.”
MAGA leaders have defined the movement as one that advocates for economic sovereignty, secure borders, and a “America First” foreign policy, said political theorist Laura K. Field, author of the book Furious Minds, to The Guardian. “But an underestimated element of MAGA is its community-building dimension,” she stated.
The glue that held that community together was “lies and falsehoods” and an “addiction to fear and rage” fueled by misinformation, Logis said.
“(In MAGA) I had a dangerous belief in ‘them.’ A ‘them’ trying to restrict my rights, indoctrinate my children, take away my guns, and replace white people with people of color and foreigners,” he said.
Logis and Messina described their exit as a project to rebuild the empathy that MAGA suppressed. “When I started listening to those I had been told not to listen to – feminists, who were labeled ‘racial hate inciters,’ or trans creators – my empathy returned,” Messina recounted.
Neither of them seeks to change the opinion of those who still sympathize with MAGA. The idea is that those who already have doubts know there is support on the other side. “My philosophy is not to engage in debates with people who belong to MAGA,” Logis said. “I don’t try to bombard or overwhelm people with data or political proposals,” he added.
Logis and other group representatives spread their message on Instagram live streams and TikTok videos. One of the most effective methods has been billboard advertising.
Almost 40 billboards have been installed in 27 states this year, with a simple message, “Got doubts? You’re not alone,” as can be seen on their Instagram profile.
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Logis said more than half a million people visited the group’s website last year, and a similar number have done so so far this year. There it is possible to subscribe to a newsletter with testimonials, access a guide to talk with family members inside the movement, and join monthly meetings with those who have already left.
Carter Brown, an ex-Traditionalist who voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024, said leaving MAGA made her realize she needed to do more than express herself online, that she needed to help rebuild. Today, considered a leader of the dissident organization of the ultra-conservative movement, she points out that “it has required deconstructing my religion and the dogma of Western theology, and realizing that I wasn’t even living like Jesus,” she commented.
Brown changed her stance on women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, capitalism, and immigration. She said she now votes according to her new convictions and volunteers with groups she previously harmed with her vote.
According to Logis, Leaving MAGA is growing as polls show a growing unpopularity of Trump. According to the latest YouGov poll cited by The Economist, 35% of Americans approve of the Republican president, while 61% disapprove.
The founder of Leaving MAGA spoke with people who quit after being fired by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – the agency Trump created after assuming his second term and left under the command of Elon Musk – and with others disillusioned by unfulfilled promises in foreign policy and the rise in the cost of living.
Messina said those she has met in Leaving MAGA come from diverse backgrounds. “We joined MAGA for different reasons and left for different reasons,” she said. “Although the right knew how to manipulate us with their algorithms, I feel the situation is changing.”
Among other things, Leaving MAGA has an online support group aimed at those who have a loved one inside MAGA. Among them are spouses, adult children, parents, siblings, and friends who have seen a loved one transformed by the Trumpist movement, according to the group facilitator, Julianna Forlano, to The Guardian.
Forlano, a therapist by profession, has worked with families of people with narcissistic personality disorder and in addiction recovery processes. She said these breakups have to do with behavior within families and parent-child relationships, more than with political ideologies.
Forlano and her group treat the psychological impact of fear produced through MAGA misinformation and conspiracy theories as a disease. “The mind works like a dopamine seeker,” she noted, comparing the search for the next alarming news with the anxiety of a brain addicted to its next dose.
Those who constantly consume that content adopt a “with us or against us” mentality and, in conclusion, see their loved ones as threats.
She clarified that having certain political beliefs does not mean being sick. What the group seeks to address is the compulsive pattern of threat-seeking that overlaps those beliefs.
The stories shared in the dissident organization by members show how the breakup alters daily life. For example, one participant married a member of a Latino family with the blessing of her parents, until she heard them use racist insults against mestizo people. Because of this, she decided they can no longer be part of her life.
Instead of encouraging members to break ties or insist on fact-based debate, the group teaches patience and offers a space to verify that they are not alone. They are taught to keep the door open, to wait without insisting or arguing.
The first step, according to Forlano, was admitting that what had been tried so far had not worked and to stop fighting. Conflict usually decreases when one party stops resisting. From there the work consists of mourning, crying for the relationship as it was, and rebuilding self-esteem alongside others going through the same.
“Community support has been healing,” Forlano said. “It helps people reconnect with themselves.”
Leaving MAGA is a different process for each person. Logis now supports the Democrats. Messina went further. “I consider myself 100% a democratic socialist,” she said. “I am a member of the DSA. My son is too.” She became an active advocate for Abdul El-Sayed, Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, and said her husband and her son’s friends have strongly turned against Trump in the last two years.
That has not happened with her entire family. Her 64-year-old mother voted twice for Trump and still struggles to leave behind the discourse that presents Democrats as enemies.
But Messina has been gaining influence little by little. She has talked with her mother about misogyny, intersectionality, and the privilege of white women within MAGA. Their discussions used to end in shouting, but she learned not to cut off communication. “Cutting off communication completely only increases division,” she said.
The group continues to deal with questions about forgiveness. Logis said Leaving MAGA regularly receives hostile messages. He understands the anger, he noted, but maintained that a movement built solely around punishing desertion offers no incentive for others to leave.
“I don’t ask anyone to like me. I don’t even ask for forgiveness,” Messina said. “I just hope they take what I have to say seriously and believe it, because I have nothing to gain except the hope that we can achieve change.”
