Anatomy of a Trump cult
You have probably heard many times that MAGA is a cult. But what does that mean? Is it nothing more than an arbitrary designation used by a mainstream group to denigrate and discourage membership in an emerging rival group?
Sometimes it is. In order for a group to be a genuine cult it has to satisfy certain criteria. Fortunately those criteria are easy to understand and identify.
First, the cult has one or more leaders who are significant to the cult, though in a cult there is usually room only for only one leader. They are people like David Koresh of the Branch Dravidians or Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple. Or Donald Trump.
In a cult the leader is always right. To so much as criticise or question the leader is considered persecution or even blasphemy. Members of cults love to talk about how misunderstood and persecuted their Dear Leader is, or they are. This is dangerous when the cult leader has a lot of followers, and the more followers he or she has, the more dangerous the situation becomes.
Anything the cult leader does or says, no matter how preposterous, dangerous or harmful, is justified. For example, Trump’s tariffs are destroying the world economy. But the cult says that’s okay because America has been ripped off by the world for years and it needs to stop! Vengeance is required! It’s short term harm for long term good. Meanwhile the world economy is creeping closer and closer to global recession, possibly even a second Great Depression.
Another example, Trump has turned Elon Musk loose on the government. He is firing tens of thousands of people, dismantling whole departments and decimating the Social Security Administration and Medicaid. Even though cult members rely on those services, sometimes for the sustenance of their very lives, they parrot the cult mantra that it’s all necessary in order to weed out waste fraud and abuse.
It’s all thoughtless and formulaic. It never occurs to them to wonder why Trump and Musk don’t just go after the waste, fraud and abuse alone. You don’t fix a corrupt system by firing everybody. You find out who’s corrupt and fire them.
But to suggest such a solution is blasphemy. Musk is the richest man in the world, the cult members say. He got that way because he knows what he’s doing, the cult members say. Who the hell are you?
Arguments against won’t be heard by the cult member. None of that matters. The cult member will follow the cult leader into suicide. Again, for reference see David Koresh, whose cult members eventually died in a fire rather than surrender to authorities. Or Jim Jones, whose members died by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid. Or Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate cult, whose male members agreed to be castrated, and whose members of both sexes eventually died all at once by suicide.
In the hypnotised minds of the cult members, the leader is the only source for the truth. Everybody else is lying. Intrinsic to any cult is the odd belief that millions of people are involved in a conspiracy to cover up the truth. Of course, the idea that millions of people are deliberately telling lies is preposterous. Such a secret could not be kept for five minutes, let alone for decades. But you will find in virtually every cult (and every conspiracy theory, for that matter) the need for a bête noire, the need for a secret and monolithic entity that tells nothing but lies.
Finally, a cult member won’t recognise they’re in a cult. They will turn it around and say we are in a cult. They will loudly proclaim that we were hypnotised by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who were going to ruin the economy and take away all our freedoms, paradoxically, exactly what Donald Trump is doing right now.
There’s a bonus when it comes to Trump cult members. Most cult members move about anonymously and blend into the landscape. Trump cult members, on the other hand, you can spot a mile away, with their red hats and garish costumes, their monster trucks and their outsized flags, their appalling grammar and out-of-shape bodies. In that way the Trump cult could be unique. To paraphrase Darth Vader, the Farce is strong in this one.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.