A cult is any group of people you disagree with. That is the definition of “cult” in The Devil’s Dictionary, a satirical 19th century work by Ambrose Bierce. The word “cult” is often used as an epithet. I remember in the 1980s when fundamentalist Christians used to say that punks and goths were cults. (We used to say the fundamentalists were a cult as well) But there are cults and then there are cults. High control groups that use deception for recruitment and social engineering techniques to manipulate the thoughts and behaviors of their members do exist. Heaven’s Gate, the Church of Scientology, the Hare Krishnas, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses all come to mind. Then there are those that say mind control doesn’t exist and these groups are just ordinary religions like the Methodists or Presbyterians. They just choose to worship in different ways. Yeah right. Try telling that to the ghosts of those who died in Jonestown.
By now we all know how much people hate our current president Donald Trump. What baffles the rest of us is how fanatical his followers are who believe everything he says, worship the toilet he shits in, think Melania’s face and tits are organic, and believe he is a messianic figure sent to save America from who know what. Immigrants? Communists? Space aliens? Whatever. The rest of us see him as an ordinary demagogue. A failed businessmen, a criminal, a pervert, and a bumbling Homer Simpson-type in the early onset stages of frontal lobe dementia. To us, his followers look and act like they are in a cult. Psychologist Steven Hassan has been studying cult psychology for several decades and has decided that MAGA and some followers of Dementia Don are, in fact, members of a cult. He lays out his case in The Cult of Trump. The question now is does Hassan succeed in proving his case?
Steven Hassan himself has an interesting story. He was once a high-ranking member of a cult, the Unification Church a.k.a. the Moonies. After being deprogrammed, he went on to study psychology and now works as a therapist helping ex-cult members, human trafficking victims, and domestic abuse survivors cope with their trauma and reorient to reality. His technique involves making his patients aware of the mechanics of brainwashing, mind control, and undue influence. He designed a metric called the BITE Model which is easy to use and can be applied to any social group to evaluate how authoritarian and controlling they are. By using BITE Model metrics, Hassan demonstrates how Trump, MAGA, and the current Republican party lean in the direction of an authoritarian mind control cult.
It all starts with the leader. Trump gets diagnosed as having a narcissistic personality disorder which is another name for the clinical, technical diagnosis of anti-social personality disorder. NPD was originally described by psychologist Eric Fromm who set out to prove that Hitler was mentally ill. NPD is commonplace among cult leaders and may actually be a common diagnosis for all of them. Incidentally, Trump’s father used to take him to a cult-like church called the Marble Collegiate Church led by Norman Vincent Peale. Although it was called a church, their teaching had nothing at all to do with Christianity and had everything to do with magical thinking and, some would say, methods of committing fraud. Hassan continues on with the biography of Trump, pointing out the factors that contributed to his NPD and the patterns that indicate he has been a cult leader in the making since childhood.
Then there are the followers in different degrees. The behaviors of advisors, business associates, cabinet members, family members, lobbyists, the right wing media, and other assorted entities with bad intentions are feeding into this. Hassan also analyzes the MAGA base and how they are manipulated by those in between them and Trump. He demonstrates the use of cult mind control techniques in the media and at Trump rallies. These include love bombing, black and white/false dichotomy thinking, scapegoating, phobia inducement, thought stopping phrases, and other rhetorical tricks. Hassan demonstrates how Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is used to disarm and soften up the audience. One example is how Trump will give a speech that inexplicably degenerates into nonsense. He starts talking about Hannibal Lecter or choosing whether he wants to be electrocuted or eaten by a shark. Left wing podcasters have made a big joke out of this and claim it is a symptom of mental illness. Hassan’s take is something darker. He claims it is an NLP technique meant to confuse people because when people are confused or scared they are more vulnerable and open to suggestion. It might be worth studying patterns of what Trump says after he spews gibberish to test Hassan’s theory.
Something else to watch for is the diminishing of individual identity in the MAGA cult. Cheering and chanting crowds at rallies can act to suppress individuality thereby merging each individual into a collective identity that is, if softened up and vulnerable enough, easily directed in thought and behavior by the person leading the crowd. Hassan identifies this as a form of trance. Red MAGA baseball caps are also used to erase a person’s individuality, submerging them into a visually recognizable group which they identify with through emotional attachment. Cults use uniforms in this way and that is why Hare Krishnas shave their heads and wear orange robes. That is why female Wahhabi Muslims wear full black hijab. That is why the Manson Family shaved their heads, drew X’s on their foreheads, and sat in a circle outside the courthouse while their leader was on trial. Notice that MAGA members wore bandages on their ears after the first attempt on Trump’s life during the 2024 campaign. When the group identity supercedes the individual identity, people are easy prey for mental manipulation.
So what about individuals who choose to go to Trump rallies and wear MAGA hats? Hassan would say that cult members choose to join cults, at least on a superficial level. Cults don’t directly control people’s minds; instead, the nudge them in the direction they want them to go in. Stage magic sleight of hand works the same way by nudging your attention towards what the magician wants us to see and away from what he doesn’t want us to see. Advertising is designed to control people by nudging them too by preying on their desires and insecurities. Cult leaders use the same mind control techniques that advertisers and propagandists do which should tell you something pretty scary about American society.
Hassan argues that cult members are actually mentally ill and can be diagnosed with a disassociative identity disorder. It is the same thing that causes people to stay in traumatic, abusive relationships. In colloquial terms it is called “battered wife syndrome”. Cult members, like victims of mental or physical abuse, disassociate by creating a false identity, thereby hiding their true self. This would explain why some cults like est and Rajneeshpuram physically, verbally, and sexually abuse new recruits as part of the indoctrination process. But a cult doesn’t need to go to such extremes to make this disassociation happen; it can be done through things like hazing rituals, scapegoating, ad hominem attacks, conspiracy theories, hypnosis, and repetitive fear mongering. Fear of shunning works this way too. This is also why information control is such a big part of indoctrination. A cult leader doesn’t want you listening to opposing points of view, using a closed feedback loop to regulate what you think, believe, and feel. This is what Trump is doing when he tells you not to listen to the fake news of the mainstream media. This is what internet algorithms are programmed to do in order to create information silos. Trump once said at a rally, “Don’t believe what you see or hear. Believe what I say.” He flat out admitted in public that his intention is to control people’ssceptions of reality.
Hassan also says a lot about cults at the macro level of society. There is a lot of disagreement about cults and whether or not they actually exist. For the sake of understanding Hassan’s argument we have to accept his definition of a cult as a group following an authoritarian leader who uses undue influence to manipulate their follows and indoctrinate them into believing the leader holds the ultimate truth. Many cults are religious but also many aren’t. They can be political like the Symbionese Liberation Army or Lyndon LaRouche. They can be business-oriented like Mass Level Market Schemes, pyramid schemes, Amway, or Koch Industries. They can be therapeutic like est, Synanon, or Scientology. They can also be political at the national level like Saudi Arabia, North Korea, the Soviet Union, or Hitler’s Germany. Hassan uses his metric to identify MAGA and the Trump movement as a personality cult with elements of religious, business, and political cults mixed in. The consolidation of those institutional elements is also a standard, traditional definition of political fascism.
Aside from the MAGA rank and file, the Trump movement acts as an umbrella group that unites several cults and cult-like groups under one banner. Hassan identifies several of these groups as having direct ties to Trump. They include well-known cults like the Moonies, Scientology, and Falun Gong. Fundamentalist Christian cults like the Pentecostals, New Apostolic Reformationists/Dominionists, and Opus Dei who have two Trump appointed members on the Supreme Court and one cabinet member named Bill Bar who is Trump’s ex-Attorney General. The Heritage Foundation, who designed Project 2025, literally wants to turn America into a white Christian nationalist dictatorship, a Christian version of Saudi Arabia or Iran. White supremacist and neo-Nazi groups are also all in with the Trump cult as are some sects of Ultraorthodox Jews. Ayn Rand libertarian groups are mentioned as well as paramilitary and militia brownshirt groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Boogaloo Bois. Brief mentioln is made of Qanon. Through not mentioned in this book, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who was also a CIA operative in charge of PSYOPS, is an associate of the Montana new age doomsday cult the Church Universal Triumphant.
Hassan’s method is to identify techniques of cult mind control, show how they are used by other cults, and then show how they are used by Trump and his cohorts. This serves two functions: one is to make it easy to show MAGA members how they are falling into the same patterns as cult members always have and the other is to raise awareness among non-cult members about manipulation techniques on the principle that such awareness makes it more difficult for a person to have their mind controlled. Afer all, most cult members don’t know they are in a cult. They think they are following the truth when in fact they are being tricked into following a lie. And not just any lie, but one that can waste their lives and lead to devastation and destruction.
So does Steven Hassan succeed in proving MAGA is a cult? Yes he provides enough plausible evidence to support that claim but it is qualified with Hassan’s own admissions that MAGA is not quite as authoritarian as the Moonies or Scientology and also that not everybody who voted for Trump or supports him in any way is a member of a cult. The further away from Trump you are, physically or psychologically, the less you are under his spell.
But not all is well with this book. None of it is based on primary research. A lot of the evidence supporting the analysis of Trump’s personality is anecdotal and taken from the memoirs of Omorosa Manigault Newman and Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of The Art Of the Deal. He never reports any information from primary sources, asdide from his experience in the Moonies, like MAGA members or ex-members. He would have benefited from providing a case study or two to demonstrate how the mind control process works. Hassan does identify clear patterns of similarity between Trump and MAGA in comparison to other dictatorships and cults, but he doesn’t depend on large data sets to prove his point. Hassan goes wide but not so deep.
Also a lot of these mind control techniques are common logical fallacies familiar to anyone who knows about logic or rhetoric. He could have emphasized that while most people mistakenly use logical fallacies due to a lack of self awareness, cult leaders, advertisers, propagandists, politicians, and whatever manipulative jerk you dated during high school deliberately craft them and exaggerate them because they work so effectively at guiding people’s emotions and perceptions. Of course his intention is to reach a general audience, not a committee of scholars and researchers, so he can be forgiven for writing an overly simplified book. And since literacy and IQ levels have dropped sharply since the cell phone came on the market (I like to call it a DLD or Digital Lobotomy Device), you can’t expect this to be an intellectually rigorous study considering the message is being pitched to ordinary mooks on the street, most of which never bother reading a book anyways. This book is also a bit dated since it was written during the first half of Trump’s first term in office. Hassan’s message obviously didn’t get through seeing as Toddler Trump won again in 2024. The American democratic republic has ended. The idiocracy is upon us.
In closing, I’ll say that cult leaders and dictators are a lot like Mickey Mouse in the Walt Disney movie Fantasia. Mickey Mouse dons a wizard’s costume and casts a spell that makes a broom replicate itself an infinite number of times over. Then he commands the cloned brooms to do his menial tasks for him. This is what cult leaders think of their followers. They erase their individuality and make them do their shitwork while taking their money and living it up in places like Mar a Lago and Epstein Island. Cult leaders are only after three things: sex, money, and power. That’s what Trump wants and he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you or anybody else but himself. But remember that in Fantasia Mickey Mouse’s brooms go out of control and after they are destroyed he is nothing but an ordinary mouse. Not a wizard. Just a mouse. Trump is just a dumb old man with a stupid looking haircut. He’s getting weaker by the day. Cults don’t last forever. Dementia Don will die soon. MAGA won’t be around much longer. I am seriously worried about what state the world will be in when this is all over though. It’s hard to imagine we’re on the road to anything good.
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