MIAMI, Aug 20 — For seven years, Rich Logis was a staunch supporter of Republican Donald Trump, attending his rallies and using far-right media to assail his detractors. But at the Democratic National Convention, he will lay out why he is voting for Democrat Kamala Harris.

The 47-year-old Florida businessman is set to appear in a DNC video broadcast, sharing his evolution from a member of Trump’s MAGA — or Make America Great Again movement — to vocal Harris backer.

His journey is something of an anomaly in American society which is often divided along seemingly rigid partisan lines.

"Donald Trump has pitted strangers against each other,” Logis told AFP from Miami, explaining his transition. "He has torn asunder communities, families, households, places of worship.”

Now Logis is now a member of "Republicans for Harris,” a group launched earlier this month by the Democrat’s campaign.

Back in 2015, Logis, disillusioned with US politics and politicians, believed Trump was cut from a different cloth, a candidate more concerned with the problems of everyday citizens.

"He was the right person at the right time, and I was attracted to all of his messaging about obliterating the established political order,” Logis said.

He soon joined Trump’s campaign as a volunteer, making calls, organising support groups and writing articles for far-right digital media in which he says he "dehumanised” Trump’s opponents.

"I felt like we were the good side in our country, against evil,” he said.

First doubts

The work consumed him, and he found community in the movement. But then the coronavirus pandemic hit.

By mid-2021, as the delta variant spread quickly throughout the country, Logis, who never doubted the effectiveness of vaccines, became concerned.

When Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis began to question the public’s obligation to get vaccinated, Logis did something he had not done in a long time: consult media outside his far-right bubble.

Not only did he begin to believe DeSantis was endangering the public to win favour with the MAGA movement, but his thoughts also changed on the attack by Trump supporters on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, which until then he had downplayed.

Logis’s disappointment with Trump only grew as the billionaire continued to claim, without evidence, that he had been the victim of electoral fraud and had really won the 2020 election — something Logis said he never believed.

Little by little, he began to see the reality-show-star-turned-politician as a danger to democracy.

‘Hope’

Leaving the MAGA movement, which had become part of his personal identity, took months and was not easy. His final break came in a letter he published online in August 2022.

Since then he has tried to repair the damage he believes he did as a Trump activist, creating for example, Leaving MAGA, a community to welcome those who have moved on from the movement or have doubts about staying in it.

"I no longer view people I may not agree with as enemies,” he told AFP. "I don’t view them as traitors to the country.”

More recently, wooed by the enthusiasm of the Harris ticket and its political message, Logis volunteered to help her campaign.

The US vice president and her running mate Tim Walz will accept their party’s nomination this week at the DNC just a month after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

"Americans are starved for hope and the Harris-Walz ticket is providing that,” Logis said.

"We see a campaign, Trump’s, that does want to move backwards. And the other campaign that wants to move the country forward.” — AFP