The Cult of Trump

The most important thing to know about Donald Trump is this.

He’s a cult leader.

There is nothing unAmerican about that. America has been the home to cults since its founding. The first half of the 19^th century was filled with them. The Mormon Church is just one example, but there are many others.

Don’t throw your magic underwear at me for writing that. Most churches begin as cults. Their founders claim to have “special knowledge” and cult leaders pass it to the congregation. The early members gain a special status, because they have the special knowledge. It’s something all western religions have in common. We all want to be the chosen people, because it means that others weren’t chosen, and you’re automatically better than they are.

Trump wasn’t the first to bring this to American politics. Most of our biggest Presidents had cult-like followings, who continued believing as they did for decades after their passing. When I first started writing about politics regularly, in 2006, I described our political generations based on these leaders. Jefferson. Jackson. Lincoln. Teddy Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt. Nixon. Obama.

But you don’t have to be a raving success at politics to get a cult following. George Wallace was a cult political figure. I lived through that time and know it to be a fact. Democrats turned John F. Kennedy into a cult figure, first through his brothers, then his family and descendants. They put whatever their current beliefs were onto the enigmatic assassination victim. Would he have left Vietnam? Was he really a race man? Would he have expanded social programs? We’ll never know.

Republicans were exhausting their Cult of Reagan when Trump came along and made his personal cult the center of their politics.

What’s important about a cult leader is that he doesn’t have to speak the truth. He is above the truth. He is beyond the truth. He is the truth, which means his lies are thus truth.

These contradictions are why Americans have always tried to separate church and state. Giving someone with the power to direct a cult temporal power is supremely dangerous. It feels foreign.

Trump acolytes will read back what I’ve just written and may claim “Democrats did it first,” making Kennedy a cult figure. But there is a difference between a cult founder and a cult leader. Simon Peter wasn’t Jesus. Brigham Young wasn’t Joseph Smith. Edward Kennedy wasn’t John.

This is the special danger in Trump. He is both the founder and the leader. It’s a bit like L. Ron Hubbard, who began Scientology as a side-hustle. He was a magazine editor and book publisher, specializing in science fiction. That’s why Scientology reads as a sci-fi story. Personally, I prefer Asimov. If a writer is doing something other than writing, he or she is wasting their time.

It’s easy to see the cult-like hold Trump has over his most ardent followers. They wear the hats the way earnest Muslim women wear niqab, or the way Catholic nuns when I was a child wore their habits. Costume becomes identity, even if you’re just going shirtless, with your fat belly hanging out, to let the world know you love Sheffield Wednesday.

In a recent town hall by Justin Amash, a Republican conservative who has renounced Trump and thus been given the shunning and apostasy given all those who leave “the way,” his critics came complete with red hats and Trumpist talking points. They issued those talking points as though reciting Holy Writ, and if Trump reversed himself on any point tomorrow, they’d recite those talking points in the same way.

In this way Trump and his cult are impervious to truth. You can’t argue with them. You’d might as well try converting an observant Jew to the glories of bacon.

But if you can’t beat the cult leader through argument, what else is available?

Democracy has many tools.

For one thing, you don’t have to listen to them. You don’t have to do business with them. You’re free to ignore them as you would a relative demanding money to buy liquor or any other drug. Trust in the truth that they will eventually hit bottom. Make their refusal to engage cost them. Isolate them.

This isn’t true for all the 40% of America that claims to like Trump. Most have other reasons. Trump’s coalition consists of militarists, nihilists, financial oligarchs and religious zealots, as well as others who follow such ideologies. When they see the castle around them crumbling, each of these groups will drift away, and we’ll wonder what the trouble was.

The second thing we can all do is stand up for truth. Stand up for science. Stand up for history. Stand up for our Constitution, even if you’d like some amendments to assure this doesn’t happen again. Remember what Lincoln said in 1838, the Lyceum speech, given after the lynching of a black man in St. Louis, known best for the line “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

“Let those materials be molded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws: and, that we improved to the last; that we remained free to the last; that we revered his name to the last; that, during his long sleep, we permitted no hostile foot to pass over or desecrate his resting place; shall be that which to learn the last Trump shall awaken our WASHINGTON.”

Lincoln, then only 29, was referring at the end to the last trumpet heralding the end of the world, invoking Washington and the rest of the Founders who in 1838 held the place our Greatest Generation does today.

But let this be the last Trump. Let truth overwhelm him, and let it then be our “right, our duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for our future security.” 

When this evil is over, there will remain much work to do in order to make our Union more perfect. That will be the work of my children’s generation, and I’m sorry to have to leave it to them. But we all have our burdens to bear, our heresies to fight. This was true in 1838 and 1865. It was true in 1941 and 1963.

It remains true today.