The Cult of Trump
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Cult leaders arise from decayed communities and societies in which people
have been shorn of political, social and economic power. The disempowered,
infantilized by a world they cannot control, gravitate to cult leaders who
appear omnipotent and promise a return to a mythical golden age. The cult
leaders vow to crush the forces, embodied in demonized groups and
individuals, that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous the cult
leaders become, the more they flout law and social conventions, the more
they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established
society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders demand a God-like power. Those
who follow them grant them this power in the hope that the cult leaders will
save them.
Donald Trump has transformed the decayed carcass of the Republican Party
into a cult. All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the
cult leaders. The cult reflects the leader's prejudices, worldview, personal
style and ideas. Trump did not create the yearning for a cult leader. Huge
segments of the population, betrayed by the established elites, were
conditioned for a cult leader. They were desperately looking for someone to
rescue them and solve their problems. They found their cult leader in the
New York real estate developer and reality television show star. Only when
we recognize Trump as a cult leader, and many of those who support him as
cult followers, will we understand where we are headed and how we must
resist.
It was 40 years ago next month that a messianic preacher named Jim Jones
convinced or forced more than 900 of his followers, including roughly 280
children, to die by ingesting a cyanide-laced drink. Trump's refusal to
acknowledge and address the impending crisis of ecocide and the massive
mismanagement of the economy by kleptocrats, his bellicosity, his threats
against Iran and China and the withdrawal from nuclear arms treaties, along
with his demonization of all who oppose him, ensure our cultural and, if
left unchecked, physical extinction. Cult leaders are driven, at their core,
by the death instinct, the instinct to annihilate and destroy rather than
nurture and create. Trump shares many of the characteristics of Jones as
well as other cult leaders including Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu
Nettles, the founders of the Heaven's Gate cult; the Rev. Sun Myung Moon,
who led the Unification Church; Credonia Mwerinde, who led the Movement for
the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda; Li Hongzhi, the
founder of Falun Gong; and David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidian cult in
Waco, Texas. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning
and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield
absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure,
a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral
and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as
objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often
sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of
evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.
"A cult is a mirror of what is inside the cult leader," Margaret Thaler
Singer wrote in "Cults in Our Midst." "He has no restraints on him. He can
make his fantasies and desires come alive in the world he creates around
him. He can lead people to do his bidding. He can make the surrounding world
really his world. What most cult leaders achieve is akin to the fantasies of
a child at play, creating a world with toys and utensils. In that play
world, the child feels omnipotent and creates a realm of his own for a few
minutes or a few hours. He moves the toy dolls about. They do his bidding.
They speak his words back to him. He punishes them any way he wants. He is
all-powerful and makes his fantasy come alive. When I see the sand tables
and the collections of toys some child therapists have in their offices, I
think that a cult leader must look about and place people in his created
world much as a child creates on the sand table a world that reflects his or
her desires and fantasies. The difference is that the cult leader has actual
humans doing his bidding as he makes a world around him that springs from
inside his own head."
George Orwell understood that cult leaders manipulate followers primarily
through language, not force. This linguistic manipulation is a gradual
process. It is rooted in continual mental chaos and verbal confusion. Lies,
conspiracy theories, outlandish ideas and contradictory statements that defy
reality and fact soon paralyze the opposition. The opposition, with every
attempt to counter this absurdism with the rational-such as the decision by
Barack Obama to make his birth certificate public or by Sen. Elizabeth
Warren to release the results of her DNA test to prove she has Native
American ancestry-plays to the cult leader. The cult leader does not take
his or her statements seriously and often denies ever making them, even when
they are documented. Lies and truth do not matter. The language of the cult
leader is designed exclusively to appeal to the emotional needs of those in
the cult.
"Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic
upheaval," Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in "The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology
of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing." "They never knew what this
unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical, because
he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with
logic, while illogic cannot-it confuses those who think straight. The Big
Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold
war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a
reasonable counter-argument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault
him with another."
The cult leader grooms followers to speak in the language of hate and
violence. The cult leader constantly paints a picture of an existential
threat, often invented, that puts the cult followers in danger. Trump is
doing this by demonizing the caravan of some 4,000 immigrants, most from
Honduras, moving through southern Mexico. Caravans of immigrants, are, in
fact, nothing new. The beleaguered and impoverished asylum seekers,
including many families with children, are 1,000 miles from the Texas
border. But Trump, aided by nearly nonstop coverage by Fox News and
Christian broadcasting, is using the caravan to terrify his followers, just
as he, along with these media outlets, portrayed the protesters who flooded
the U.S. capital to oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as unruly mobs.
Trump claims the Democrats want to open the border to these "criminals" and
to "unknown Middle Easterners" who are, he suggests, radical jihadists.
Christian broadcasting operations, such as Pat Robertson's The 700 Club,
splice pictures of marching jihadists in black uniforms cradling automatic
weapons into the video shots of the caravan.
The fear mongering and rhetoric of hate and violence, as I saw in the former
Yugoslavia, eventually lead to widespread acts of violence against those the
cult leader defines as the enemy. The 13 explosive devices sent last week to
Trump critics and leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama,
Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, along with George Soros, James Clapper and
CNN, allegedly by Cesar Sayoc, an ex-stripper and fanatic Trump supporter
who was living out of his van, herald more violence. Trump, tossing gasoline
on the flames, used this assault against much of the leadership of the
Democratic Party to again attack the press, or, as he calls it, "the enemy
of the people." "A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is
caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream
Media that I refer to as Fake News," he tweeted. "It has gotten so bad and
hateful that is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its acts,
FAST!"
It should come as no surprise that on Saturday another enraged American
white male, his fury and despair seemingly stoked by the diatribes and
conspiracy theories of the far right, entered a Pittsburgh synagogue and
massacred eight men and three women as he shouted anti-Semitic abuse. Shot
by police and arrested at the scene was Robert Bowers, who believes that
Jewish groups are aiding the caravan of immigrants in southern Mexico. He
was armed with a military-style AR-15 assault rifle, plus three handguns.
The proliferation of easily accessible high-caliber weapons, coupled with
the division of the country into the blessed and the damned by Trump and his
fellow cultists, threatens to turn the landscape of the United States into
one that resembles Mexico, where at least 145 people in politics, including
48 candidates and pre-candidates, along with party leaders and campaign
workers, have been assassinated over the last 12 months, according to
Etellekt, a risk analysis firm in Mexico. There have been 627 incidents of
violence against politicians, 206 threats and acts of intimidation, 57
firearm assaults and 52 attacks on family members that resulted in 50
fatalities. Trump's response to the mass shooting at the synagogue was to
say places of worship should have armed guards, a call for further
proliferation of firearms. Look south if you want a vision of our future.
Domestic terrorism and nihilistic violence are the natural outcomes of the
economic, social and political stagnation, the total seizure of power by a
corporate cabal and oligarchic elite, and the contamination of civil
discourse by cult leaders. The weaponization of language is proliferating,
as seen in the vile rhetoric that characterizes many political campaigns for
the midterm elections, including the racist robocall sent out against Andrew
Gillum, an African-American candidate for the governorship of Florida.
"Well, hello there. I is the negro Andrew Gillum and I'll be askin' you to
make me governor of this here state of Florida," a man speaking in a
caricature of a black dialect accompanied by jungle noises said in the
robocall. Cults externalize evil. Evil is embodied in the demonized other,
whether desperate immigrants, black political candidates and voters, or the
Democratic Party. The only way to purge this evil and restore America to
greatness is to eradicate these human contaminants.
The cult leader, unlike a traditional politician, makes no effort to reach
out to his opponents. The cult leader seeks to widen the divisions. The
leader brands those outside the cult as irredeemable. The leader seeks the
omnipotence to crush those who do not kneel in adoration. The followers,
yearning to be protected and empowered by the cult leader, seek to give the
cult leader omnipotence. Democratic norms, an impediment to the leader's
omnipotence, are attacked and abolished. Those in the cult seek to be
surrounded by the cult leader's magical aura. Reality is sacrificed for
fantasy. Those who challenge the fantasy are not considered human. They are
Satanic.
Meerloo wrote:
"
The dictator is not only a sick man, he is also a cruel opportunist. He sees
no value in any other person and feels no gratitude for any help he may have
received. He is suspicious and dishonest and believes that his personal ends
justify any means he may use to achieve them. Peculiarly enough, every
tyrant still searches for some self-justification. Without such a soothing
device for his own conscience, he cannot live. His attitude toward other
people is manipulative; to him, they are merely tools for the advancement of
his own interests. He rejects the conception of doubt, of internal
contradictions, or man's inborn ambivalence. He denies the psychological
fact that man grows to maturity through groping, through trial and error,
through the interplay of contrasting feelings. Because he will not permit
himself to grope, to learn through trial and error, the dictator can never
become a mature person. . It is because the dictator is afraid, albeit
unconsciously, of his own internal contradictions, that he is afraid of the
same internal contradictions of his fellow man. He must purge and purge,
terrorize and terrorize in order to still his own raging inner drives. He
must kill every doubter, destroy every person who makes a mistake, imprison
everyone who cannot be proved to be utterly single-minded.
Behavior that ensures the destruction of a public figure's career does not
affect a cult leader. It does not matter how many lies uttered by Trump are
meticulously documented by The New York Times or The Washington Post. It
does not matter that Trump's personal financial interests, as we see in his
relationship with the Saudis, take precedence over the rule of law,
diplomatic protocols and national security. It does not matter that he is
credibly charged by numerous women with being a sexual predator, a common
characteristic of cult leaders. It does not matter that he is inept, lazy
and ignorant. The establishment, whose credibility has been destroyed
because of its complicity in empowering the ruling oligarchy and the
corporate state, might as well be blowing soap bubbles at Trump. Their
vitriol, to his followers, only justifies the hatred radiating from the
cult.
The cult leader responds to only one emotion-fear. The cult leader, usually
a coward, will react when he thinks he is in danger. The cult leader will
bargain and compromise when afraid. The cult leader will give the appearance
of being flexible and reasonable. But as soon as the cult leader is no
longer afraid, the old patterns of behavior return, with a special venom
directed at those who were able to momentarily impinge upon his power.
The removal of Trump from power would not remove the yearning of tens of
millions of people, many conditioned by the Christian right, for a cult
leader. Most of the leaders of the Christian right have built cult
followings of their own. These Christian fascists embraced magical thinking,
attacked their enemies as agents of Satan and denounced reality-based
science and journalism long before Trump did. Cults are a product of social
decay and despair, and our decay and despair are expanding, soon to explode
in another financial crisis.
The efforts by the Democratic Party and much of the press, including CNN and
The New York Times, to discredit Trump, as if our problems are embodied in
him, are futile. The smug, self-righteousness of this crusade against Trump
only contributes to the national reality television show that has replaced
journalism and politics. This crusade attempts to reduce a social, economic
and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It is accompanied by a
refusal to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed
democracy. This collusion with the forces of corporate oppression neuters
the press and Trump's mainstream critics.
Our only hope is to organize the overthrow of the corporate state that
vomited up Trump. Our democratic institutions, including the legislative
bodies, the courts and the media, are hostage to corporate power. They are
no longer democratic. We must, like liberation movements of the past, engage
in acts of sustained mass civil disobedience and non-cooperation. By turning
our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse.
We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as
undocumented workers, Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, liberals,
feminists, gays and others. We give people an alternative to a Democratic
Party that refuses to confront the corporate forces of oppression and cannot
be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society. If we
fail to embrace this militancy, which alone has the ability to destroy cult
leaders, we will continue the march toward tyranny.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers.
