The Cult of Trump

by Steven Hassan

  USE OF FEAR

  In his 1954 book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer wrote about the use of fear—the most basic of human emotions. It hits at the heart of our drive for survival. According to Hoffer, followers of mass movements need not believe in a god, but they must believe in a devil. He actually talked about the strength of a mass movement being measured by the vividness and tangibility of its devil. Hatred and fear always unify believers against a common enemy. We have seen how Trump does this: drumming up fear of the “other” and of what will happen to the country if he is not in power. Trump is not alone. Many political candidates, in their speeches and negative ads, create an image of dire consequences if their opponent wins. If you vote for the other candidate, you and the country will suffer—jobs will be lost, crime will rise, family values will erode, and your very freedoms will be stripped away.

  Yet few candidates have stoked fear quite like Trump does—fear is the way he holds onto power. It was the basis of his presidential campaign, and it is the basis of his bid for reelection. He frequently cites the same old cast of enemies to maintain his position and to keep his followers stoked and ready to defend him. Even with a seemingly strong economy he needs to fuel the drama. Trump is the “candidate of crisis,” as Richard Wolffe colorfully writes in The Guardian. “For most politicians, this would be a frabjous day of well-nigh full employment and fatter paychecks. But there are no calloohs or callays in this Trumperwocky. There are just rock-wielding caravans of disease-plagued murderers invading a fragile nation at risk of imminent collapse from the enemies within: notably the media and a bunch of leftwing mobs in cahoots with a suspiciously Semitic man named [George] Soros.”32

  Parody aside, creating fear of imaginary threats is dysfunctional and dangerous. It is especially dangerous when the fear is directed toward a group of people, a phenomenon known as scapegoating. Hubbard blamed psychiatrists and journalists for society’s ills, claiming they were part of a global conspiracy to undermine the “clearing” of the planet. Like Trump, he demonized the press and even had a word for information that was critical of him or the group, “entheta.” He claimed that if we could get rid of his enemies, Scientology could save the world. Moon blamed the communists for all the world’s problems. Most notoriously and tragically, Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s economic and social woes and suggested they were vermin needing to be exterminated. Trump has used similar terms for undocumented immigrants: “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people, these are animals.”33

  REPETITION

  Want to get a point across? Repeat it. Repetition, as we have seen, can be very effective in everyday speech and in advertising. Hearing words and phrases multiple times is a way to get across a message and have it stick in people’s heads. As mentioned earlier, Trump’s father, Fred, repeated over and over again to his sons, “You are a killer. You are a king. You are a killer. You are a king.” Trump would absorb these words, developing, as we have seen, a predator versus prey mentality. His brother, Fred Jr., took a more self-destructive path, dying at a young age due to alcoholism.

  In everyday life, too much repetition may backfire. A classic study by J. T. Cacioppo and Richard Petty showed that low to moderate levels of repetition often create greater agreement with the message, while too much repetition can have an adverse effect.34 And yet the content of the message, as well as how it’s conveyed, and also its context, can affect how a repeated message is received. Messages that resonate with a person’s prior beliefs may be more likely to be believed. With cult members, it is akin to programming.

  When I was in the Moonies, we would hear the same lectures over and over—the goal was to get us not just to remember and accept what we were hearing but to reinforce it and have it become part of our mindset. It was part of our mind control programming. Repetition is standard operating procedure for many cults—from Scientology, to Aum Shinrikyo, Lyndon LaRouche’s organization, the World Mission Society Church of God, NXIVM, and numerous others. In some cults, members would be forced to watch endless videos. As we saw in an earlier chapter, it is part of Pratkanis and Aronson’s formula for becoming a cult leader: “Repeat your message over and over and over again. Repetition makes the heart grow fonder and fiction, if heard frequently enough, can come to sound like fact.”

  Trump uses this technique a lot, both with his truthful statements and with his numerous falsehoods and lies. According to his biographer David Cay Johnston, repetition is the key to Trump’s success. Trump boiled his platform down to just a few key slogans—Make America Great Again, Drain the Swamp, Build the Wall, Lock Her Up—and then repeated them over and over, and eventually had his followers repeat them at rallies. Like my Moonie programming, the constant repetitions reinforced the Trump platform in the minds of his followers.

  Trump also repeats individual words and phrases—repetition is part of his idiosyncratic speech pattern. Shortly after he was inaugurated, he complained about his legacy from former president Obama. “To be honest, I inherited a mess,” he said. “It’s a mess. At home and abroad, a mess… I inherited a mess.”35 Do you see the mess? Even for Obama lovers, who might be enraged by the insults and believe them to be totally false, it’s hard not to see a “mess.”

  Trump loves to remind the public how smart he is:

  December 11, 2016, on Fox News: “I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day.”

  January 6, 2018, tweet (defending himself against material in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury): “My two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.”

  April 26, 2016, Trump Tower event: “I’m not changing. I went to the best schools, I’m, like, a very smart person. I’m going to represent our country with dignity and very well. I don’t want to change my personality—it got me here.”36

  He also loves the word “winning.” He repeated it throughout his campaign. “We don’t win anymore. We don’t win anymore in our country. We used to win. If I win, we’ll win, we’ll all win,” he said during an interview on Fox News. Nor has he stopped using it since he won the presidency. “Winning is such a great feeling, isn’t it? Winning is such a great feeling. Nothing like winning—you got to win.… Victory, winning—beautiful words, but that is what it is all about,” he said during a 2018 address to the U.S. Naval Academy.

  Beautiful words, indeed—they helped get Trump elected. Repetition is effective at persuading people of the credibility of a statement for several reasons. It leads the recipient, through a primarily unconscious and memory-based process, to “mistakenly believe that he/she has already heard the statement from another source,” according to researchers Nicole Ernst, Rinaldo Kuhne, and Werner Wirth. Second, it may “increase the ‘processing fluency,’ which is defined as the metacognitive experience of ease during information processing. The easier and more fluently that information can be processed, the more credible the information appears, regardless of the statement’s content.”37 Trump’s often outrageous claims may also cause confusion—crowding out analytical thinking and causing the mind to retreat into a kind of trance, especially when the repeated phrase is a lie, falsehood, or otherwise contradicts what you already know.

  SOCIAL PROOF

  One of the six universal techniques described by behavioral scientist Dr. Robert Cialdini in his 2009 book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, social proof describes how people are influenced by the actions or opinions of others. Cialdini writes that “we determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct.” Especially if there is uncertainty, people, like, sheep, will follow the herd. It is based on our ancient instincts for survival—if everyone is eating this berry, it’s probably a safe berry to eat.

  Think about it: if someone looks up at the sky, others will look up as well. Do you check Yelp.com for a restaurant’s ratings before making a reservation? That’s social proof. Today it is used in advertising and marketin
g campaigns all the time. Instagram “sponsorships” are impossible to miss. In our information-laden, time-strapped world, we tend to be overwhelmed, making us even more likely to default to the herd’s opinion. The Moon cult was famous for having mass weddings in stadiums with tens of thousands of members getting married to people selected by Moon, a striking testament to their faith. Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and dozens of other celebrities are often used by Scientology to promote how great the group is. NXIVM and Aum Shinrikyo both made large donations in order for leaders to have a meeting with as well as a photo opportunity with the Dalai Lama.

  President Trump uses social proof to dispel criticism. As Jason Hreha observes in Medium, during the third Republican primary debate, when Trump was getting pushback on his tax plan, he cited Larry Kudlow. “Larry Kudlow is an example, who I have a lot of respect for, loves my tax plan.” He thrives on showing how popular he is. “During rallies he will often heckle the cameramen, saying they never show the full crowd. ‘They don’t turn ’em. They don’t turn ’em. Go ahead, turn ’em. Look. Turn the camera. Go ahead. Turn the camera, ma’am. Turn the camera… Show them how many people come to these rallies.’ ”38

  HYPNOSIS FOR HARM

  We remember from George Orwell’s 1984 that language can be manipulated and convoluted so that freedom becomes a synonym for slavery. Orwell called it doublespeak—using language in a way that deliberately obscures, distorts, disguises, and even reverses the meaning of words. The result was to promote in the citizens of 1984 a kind of doublethink—the ability to hold contradictory statements in one’s mind without noticing the discrepancy, “knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it,” in Orwell’s words. I believe a similar thing can happen with the techniques included in NLP. Though Bandler and Grinder may have developed their approach with good intentions—to help people be their best selves—their techniques can take on an almost opposite meaning when they are used to subvert people’s free will and to indoctrinate, control, and enslave them. Instead of bringing out a person’s best self, they can promote a cult self.

  The cult group NXIVM is an example of NLP used unethically. Its president, Nancy Salzman, was trained in NLP by Tad James, a protege of Richard Bandler. She evidently trained the group’s leader, Keith Raniere, to use hypnotic techniques, which I believe created dissociative states in his followers. He would tell stories with embedded commands in them, essentially programming members. The group used those techniques to recruit and keep members in line, and to lure women and girls to have sex with Raniere. Followers of NXIVM did not realize that hypnotic techniques were being used on them and that they were using them on others. This is often true in destructive groups—members do not realize what they are doing or what has been done to them. It was certainly the case for me when I was in the Moonies.

  In my opinion, this kind of use of covert hypnotic techniques is amoral and dangerous. It’s one thing if you’re a trained mental health professional who abides by an ethical code to do no harm and has a professional body that holds them accountable. But when hypnosis is used by unscrupulous people to make money, solicit sex, wield power, or otherwise further their own ends, without supervision or strict ethical guidelines, great harm is often done.

  When I first saw Richard Bandler in 1980 doing a hypnotic trance with someone, a light went on in my head. I thought to myself, “I used to talk like that when I was a Moonie leader.” I’ve since talked to former members of NXIVM about their experiences during private meetings with Raniere. Some of their meetings lasted between two and four hours and yet they told me they have no memory of what happened. According to former members, Raniere was likely using hypnotic techniques. Programming amnesia is not difficult for someone skilled in hypnosis with no ethical principles.

  Destructive cults use hallucinations to their advantage and commonly induce trances in their members through lengthy indoctrination sessions. Repetition, boredom, and forced attention provide favorable conditions for inducing a trance. Looking at a group in such a setting, it is easy, as a leader, to see when the trance has set in with most people. Audience members exhibit slowed blink and swallow reflexes; their facial expressions appear rapt in attention or relaxed into a blank, neutral state. When they fall into such a state, it is possible for unscrupulous leaders to implant irrational beliefs. I know many intelligent, strong-willed people who were hypnotized in such settings, usually without knowing it, and made to do things they would never normally do.39

  Nefarious use of covert hypnosis is not limited to cults. Hypnotic techniques are taught as “go-to tricks” for mastering human connection in a multitude of areas—from personal development programs to business management seminars. Methods of NLP were taught in Neil Strauss’s 2005 bestselling book on pickup artists, The Game. The book describes how to master the art of seduction using hypnotic techniques and triggers, which raises the question: are these merely tricks for picking up women or are they methods for controlling their minds—something altogether darker?

  Something was definitely dark in the case of former Ohio divorce attorney Michael W. Fine who, in 2016, pleaded guilty to five counts of kidnapping and one count of attempted kidnapping. Instead of using brute physical force, Fine hypnotized female clients for sexual purposes.40 The first victim to step forward, Jane Doe 1, contacted police after she realized that she was unable to recall large portions of her meetings with Fine, and that her clothes and bra were out of place. When a second woman stepped forward, the claims against Fine were examined more thoroughly and an investigation was opened. Eventually, the police caught Fine in the act. After news of the case was made public, twenty-five more of Fine’s victims came forward with similar claims. Before entering into a twelve-year plea agreement, he was charged with multiple counts of kidnapping, rape, sexual battery, gross sexual imposition, possessing child pornography, and engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity.41 It was a precedent-setting case—it showed that a person can be put into a trance, made to do something they would normally not agree to, and develop amnesia about those events. In 2018, Fine was ordered to pay Jane Doe 1 $2.3 million.42

  Human beings are incredibly susceptible to well-honed powers of persuasion—sometimes to our benefit. But with the internet and 24/7 streaming of images and messages from anonymous, often ill-meaning sources, the opportunity for harm has greatly increased. The Russians who manipulated social media during the 2016 presidential elections clearly knew how to use hypnotic techniques and other methods of persuasion. Almost all politicians use persuasion techniques but Trump has used them in a way that is both brazen and insidious. Clearly they have been effective—he was elected president.

  Trump, of course, did not engineer his presidential victory all by himself. He had enormous help—from advisers, wealthy donors and corporations, internet companies, religious leaders, and a vast and powerful conservative media behemoth that found in Trump a willing mouthpiece for its own agenda.

  CHAPTER SIX Manipulation of the Media

  Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.

  —Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Early on Easter Sunday morning in 2018, Donald Trump tweeted out a simple message: “HAPPY EASTER!” The holiday spirit didn’t last long. Over the course of the next few hours, he sent out a barrage of tweets railing against U.S. immigration policy. In his tweets, which became ever more agitated, he would blame “ridiculous (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release” and stoke fears of “more dangerous caravans coming.” He threatened to use the “Nuclear Option”—the congressional procedure that allows an issue to pass by a simple majority vote—to get tough laws passed and concluded with a familiar refrain: “NEED WALL.”

  Though the volley bore Trump’s trademark bluster, what was striking was the way he echoed words spoken earlier that morning on the TV show Fox & Friends. “Our legislators actually have to stand up, and the Republicans contro
l the House and the Senate; they do not need the Democrats’ support to pass any laws,” said border patrol agent and frequent Fox News guest Brandon Judd. “They can go the nuclear option, just like what they did on the [Supreme Court] confirmation. They need to pass laws to end the catch-and-release program.”1 Of course, Judd was reiterating what Trump had been saying. He might have even suspected that Trump would be watching. It was as though Trump were speaking to—and inflaming—himself.

  The New York Times would later describe it as “a public mind meld” between Fox and the president. In The New Yorker, Jane Mayer describes Fox News as a kind of state-run television.2 She quotes Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia and author of Messengers of the Right: “ ‘Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,’ [Hemmer] says. ‘It’s a radicalization model.’ For both Trump and Fox, fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.” Mayer goes on to describe how the “White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead.” Fox News host Sean Hannity speaks to Trump nearly every weeknight,3 and Fox owner Rupert Murdoch is like a member of the administration, according to Mayer. Former copresident of Fox News Bill Shine was appointed director of communications and deputy chief of staff at the White House, though he resigned to advise the 2020 Trump campaign. His job description—to sell the president—is not that different from his job at Fox News. “[I]t’s a fact: [Fox News] is the closest we have come to having state-run media,” said former CBS anchor and journalist Dan Rather, “a straight up propaganda outlet.”4