The Cult of Trump

by Steven Hassan

  Perhaps most pertinent are my many colleagues in the field of cult studies—researchers, academics, and practitioners such as Robert Jay Lifton, Philip Zimbardo, Jon Atack, Stephen Kent, Steve Eichel, Janja Lalich, Alan Scheflin, Dennis Tourish, Alexandra Stein, Dan Shaw, and others—who see, all too clearly, the cultlike aspects of the Trump presidency.

  In this book, I will show how Trump employs many of the same techniques as prominent cult leaders, and displays many of the same personality traits. He has persuaded millions of people to support, believe, and even adore him by exerting control in four overlapping areas: Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion (BITE). I will describe how cult leaders exert control in each of these areas and then show how Trump and his adherents have exploited them to their own ends.

  They may not approach people on street corners like members of the Moon cult (often referred to as Moonies) did, but Trump and his supporters are using social and mainstream media to gain access to followers in ways Moon never could. Through his barrage of daily tweets, Trump sows confusion and distorts reality, and has ultimately called into question the foundations of national institutions. Questioning government, politicians, and the media are all signs of a healthy democracy, one that values free and critical thinking. Trump’s exhortations do the opposite. By promoting the idea of “fake news” and calling journalists who disagree with him “enemies of the people,” he is closing his followers’ minds to disconfirming evidence and arguments. He sounds to me like notorious cult leader Jim Jones, who, as he was taking his last breaths, told his followers at Jonestown that it was all “the media’s fault—don’t believe them.”

  Over the years, I’ve received thousands of calls, emails, and letters from people who have lost loved ones to a destructive group or relationship. Many describe how their loved one has undergone a radical personality change. They are not the loving son, daughter, parent, or friend they once knew. They hold beliefs that are diametrically opposed to the values they once held and are not willing to discuss issues and look at facts. A similar thing appears to be happening to the nation and to individual families and relationships, many of which have been broken by the recent presidential election. I have known critics as well as supporters of Trump who are rigidly closed-minded to any opposing evidence or information. I encourage them to think analytically and consciously and not on “automatic pilot.”

  What I’ve learned in working with such people is that attacking a person’s beliefs is doomed to fail. When I first began confronting this reality, I realized I had to develop a process to help people recover their individual faculties and, ultimately, their true, or authentic, selves. I found that to reach that authentic self, I needed to encourage a positive, warm relationship between cult members and families—essentially, to build trust and rapport—while raising essential questions for cult members to consider. My goal in this book is to educate and inspire people to regain their capacity for critical thinking and to free their own minds. By presenting this approach, and showing how it applies to the current situation, my hope is that it might be used to heal fractured families, fractured relationships, and a fractured nation.

  CHAPTER ONE What Is a Cult?

  Few political scenes have been as strange and unsettling as Donald Trump’s first cabinet meeting, which took place six months into his tenure. It was televised, though there seemed to be no real agenda. The camera panned around the room as members of the president’s cabinet, one by one, praised Trump.

  “We thank you for the opportunity and the blessing to serve your agenda,” said then chief of staff Reince Priebus. Agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue, just back from a trip to Mississippi, said, “They love you there, Mr. President.” Outdoing the previous devotional, Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, told Trump that it was a “great honor traveling with you around the country for the last year, and an even greater honor to be here serving on your cabinet.” Labor secretary Alexander Acosta also claimed to be “privileged and honored,” echoing words used earlier by Vice President Mike Pence, who set the tone for what amounted to a spectacle of love and flattery.

  It was stunning. The country had already witnessed the almost daily onslaught of bizarre and contradictory statements and behavior coming from the Trump White House, but this should have been different. Wasn’t the cabinet supposed to give the president unadulterated, honest advice for running the country, not praise him or stroke his ego? It seemed that the video cameras had been allowed into the room for the sole purpose of publicizing the fawning display. As the members carried on their praise, Trump smiled, almost gleefully, nodding vigorously. He interrupted the adulation just long enough to offer his own somewhat contradictory self-praise.

  “I will say that never has there been a president, with a few exceptions—in the case of FDR, he had a major depression to handle—who’s passed more legislation, who’s done more things than what we’ve done.”

  Some forty years earlier, I was seated in a closed room with another narcissistic leader, Sun Myung Moon—the self-ordained reverend and leader of the Unification Church, popularly known as the Moonies—along with a number of his most devoted followers. I was only twenty years old but was being groomed for a leadership role. All of us in the room understood how blessed we were to be in Moon’s presence. We adored him as the greatest man who ever lived. If we had doubts or criticisms, we were taught to block, or “thought stop,” them. If we dared disagree or point out inconsistencies, we would be kicked out. It seemed the only difference was that the Moon meetings always began with us bowing and even kneeling with our heads to the floor. (Trump would narrow the grandiosity gap when he accused Democrats of treason for not clapping during his first State of the Union address.)

  Did Trump’s cabinet members believe what they were saying? Did they know what they were getting into when they agreed to serve? I did not knowingly join the Moon cult. I was nineteen, newly split from my girlfriend, and was sitting in the Queens College student union cafeteria when I was approached by three attractive women—students, or so they said. The women turned out to be members of a front group for Moon’s Unification Church. They invited me to dinner that evening, and over the following weeks, I experienced the full arsenal of influence techniques. I cut off connection with my family and friends—and my previous life and self—and was thrown into recruiting and indoctrinating others. Before I knew it, I was rising rapidly through the Moonie ranks. I was already a fanatical follower of Moon when I was invited into his inner sanctum, though the proximity to power was a heady incentive to do even more for him.

  Trump’s appointees may not have been passionate followers when they had that first televised meeting with Trump, but simply being invited to join the cabinet, where they might exercise real power, already tied them to Trump. To my eyes, a huge amount of social and psychological manipulation was happening inside that meeting room. Not all of it came from Trump. Some of it came from the cabinet members themselves who felt compelled to outdo one another in their praise—and it is often true that cult members compete with and indoctrinate one another.

  But most of the pressure did come from Trump. How could it be otherwise when the president equates power with fear? Mnuchin, Acosta, and the others had already seen, as had the world, what happens to those who “betray” Trump—the shunning, bullying, baiting, and outright expulsion. They had seen Trump unleash the full fury of his anger on one of his earliest and most devoted followers, then attorney general Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself from the FBI investigation into possible collusion with Russia during Trump’s presidential campaign. They had seen Trump fire the head of the FBI, James Comey, for reportedly refusing to stop that same investigation.

  The parallels between Trump and Moon—and also other cult leaders—extend far beyond that cabinet meeting, as we will see. But simply using the word “cult” conjures up all kinds of images in people’s minds, which raises the central question: what is a cult?

  Say the word and most
people usually think of a religious group. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious.” According to Google, it is “a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.” Some expand the definition beyond religion to a “small or narrow circle of persons united by devotion or allegiance to some artistic or intellectual program, tendency, or figure.” In fact, most cults do tend to revolve around a central figure—the leader. Cult leaders often appear to be devoted to, and even embody, the religion or ideology practiced by their group. In my experience, cult leaders are often motivated by three things: power, money, and sex—in that order. It is estimated that there are now more than five thousand destructive cults operating in the United States, of varying size, directly—and unduly—influencing millions of people.

  THE STUDY OF BRAINWASHING

  Though cults have been around for centuries, it was during the second half of the twentieth century that they were approached in a systematic fashion. The former air force and Yale psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton was one of the first to study how authoritarian leaders and regimes, such as those experienced in a cult, exert their power. Lifton spent much of the 1950s studying the experiences of political prisoners in China and American soldiers held as prisoners during the Korean War. He came to understand that under conditions of totalitarianism, the human mind can be systematically broken down and remade to believe the exact opposite of what it once did. In his seminal 1961 work, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, Lifton identified eight criteria of what he called “thought reform,” popularly known as “brainwashing” (a term coined in the early 1950s by the intelligence agent and writer Edward Hunter to describe how the Chinese communist army was turning people into followers). The Trump parallels are striking:

  1. Milieu control. The leader, or inner circle, has complete control of information—how and where it is communicated, disseminated, and consumed, resulting in nearly complete isolation from the outside world. People learn to trust only the publications and news that come from the group itself. (The rest is “fake,” in Trump parlance.) Eventually, people internalize the group mindset, becoming their own “mental police.”

  2. Mystical manipulation. Group and individual experiences are contrived, engineered, and even staged in a way that makes them seem spontaneous and even supernatural or divine. A leader may be told something about a new member and then present that knowledge to the new recruit as if they had somehow divined it. Witnessing such things, the member believes that there are mystical forces at work.

  3. Demand for purity. Viewing the world in simple binary terms, as “black versus white,” “good versus evil,” members are told that they must strive for perfection—no messy gray zones. They are set impossible standards of performance, resulting in feelings of guilt and shame. No matter how hard a person tries, they always fall short, feel bad, and work even harder. (Out of twenty-four cabinet posts, at least forty-six appointees have been fired or resigned since Trump’s inauguration, a record for the presidency.1)

  4. Confession. Personal boundaries are broken down and destroyed. Every thought, feeling, or action—past or present—that does not conform to the group’s rules should be shared or confessed, either publicly or to a personal monitor. Nor is the information forgiven or forgotten. Rather, it can be used by the leader or group to control members whenever the person needs to be put in line. (Trump appears to have an elephant’s memory for perceived betrayals.)

  5. Sacred science. Group ideology or doctrine is considered to be absolutely, scientifically, and morally true—no room for questions or alternative viewpoints. The leader, often seen as a spokesperson for God, is above any criticism. (Trump, who denies the scientific evidence of climate change and regularly ignores and even denigrates science, could be said to put his own spin on this, promoting a kind of “sacred anti-science.”)

  6. Loading the language. Members learn a new vocabulary that is designed to constrict their thinking into absolute, black-and-white, thought-stopping clichés that conform to group ideology. (“Lock her up” and “Build the Wall” are Trumpian examples. Even his put-downs and nicknames—Crooked Hillary, Pocahontas for Elizabeth Warren—function to block other thoughts. Terms like “deep state” and “globalist” also act as triggers. They rouse emotion and direct attention.)

  7. Doctrine over person. Group ideology is privileged far above a member’s experience, conscience, and integrity. If a member doubts or has critical thoughts about those beliefs, it is due to their own shortcomings.

  8. Dispensing of existence. Only those who belong to the group have the right to exist. All ex-members and critics or dissidents do not. This is perhaps the most defining and potentially the most dangerous of all of Lifton’s criteria. Taken to an extreme, which it has been by some cult groups, it can lead to murderous and even genocidal actions. Trump doesn’t go that far, but some have argued that his racist tweets—against Muslims, Mexicans, and immigrants—may have fueled hate crimes, such as the killing of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville and eleven people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, to name just a few. The FBI has reported that hate crimes went up 17 percent in 2017 alone, continuing a three-year rise.2

  THE MYSTERY OF MIND CONTROL

  In addition to Lifton, researchers such as army psychologist Margaret Singer, psychologist Edgar Schein, and military psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West had been studying American POWs held captive by Korean and Chinese communists and were making contributions to understanding coercive persuasion and cults. Singer would later write a book, Cults in Our Midst, with cult expert Janja Lalich, identifying six conditions for exerting undue influence on a person.

  Keep them unaware of what is happening and how they are being changed one step at a time.

  Control their social and/or physical environment, especially time.

  Systematically create a sense of personal powerlessness.

  Implement a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences that inhibits behavior that might reflect the person’s former social identity.

  Implement a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences that promotes learning the group’s ideology or belief system and group-approved behaviors.

  Put forth a closed system of logic and an authoritarian structure that permits no feedback and cannot be modified except by the leaders.

  Whatever term you wish to use—mind control, thought reform, brainwashing—it is ultimately a process that disrupts an individual’s ability to make independent decisions from within their own identity.

  After World War II, American intelligence agencies began to aggressively engage in mind control research. The CIA performed drug, electroshock, and hypnosis experiments on human subjects in order to develop new ways of extracting information and confessions from Soviet spies and other captives, largely, they claimed, in response to the alleged use of mind control techniques on U.S. prisoners during the Korean War. This program, code-named MK-ULTRA, began in 1953 and continued for nearly twenty years, during which time fear of communism was reaching new heights.

  Meanwhile, branches of the military—including the newly formed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was created in 1958 in response to the Soviet launching of Sputnik 1—began funding the work of social psychologists at major universities, as well as in branches of the armed forces. Two of these military-funded projects came to fruition in the early 1970s, each showing in a different way how easily people can be influenced by authoritarian settings. Stanley Milgram, working at Yale University, conducted experiments showing that subjects could be induced to administer ever more powerful and painful electric shocks to what they thought were innocent subjects when directed by an authority figure. Meanwhile, Philip Zimbardo, in his famous Stanford Prison Experiment, showed how easily and rapidly subjects—in this case, college students who were randomly assigned to play the part of either prisoner or guard—would take on social r
oles, exhibiting either submissive or authoritarian behaviors, sometimes in quite extreme fashion. After six days, Zimbardo had to stop what was to be a two-week experiment.

  Spurred in part by this and other new research, destructive groups were developing ever more sophisticated techniques. During the late 1960s, the Human Potential Movement in psychology began to experiment with approaches that might enhance people’s lives. One of these was a form of group therapy known as sensitivity training. It started with good intentions—to help people out of debilitating mental ruts. People were encouraged to publicly speak about their most intimate experiences. One technique widely popular at the time was the “hot seat,” which was first used by the drug rehabilitation cult of Charles Dederich, called Synanon. Someone would sit in the center of a circle while other members confronted the person with what they considered to be his or her shortcomings or problems. Without the supervision of an experienced therapist—and sometimes even with it—such a technique opened up considerable possibilities for abuse. Today the hot seat is used by some destructive cults to demean and control their members.

  Another development was the popularization of hypnosis. Originally this set of approaches for reaching the subconscious mind was used only on willing participants, many of whom reported positive experiences. Eventually hypnotic techniques percolated out into the general culture, where they became available for anyone to use and abuse. Unscrupulous con artists began using them to make money off unsuspecting subjects while would-be cult leaders used them to gain power by manipulating a coterie of unwitting followers.