Tag: trump cult
Why The Trump Cult Is So Appealing To Fundamentalists

Why The Trump Cult Is So Appealing To Fundamentalists

Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is fundamentalist at its core—with fundamentalism being understood as a psychological rather than a religious concept. Pretty much every large-scale public movement, secular or sacred, has its share of extremists, and as the religious columnist Paul Prather has argued: “remove the labels, close your eyes and quickly the fundamentalists in one group start sounding uncannily like the fundamentalists in all other groups, as if they were reading from the same script.”

It's another word for fanatic.

Most Trumpists call themselves “conservative,” which used to signify a belief in limited government, low taxes, free trade and freedom of conscience, but which under Trump signals tribal loyalty and revenge. This explains what some see as the central paradox of the MAGA movement, that a congenital braggart who pretty much embodies what Christianity has traditionally called the Seven Deadly Sins—greed, lust, envy, sloth, gluttony, pride and wrath—has come to seem the embodiment of faith for millions of Republican evangelicals.

Trump spent Christmas Day typing up and posting laments and threats in ALL CAPS on his Truth Social website, targeting “JOE BIDEN’S MISFITS & THUGS, LIKE DERANGED JACK SMITH.” They’re “COMING AFTER ME,” he warned “AT LEVELS OF PERSECUTION NEVER SEEN BEFORE IN OUR COUNTRY???...looking to destroy our once great USA. MAY THEY ROT IN HELL. AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS!”

A bit lacking in the spirit of the holiday, some would say.

Not to mention he's the world's biggest crybaby

But they would be wrong, the MAGA faithful would insist. George Orwell captured the essence of the whiny strongman in reviewing the British edition of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf way back in 1940, after the German dictator had driven Germany to war, but before it was clear that he had doomed his country to catastrophe.

Hitler, Orwell wrote, "knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, [and] short working-hours …they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades."

Orwell understood Fascism’s appeal to an aggrieved population. While European and North American democracies, he wrote, told people, in effect, that “'I offer you a good time,' Hitler has said to them, 'I offer you struggle, danger, and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."

Orwell also understood the personal psychology of the crybaby conqueror: “The initial, personal cause of [Hitler’s] grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.”

Sound like anybody we know?

That said, I do believe Trump when he says he never read Mein Kampf. Too long, too many big words. Donald Trump never learned anything from a book. He stole his whole act from 1950s professional wrestlers at Sunnyside Gardens in Queens—specifically from Dr. Jerry Graham, who swaggered around boasting that “I have the body men fear and women adore.”

The hairstyle too, a bleach blonde pompadour that taught a generation of wrestling fans how a “heel” behaved—that is, basically like a cartoon Nazi. The man was a masterful showman who aroused thousands to frenzy with balsa wood chairs and fake blood capsules. He was as fat as Trump too, although there was muscle under the lard.

Likewise, Donald Trump needed no books to absorb the lesson that non-white immigrants are “vermin” poisoning the nation’s blood, or that (white) people in Minnesota, as he assured an audience there the other day, are genetically superior. He learned those things at his slumlord father’s knee. Fred Trump was arrested at a Manhattan Ku Klux Klan rally some years before The Donald was born. This business about racehorse genes is straight KKK dogma. It's always appealed to people who fear outsiders.

But back to the great man’s hypnotized fanbase. Paul Prather credits David French with defining fundamentalism’s essential nature. He argues that whether religious or political, all “fundamentalist cultures exhibit three traits: certainty, ferocity, and solidarity. He says certainty is the key to the other two traits.”

“The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt,” French has written. “In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement. To fundamentalists, their opponents aren’t just wrong but evil. Critics are derided as weak or cowards or grifters. Only a grave moral defect can explain the failure to agree.”

Doubters should see this column’s e-mail feed, although I must say the Trumpist faction has been relatively restrained of late. Maybe they’ve given up on me, or maybe reality has begun to creep in at the edges.

One way or another, fundamentalist cults always implode; often violently, but sometimes not.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

'We're Both White Americans': SNL's Trump Compares Himself To Jesus (Again)

'We're Both White Americans': SNL's Trump Compares Himself To Jesus (Again)

“A famous, wonderful man arrested for no reason at all,” said SNL's fake Trump — played by cast member James Austin Johnson — during the opening of this week's edition of Saturday Night Live.

Standing in front of a re-enactment of the Last Supper, fake Trump added, “If you haven’t put it together folks, I’m comparing myself to Jesus. Again. And what better time than on his birthday, Easter? ...We’re both very tall, very popular, and both, frankly, white Americans."

In a shout-out to the "stand back and stand by" crowd, SNL's Trump continued, “A lot of his followers got in big, big trouble, just like mine. All because I told them exactly what Jesus would have said: 'Get very violent and start a war.'"

“Because I’m a self-made billionaire and Christ was—let’s call it what it is—a nepo baby. I mean, his dad was God. It’s pretty easy to start a religion when your daddy’s God.”SNL's Trump also attacked Ron DeSantis.

“And I’ve even got my very own Judas: Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis came to me with tears in his eyes. He said, ‘Help me, Mr. Trump. I’m going to lose my election.’ So I very generously pretended to like him. And then he did a Judas and now he can’t even get the gays out of Disney World. It’s an awful shame.”

Watch the full segment below:


MAGA Isn't Just A Cult -- It Has Become A Murder Cult

MAGA Isn't Just A Cult -- It Has Become A Murder Cult

The aftermath of the August 8, 2022 search of the Mar-a-Lago club, former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, isn’t the first showdown between the FBI and a cult leader.

The Following, a 2013 Fox Pictures series, played out in similar fashion. Three seasons was enough for the producers and it’s been nine years since our introduction to Joe Carroll, English professor-novelist-serial killer, so there’s a spoiler risk -- but not enough to prevent the comparison.

Carroll (played by actor James Purefoy) breaks out of prison and meets up with his “followers” — so named because they follow him and also stalk one of Carroll’s enemies. They're basically, disaffected outsiders, obsessed fans who are willing to commit any act of violence to clear Carroll’s path - which seems directed toward reuniting with his ex-wife, Claire Matthews (played by actress Natalie Zea) and his young son — as well as establishing dominion over everyone else and indoctrinating them into his church of latter-day psychos and first-degree homicide.

After two episodes, the audience’s trust in introduced characters is limited because no one knows if the new face is a member of the cult or not. Local sheriffs, housewives, nurses, medical students, correction officers, ex-military have all enrolled in Carroll’s Following.

The man who caught Carroll the first time, retired FBI Agent Ryan Harding (played by Kevin Bacon), comes out of retirement to hunt Carroll again, somewhat ineffectively since the first season needs to last 15 episodes.

The compelling part of the show is the pre-planned nature of these attacks. The Following is organized; they wait for signals from Carroll and execute his designs pretty deftly.

His appellate lawyer, whose fingers have been cut off to persuade her to represent Carroll again, reads a poem in a press conference to incite the abduction of his wife.

In another scene, one Follower raises both of his arms and his colleagues cut the lights and start slitting people’s throats.

When Carroll’s ex, Claire, won’t engage with him, his acolytes start killing other women with the same name. One gets pushed out a high rise window. Another one gets spear gunned in her stomach in a diner booth.

Murder cultists work in concert to protect Carroll from the FBI and impress him with their slaughters, but as the show reveals some characters’ backstories, the audience learns that most have been killing all along; no one ever apprehended them. Their credo is: “In death there is life. In death there is love. In death there is everything.”

I watched it during my last year in prison and all the violence — the setting of unsuspecting people on fire, the slicing of security guards’ livers, the gouging of eyes — scared me more than usual. All I could think was: A few women in here don’t need any new ideas.

Since 2016, I’ve flashed back to various episodes. It’s often said that Trump supporters are a cult. That label needs to leap forward to reflect reality. MAGA is now a murder cult. It seems like no one’s come out and said this yet. There’s no firm definition of a murder cult. The phrase seems just to be a cult qualifier. The difference between a murder cult and a regular cult is their daily activities; murder cultists kill people while others work or chant or pray or study or get sexually abused by their leaders.

U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) came the closest to calling Trumpism what it is when she compared Trump to Jim Jones, the cult leader who led the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana. Speier would know: she was shot five times when she traveled in a congressional delegation to investigate Jonestown. She made the comparison during an appearance on Brian Selter’s Reliable Sources show on CNN last August.

The only difference between Jim Jones and Donald Trump is the fact that we now have social media, so all these people can find themselves in ways that they couldn’t find themselves before … both of them merchants of deceit,” Speier said.

A writer for The Federalist freaked out and accused Spier of defaming Trump in a 2021 article titled “CNN’s Brian Stelter Lets Congresswoman Compare Trump To Murder Cult Leader." Madeline Osburn’s indignant rejoinder is the first and only instance of putting Trump and ‘murder cult’ in the same sentence. She accurately pointed out that “Trump did not lead his supporters to feed 287 children a potion of Kool-Aid and cyanide, leaving them foaming at the mouth, convulsing, and then dead.” But Trump led his supporters to do other things to kill people, or at least die trying.

One Trumper is a literal murder cultist. “Blacks for Trump” founder Maurice Symonette, a.k.a. “Michael the Black Man,” the Black man positioned behind Trump at his rallies, was in a real-life murder cult following a man named Hulon Mitchell, Jr. who called himself Yahweh Ben Yahweh. Interestingly, Mitchell a.k.a. Yahweh was also a hotelier and real estate developer and lived in Florida. He exhorted his followers to slay at least 14 people, “white devils,” who were usually homeless people, unlucky well before they ran across one of Yahweh Ben Yahweh’s dispatched killers. There’s no allegation that Symonette was involved in any of the attacks.

In terms of murder, there’s the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol that ended six lives. And MAGA megafan Cesar Sayoc and his pipe bombs; luckily, no one died. The bombs planted at Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee could have taken out thousands of employees. One Trump supporter tried to cut the throat of a six year old Asian boy in a Texas Costco. A Penn State student threatened to put a bullet in an Indian student. Three men in Kansas plotted to bomb a building that housed many Somalis.

And there’s “Hang Mike Pence.” Because, at least on January 6, 2021, in Pence’s anticipated assassination, there was everything.

These are just a few examples. I suspect the death count from bloodthirsty Trump supporters was supposed to be higher. They’re not as competent as the Followers who have a writing room in West Hollywood to tie up the ends of their stories.

After the search of Mar-A-Lago, violent rhetoric surged again online. It could be tough talk or it could be terrorism, not to defend Trump but to indulge the violent, homicidal nature of some of his supporters.

About halfway through the first season, Claire asks her Follower, Charlie Mead (played by Tom Lipinski): "What is Joe doing? Why do you listen to him? What is this all about?”

“He’s teaching me to feel my life,” Charlie says.

It isn’t about the Deep State. It isn’t about stopping another witch hunt. It isn’t because of the search warrant executed at Mar-A-Lago. This is only about white supremacy because that it’s a simple way to identify targets for violence. How many of the Trump cultists are just murderers who found their justification in — and coalesced around —Donald J. Trump?


Chandra Bozelko did time in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent, and she later established a blog under the same name that earned several professional awards. Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.

​Graph Shows GOP Is A Death Cult That's Killing Off Its Base

​Graph Shows GOP Is A Death Cult That's Killing Off Its Base

As the Supreme Court reexamines the merits of Roe v Wade, it's incredibly ironic to see how the Republican Party still considers itself pro-life. The party's seemingly bizarre hostility towards single mothers, the working poor, and same-sex couples already totally invalidates their vociferous "pro-life" position. But once you factor in the pandemic, the party suddenly becomes a death cult spiraling out of control in its lust for anti-science misinformation and daft conspiracies. Republicans seem keen on espousing anything that opposes President Biden and Democrats, even if it proves deadly to their own≥

The notion that the GOP has become a death cult is easily supported by the graph below:

Image via Independent Media Institute


The graph shows a higher incidence of death among Republicans in the 2020 Presidential Election. But things look even bleaker when broken down by state.

States that voted for Donald Trump in 2020 have higher COVID-19 death rates than those that went for President Biden. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the average death rate from state to state was about the same along party lines before vaccines were available. But since Feb. 1, states that went for Trump averaged 116 coronavirus deaths per 100,000 people, which is 52% higher than the average of 77 deaths per 100,000 people in Biden states. Not surprisingly, Oklahoma, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky and West Virginia--all won by Trump--had the worse per capita covid death rates.

What Does This All Mean And Why Would Republicans Want To Kill Off Their Base?

Even though nothing in this seemingly upside-down universe and toxic political landscape seems far-fetched or implausible anymore, it's difficult to fathom the Republican National Committee endorsing killing off its very own voting base as part of its 2022 midterms strategy. Complicating matters, however, and making all of this information even more difficult to digest is the fact that a large contingent of Trump supporters refuse the vaccine despite the fact that the former president is fully vaxxed and encourages his supporters to do so. In fact, former President Trump was just booed by supporters at an event with former Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly. So is this a mystery wrapped in an enigma?

Wilful ignorance, discrediting sound and unbiased science, and the complete and utter worship of misinformation were all hallmarks of the Trump Administration. With every unhinged, conspiracy-driven tweet and fact-free egotastic rally, former President Trump made wearing ignorance with pride as fashionable as a silly red hat. After all, it was Trump who claimed the worsening of the virus was a "fake news media conspiracy", ignored and discredited the science while promoting unproven therapies (bleach, anyone?), mocked mask-wearing, and encouraged his supporters to violate lockdowns from the very beginning. Trump even got covid himself, unsurprisingly.

In short, it's really no wonder that all the recklessness, loony conspiracies, and willingness to politicize a virus that cares nothing about party affiliation resulted in his sheeplike adherents dying off at levels far higher than Democrats.