Friday, December 15, 2017

Is 'Trumpism' a cult?

First, please note that I wrote:

When will the Trump cult give up? (Medium, September 2022, 5-min read)

The fascist 'death drive' (Medium, January 2026, 6-min read)

For more, see below...

I think the loss of Nonpolitical monoculture touchpoints (predominantly entertainment) because of streaming, helped contribute to why Trump was able to develop a cult.

— Kayla B (@queenofthesouth.bsky.social) May 18, 2026 at 7:53 PM

Barbara F. Walter wrote in How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them (2022):

"By the early twenty-first century, if you were Christian or evangelical, you had little choice but to vote Republican. Early partisan divides on abortion were followed by increasingly polarized positions on gay rights and eventually transgender rights. Wealthy Republicans used these issues to capture the white working-class vote, and they largely succeeded, even though voting Republican was often not in workers' economic interst. Moral imperatives and cultural identities were now, more than ever, driving voting patterns. White evangelicals now represent two-thirds of the Republican Party. By contrast, non-Christians — including agnostics, Jews, and Muslims — represent half of the Democratic Party."

"During the late eighties and throughout the nineties," Susie Meister wrote in early 2016 before the election, "evangelicalism hit its stride communicating and promoting a very specific message that amounted to a chorus of sound bites about “family values,” militarism, and the pro-life movement." Meister, someone who "attended church several times a week," realized:

"I could no longer reconcile Jesus’s calls for non-judgment, loving your enemies, and taking up your cross with many of the Religious Right’s positions on social services, women’s rights, and the LGBT community. Even though I felt alone in my theological shift, I was not. A recent Pew Research Center poll puts the evangelical retention rate at 65%...It isn’t just general education that can shift beliefs; indeed a recent study by Baylor University researcher Aaron Franzen found that increased reading of the Bible correlated with greater passion for social justice — a trait typically associated with liberalism."

She noted that Trump isn't the first example of Christians overlooking the personal history of their preferred candidate: "From Ronald Reagan’s divorce to Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, evangelical Christians give passes to those whose rhetoric is most in line with their philosophy and who they believe can win the election, even if that person’s biography isn’t in line with their religious doctrine."

Around the same time, in early 2016, an article on The Weekly Challenger began by calling Trump "a political cult leader" The article says that the "white working class" isn't seeing quite as much benefit from their historic white privilege anymore, as they "are killing themselves with pills and alcohol, committing suicide with guns, and dying of despair" and also just dying of old age which means that "the Republican Party’s base of voters is rapidly shrinking." Trump leverages what psychologists call "terror management theory," as, "when scared or under threat, conservative authoritarians are more likely to become tribal, bigoted, racist and generally more hostile to those they identify as some type of Other."

Given that the demographic base is shrinking, can the Republican Party just become...less racist, sexist, homophobic, and isolationist to expand their appeal to wider demographics? No, they can't, because that will explode what is left of their core base right now. Since the 1960s, "racism has been fundamental to American conservatism, and the GOP in particular," writes Zak Cheney-Rice in 2019, "even as its purportedly defining tenets have proven to be negotiable, from small government to antagonism toward autocrats to reduced deficit spending." Republican leaders (given how the party has defined itself for a half-century) will give up all other governing principles before they will give up their racism. This is not a matter of party "infiltration by a few bad eggs. On the contrary, it’s been apparent since the Nixon administration that the Republican Party would collapse without support from racists." They know they're in a losing battle and they're circling the wagons. The actual people who currently support the Republican Party will not be injured if the party gives up its racism or its power, but the Party itself as an institution may fall apart. What they have to do is radically transform the party to be anti-racist so that it no longer resembles what it's been saying and doing for the past half-century and reorganizes what remains of its core supporters. The leaders won't go through this effort. Unfortunately, "the movement’s racism problem is not the result of a hijacking or a coup, but of popular will. There are no innocents among today’s Republicans. There’s only the ugliness they’ve unleashed, and whether they’ve the courage to risk political ruin in order to eradicate it."

Before the 2018 mid-term election, Trump said of evangelicals: “They’re going to show up for me [i.e. the Republican Party] because nobody’s done more for Christians or evangelicals or, frankly, religion than I have."

A January 2018 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that:

"The vast majority of black Protestants (80 percent), religiously unaffiliated Americans (75 percent), Hispanic Catholics (74 percent) and non-Christian religious Americans (73 percent) surveyed said they have negative opinions about Trump. Slim majorities of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics (both 52 percent) also said they are not fans of the president.

In fact, the only religious group that had a majority of respondents voicing a favorable opinion of Trump was white evangelical Protestants, with 68 percent of them saying they have a favorable view of Trump, including 28 percent with a very favorable opinion of the president." (Carol Kuruvilla, Huffington Post)

Apart from the clear pro-Trump majority among white evangelicals, writes Diana Butler Bass, "white Christianity right now is a dumpster of discord; internecine warfare has not been this bad since the 1920s when controversy ripped American churches apart on whether human beings evolved from monkeys." As a personal example, although Bass and her brother "grew up in the same Methodist Sunday school," they stopped speaking after the Charlottesville incident "when we argued about white nationalism and racism," as she reports two years after that incident.

My brother, as an adult, traded that God for a tougher, stricter one who exercises judgment against all who refuse to bend the knee, a kind of Emperor-God, enthroned in glory. This God has often shown up in Christian history; including in American fundamentalism. But from 1980 onward, he underwent a revival in several strands of American religion including Pentecostalism, neo-Calvinism, traditionalist Roman Catholicism, and some Orthodox communities. He is a masculine Sovereign, and a winner-God for people feeling displaced in a pluralistic world. And after 9/11, this militaristic God became more real.

A Dungeons & Dragons manual, Villain Design Handbook, informally uses a simpler definition: “for the purpose of this book a cult is defined as any exclusive group that uses fear and intimidation to control its members.”

Adam Garfinkle, editor of The American Interest, wrote in May 2017:

"[Mark] Lilla and others have suggested that political cults tend to fill religious vacuums; that is, they tend to arise when people lose faith in the efficacy of the religious status quo to manage their problems. In other words, in times of confusion and fear, people will vouchsafe unto symbols of the nation, the state, the race, the leader, and so on what they used to reserve for God and related religious symbols. Political religion therefore always competes in some form with preexisting religious organizations and beliefs, giving rise to a range of outcomes that include cooptation, intimidation, repression, and other possibilities as well. This precisely is what led Voegelin to insist on similarities between authoritarian and totalitarian systems and religious systems..."

Using an 11-point list of cultic structure and belief, Garfinkle finds that Trumpism is cultic only to a "middling extent," and moreover its cultiness has been decreasing since the election was won. He warns that, nevertheless, "[t]o the extent it is more cult-like than its recent predecessors, the 'excitement' may be just ahead of us as the movement circles the wagons."

It's not true — Shannon Ashley wrote in 2018, identifying herself as someone who once emerged from a cult — that cults are "always religious," that only a few people are at risk for joining cults, that cults "prey on the weak and are easy to identify," and that most people who join are lost causes and can never emerge. A real cult, she says, uses "thought reform to challenge reality."

Reza Aslan, author of God: A Human History, points out in an interview on Nov. 20, 2017 that "to this day, still, three-quarters of white evangelicals strongly support him," and "support for him is highest among those who go to church at least once a week." He asks why churchgoing makes one more likely to support a

"lying, lecherous, greedy, sexist, racist, narcissistic sociopath whose entire worldview makes a mockery of Christianity, makes a mockery of basic Christian tenets like humility, and empathy, and care for the poor. And scholars like myself have been just wracking our brains trying to figure this out, 'cause it makes no sense."

He observes that this is limited to white evangelicals (as two-thirds of evangelicals of color supported Hillary Clinton). He also observes that white evangelicals (who called themselves "Values Voters") used to say that public morality was important for politicians, but today, atheists are more likely to say that. Aslan concludes that Trump has "transformed a large swath of white evangelicals into his own personal cult." Aslan is using "cult" in a "pejorative sense...it's a 'value judgment' word." He believes Trumpism is a cult insofar it is "an insulated group of individuals in thrall to a charismatic leader to whom they have given divine status, prophetic status, and that is definitively what has happened among a large swath of white evangelicals when it comes to Trump."

On June 19, 2019, TV pastor (and "End Times prepper") Jim Bakker said on his show that Trump was elected "because God's people voted and the world knows it, the enemies of the gospel know it." He warned that "if we keep losing, you’re going to see the leaders of the church and the leaders of the gospel and the political conservative leaders that are powerful, you are going to see them suddenly die, suddenly killed—suddenly as they were driving, suddenly as they were in a boat, suddenly in an airplane—you’re going to see it one after another.” He knows this because "God spoke this to me years ago what would happen near the end and I believe we’re in that time." In August 2018, Bakker warned that "the evil in this country is so bad, if I was a Republican — which I have been my whole life — I couldn’t wear a hat with my candidate on it without concern about being murdered in the street." However, Bakker is aware that Trump does not fit the image of a typical Christian leader. In January 2020, Right Wing Watch shared a video of Bakker apparently joking that, because Trump is so difficult to love or even to forgive, only true Christians are prepared to love and accept Trump.

Evangelicals aside, most Americans are displeased with the president, and therefore his approach to campaigning and governing may not survive in American politics. Ezra Klein's Nov. 7 article in Vox:

"Trumpism without Trump was possible before Trump was president. It might be possible after he’s president. It’s not possible while he’s president.

In 2016, Trump had the advantage of being a true outsider: He had no record to answer for, no unemployment rate to explain, no votes to justify. For all his oddities and eccentricities, he was a blank slate — a businessman to those who wanted a businessman, a culture warrior to those who wanted a culture warrior, a pragmatist to those who wanted a pragmatist, a conservative to those who wanted a conservative, and so on. He was theory severed from practice; “ism” without the reality check of is.

But now we have Trumpism with Trump, and the American people don’t much like it. Trump is no longer an abstraction, Trumpism no longer an idea. Instead, we are watching the real thing: a White House in chaos, a legislative agenda in shambles, a world in which nuclear war is likelier and America’s global leadership is diminished. Trump isn’t merely unpopular; he is less popular than any president at this point in their term since the advent of modern polling, and he is that unpopular even though the economy is growing and Americans are not dying in large numbers overseas."

At least a couple scandals centered around Liberty University.

First, in 2015, Liberty's chief information officer John Gauger accepted an offer of $50,000 from the Trump campaign to manipulate the polls on two news websites. Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen gave him a Walmart bag containing roughly $12,000 in cash and a collectible MMA boxing glove; he never delivered the rest of the money.

Secondly, the following year, there was a politicized Christian battle. Going into the 2016 Republican caucuses, Sen. Ted Cruz (whose father is an evangelical pastor) had expected the support of Liberty's president Jerry Falwell Jr., but shortly before the causes, Falwell (a businessman, not a pastor like his father) suddenly announced his support for Trump.

When the Access Hollywood tape was released in October 2016 before the election, Newsweek reports, "student journalists accused [Liberty's president Jerry] Falwell Jr. of censorship for axing an opinion piece in the student newspaper that blasted the then-Republican nominee." Liberty, the largest employer in Lynchburg, Va., had hosted Trump as a commencement speaker in 2017. In March 2018, Falwell appeared on CNN, defending Trump's character in the wake of sex scandals. Some Liberty students criticized Falwell for this:

A new organization called Red Letter Christians planned a revival event in Lynchburg for April 2018, intended to be somewhat of a political protest against Falwell. Professional evangelicals were afraid of damaging their ties to Liberty, so Red Letter Christians had a difficult time recruiting speakers for the event. Shortly before the event, Falwell banned the Red Letter Christians from campus and said the student newspaper couldn't cover the event. Red Letter exec director Don Golden said he wasn't inclined to ask permission to do what he does, since "we weren’t asked permission for evangelical leaders to say that Donald Trump is the president for evangelicals." In the end, the hall they rented for the revival was filled to less than one-fifth capacity, though many people watched online.

When asked at the end of 2018, "Is there anything President Trump could do that would endanger that support from you or other evangelical leaders?" Falwell answered, "No." A long investigative article published in the New York Times in June 2019, based on information gathered "from a lawsuit filed against the Falwells in Florida; the investigation into Mr. [Michael] Cohen by federal prosecutors in New York; and the gonzo-style tactics of the comedian and actor Tom Arnold," found that Michael Cohen, then Trump's lawyer, had been willing to help the Falwells with 2015 lawsuit over ownership of the gay-friendly Miami Hostel. As a favor to Jerry and Becki Falwell, who were being threatened with the revelation of compromising photographs of them, Cohen was thinking of buying and burying the photographs. The photos may have conveniently disappeared on their own without Cohen's involvement, however, and, since then, "no photos have surfaced."

A New York Times editorial on June 7, 2018 suggested that "the cult of Trump" really is just about the man:

"Mr. Trump’s favorability rating among Republicans is at 87 percent — the second-highest rating within a president’s party at an administration’s 500-day mark since World War II. (George W. Bush was slightly higher following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.) The absence of Republican criticism of Mr. Trump, in turn, serves to reinforce his popularity, creating a cycle cravenness that has now made it risky for even the staunchest of conservatives to question Mr. Trump. * * * Former House speaker John Boehner addressed the crowd at a policy conference in May 2018: 'There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.'"

Scot Lehigh satirized in the Boston Globe on June 21: "The Great Trumpkin had hoped to rally the entire cult to his side. Just follow Corey’s lead and offer a sneering 'womp womp' to stories of traumatized kids. Why, the Thugwomps, with its nice 19th century ring, could even become the new nickname of the Grand Old Cult!"

In June 2018, Michael Gerson wrote in the Washington Post:

The ultimate cause of this situation, however, is Trump himself. His followers are not asked to follow the contours of an ideology. They are asked to embrace his impulses and instincts. Those instincts move in a clear direction: toward feeding racial and ethnic divisions, salting national wounds, undermining rival institutions and violating restrictive precedents. But the unifying principle is Trump himself.

G.K. Chesterton argued that the egotist is the exact opposite of the dogmatist. The dogmatist believes there is an objective truth that he wants everyone to see. The egotist believes that all his views are interesting because they are related to him.

By October 2019, Gerson wrote more pointedly:

When it comes to President Trump, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between a political strategy and a nervous breakdown. His tweeted trash talk, his meandering stream of consciousness media availabilities and his shameless embrace of sleaziness are not the signs of a healthy mind. Trump’s followers might eventually look up to find they were actors in someone else’s delusion.

* * *

Trump is effectively setting a new standard of political morality and requiring his supporters to defend it. He is asking elected Republicans, in particular, to agree with his claim that a practice uniformly viewed as corruption in the past is actually an example of fighting corruption now. That is the little thing, the small thing, which Trump demands of his followers: To call hot cold. To call black white. To call wrong right.

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s idea of “incommensurability” strikes me as relevant here. If all moral claims are merely “emotive” — statements about ourselves rather than the nature of reality — then there is no way to argue between them.

* * *

Trump is the emotivist par excellence. He holds no objective, abstract beliefs about the meaning of justice or duty. He approves of things that help him and disapproves of things that hurt him. There is no other moral grounding.

And in another column later that month, Gerson again:

Rather than shaping President Trump’s agenda in Christian ways, they [white evangelical Protestants] have been reshaped into the image of Trump himself. Or, more accurately, they have become involved in a political throuple with Trump and Fox News, in which each feeds the grievances and conspiracy thinking of the others.

The result has properly been called cultlike. For many followers, Trump has defined an alternative, insular universe of facts and values that only marginally resembles our own.

* * *

Thirty-one percent say there is almost nothing that Trump could do to forfeit their approval. This is preemptive permission for any violation of the moral law or the constitutional order. It is not support; it is obeisance.

In January 2022, Democratic strategist Paul Begala pointed out that Republicans no longer have a political ideology apart from Trump. In 2006, "16 G.O.P. senators...voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act," yet now in 2022, those same senators are blocking that same legislation, because now they see that, if USAmericans vote, then Trump cannot win. They no longer have political beliefs (if they ever did); more obviously, they have Trumpism.

But what are the aims?

If Trumpism is a cult, what is its ideology and what are its goals?

Perhaps none. In June 2018, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker said: "It's becoming a cultish thing, isn't it?" He elaborated that this is "an administration that wakes up every day on an ad hoc basis just making stuff up as they go along with no coherency to it".

"You just can’t," Charles M. Blow wrote in the New York Times on June 20, 2018, "construct prisons for babies. You can’t rip children from mothers and fathers. You can’t use the power of the American government to institute and oversee a program of state-sponsored child abuse. You can’t have a system where the process and possibility of reunification is murky and maybe futile." Complaining that "although two-thirds of Americans overall opposed the policy, a majority of Republicans supported it," he offered this diagnosis: "That to me goes beyond standard political tribalism. That ventures into the territory that the Tennessee Republican senator Bob Corker described last week: This is cultlike." Indeed: "Not even the sight of devastated families could move the party that once called itself the party of family values. Not even the idea of 'tender age' internment camps for babies could move the party built on the protection of 'unborn babies.'"

Andrew Sullivan wrote in May 2020:

Tribalism is now not just one force in American politics, it’s the overwhelming one, and tribalism abhors reality if it impugns the tribe. But you can’t have both tribalism and public health...What we are seeing is whether this tribalism can be sustained even when it costs tens of thousands of lives, even when it means exposing yourself to a deadly virus, even when it is literally more important than your own life. We are entering the Jonestown phase of the Trump cult this summer.

What is a cult?

"The concept of cult was implicit in the work of Howard Becker on spiritualism, who described cult in terms of an ‘amorphous, loose-textured, uncondensed type of social structure ... is that of purely personal ecstatic experience, salvation, comfort and mental or physical healing’ (Von Wiese & Becker cited in Nelson, 1968). Becker’s interpretation formed the basis of the definition provided by J. Milton Yinger (1957, cited in Nelson, 1968), who maintained that a cult is normally a small, short-lived group, developed around the personality of a charismatic leader."
— Lisa Sugiura, The Incel Rebellion: The Rise of the Manosphere and the Virtual War Against Women (2021), open access.

Aside: According to a 2023 CNN story, "an unincorporated area of Volusia County, [Florida,] Cassadaga is home to the Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp, a community founded around the religious movement Spiritualism that is 'based upon the principle of continuous life demonstrated through Mediumship,' according to the camp’s official press kit."

Mary Midgley wrote in the early 1980s that Nazism lacked any consistent ideology except for hatred of Jews.

"In general, then, there are strong objections to viewing all wrongdoers as mad, as well as strong temptations to do it, and for many cases people do not find this explanation plausible. In these cases, however, another strategy often comes into play to make the offence look intelligible. This is to credit the offenders with having a complete morality of their own, which, for them, justifies their actions. This idea leads people to suppose that (for instance) the Nazis must have been original reasoners, with an independent, consistent and well-thought-out ethical theory — a view which their careers and writings do not support at all. As Hannah Arendt points out, at the Nuremburg trials the lack of this much-advertised commodity became painfully obvious. 'The defendants accused and betrayed each other and assured the world that they 'had always been against it'....Although most of them must have known that they were doomed, not a single one of them had the guts to defend the Nazi ideology.' This was not just from a failure of nerve, though that in itself would be significant in a movement apparently devoted to the military virtues. It was also because there was not really much coherent ideology that could be defended. The only part of it which carried real passionate conviction was emotional and destructive; it was the hatred of the Jews. This always remained constant, but almost every other element varied according to the audience addressed and the political possibilities of the moment. The enemy might be Communism or capitalism, the elite or the rabble, France or Russia or the Weimar government, just as interest dictated at the time. It was therefore hard to say much that was positive and constructive about the aims of the regime. Germany was to expand, but why it would be a good thing that it should do so remained obscure." (Mary Midgley. Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay. (First published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.) Kindle edition: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.)

The inevitable observation is that Nazism did not need a complex ideology to be very dangerous, not only to Jews, but to other identity groups and vulnerable people and to foreign and domestic government institutions.

Political cults may be prone to fail ultimately since, as Cheeseman and Klaas write, "the electorate is often deeply cynical about politicians. For all the capacity of presidents to build personality cults, citizens are generally skeptical about the motivations of political leaders and their ability and determination to deliver on their promises." (Nicholas Cheeseman and Brian Klaas. How to Rig an Election. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2018.)

Jeremy W. Peters interviewed several Trump supporters for the New York Times in a June 23, 2018 article. One woman said that “overblown” criticism from the left “makes me angry at them, which causes me to want to defend him [Trump] to them more." A man said: "He’s not a perfect guy; he does some stupid stuff. But when they’re hounding him all the time it just gets old. Give the guy a little.” Another woman said: "It bothers me that he doesn’t tell the truth, but I guess I kind of expect that, and I expect that from the media, too — not to always tell the truth or to slant it one way." And another man described hearing criticism more as a visceral rather than intellectual experience: "It’s kind of like when you experience a sensation over and over and over again. A sensation is no longer a sensation. It’s just, 'Oh, here we are again.'" Other people emphasized the responsibility of immigrants for their own fate — "I think it’s terrible about the kids getting split up from their parents. But the parents shouldn’t have been here" — or of the left for their comments and activism — “It’s just incredible what the nation is trying to do to disrupt this president and his agenda." A high school student said: "I have a fair bit of skepticism toward him [Trump]. But I feel like he is trying his best."

The next morning, Tom Nichols threaded his tweets: "The NYT piece on Trump supporters digging in is why I said, well over a year ago, that there was no way to reason with them. There is no level of moral collapse or political incompetence they will not defend. The question is why. ... They double-down because they know that even if they win, they lose. They're desperately trying to recapture a world that doesn't exist, and never did. That old lady crying for Trump?" — here, Nichols referred to a June 21 MSNBC interview — "She knows it's over. The world she once loved - or thought she did - isn't coming back. ... This explains a lot of the fury, I think, and why Trumpers are the angriest winners in American political history. They won, but they know it doesn't mean anything, and they double down out of shame and fear. What choice is there? ... when people are ashamed of themselves, they double down. The people in the NYT story *know*. They *know*. But once you defend the indefensible, there's no climb-down. That's why there's no point in trying to reason with them." (tweets 1, 3, 5, 7) In response to a comment, Nichols added: "We are no longer a virtuous country. The rest is just the endgame." Cesar Falson commented: "It’s like being lost when you’re driving and never wanting to admit being lost so you double down and make things worse. But then again, the easy answer is this is just cultish behavior." Another commenter said: "They tend to be authoritarians. They believe they are right because they are in a position of authority, i.e., white, esp. white male. Being right can be largely unrelated to facts to them. It's the evangelical way which is why his infidelities don't bother them, authority wins."

ok cmon guys all i did was click the link you gave me

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— plutø 🤍 (@girlfrompluto.bsky.social) January 5, 2026 at 7:06 PM

I don't think it can be mentioned enough that Jeremy Peters is friendly enough with white supremacist transphobe Ann Coulter to attend her book party and casually touch her on her bare arm. Would you expect fair minded fact based reporting on trans issues from such a man?

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— chet---desmond.bsky.social (@chet---desmond.bsky.social) January 5, 2026 at 9:10 PM

The Cult of Trump by Steven Hassan is a book about "the persuasiveness, not cultishness, of Trump, written by a cult expert," according to an interview with the author. Hassan said:

My definition of a destructive cult is an authoritarian pyramid-structured group, with a section in recruitment and mind control on the people it recruits and indoctrinates to be dependent and obedient. So, for me, the designation of “cult” includes Trump being a malignant narcissist, which is the stereotypical profile of cult leaders. I parallel his behaviors with people like Jim Jones, L. Ron Hubbard, and other cult leaders.

The overall formula of a cult is that the members are indoctrinated into a black-and-white, all-or-nothing, good-versus-evil version of reality, where they are not thinking for themselves, they’re not thinking with their consciences, they’re cut off from other forms of information that question their indoctrination. In fact, they’re explicitly punished if they listen to the other side.

He added: "A lot of people are going to wake up one day from what they were supporting with Trump and realize how they have been taken. At that point, there’s going to be a lot of upset, angry, ashamed, and embarrassed people."

In April 2020, Chauncey Devega interviewed Hassan for "The Truth Report." Hassan explained that "Trump was trained to be a magical thinker as a child" because of his association with the church of Norman Vincent Peale. "It’s been described as a type of solipsistic reality where Trump defines his own world and what is real or not...In this way of thinking, if Trump says the coronavirus pandemic is just going to somehow get better then it is going to happen. And when that does not happen, then Trump can deny ever saying such a thing, blame the Chinese, the Democrats or anyone else, instead of just saying he was wrong." Although "right now it is premature to say that Donald Trump leads a death cult," Hassan said, as in that type of cult the president would be "telling the followers to kill themselves" or saying "it does not matter if those people who are not in the death cult die," his cult would be a death cult when "the coronavirus pandemic overwhelms the health care system." But even confronting the death of family members and friends may not prompt people to leave the death cult, as "the cult part of their psyche is going to say it was their time [to die]. If Trump’s followers are religious, they will simply rationalize it as the dead are going to a better place in heaven."

In June 2022, Hassan was interviewed by Chauncey DeVega. He said: "My thesis was completely confirmed after Jan. 6 [2021] and all the efforts by the GOP to avoid being held accountable for their role in Trump's coup attempt." He reflected:

"As I began to do the research for my book, it became very clear to me that he would not have been elected president if not for the thousands of new apostolic reformation ministers supporting him and then telling their millions of followers to believe in Trump as someone doing the work of God. They represent a right-wing Christian religious movement that does not believe in equality under the law, or in civil rights for women and those not of their faith. These right-wing Christian leaders want to destroy any type of organized effort to advance liberty and freedom and knowledge. Trump as a cult leader and authoritarian is a perfect fit for their beliefs."

Regarding Trump's power over Christians, Hassan said:

"The biggest single bloc of true believers are the members of right-wing Christian fundamentalist churches and other groups. These are authoritarian religions where the members believe that their pastor is an apostle who is directly connected to God and getting direct revelations.

If the pastor says, "God wants Trump," you're going to believe in Trump. If the pastor says, "God gave me a revelation where we are now following Ron DeSantis. God's taken the blessing away from Donald Trump," then those people are going to blindly follow DeSantis. Why? Because they're already in a mind-control cult."

Hey, here's a 2024 update on the Gov. Ron DeSantis administration in Florida:

"Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker of the Northern District of Florida granted a temporary restraining order against Florida’s surgeon general after the state health department threatened to bring criminal charges against broadcasters airing the ad."
— Liam Reilly and Brian Stelter, ‘It’s the First Amendment, stupid’: Federal judge blasts DeSantis administration for threats against TV stations, CNN, October 18, 2024

Wow: The Florida official who sent letters threatening TV stations for airing pro-choice ads has filed a declaration in federal court stating that (1) DeSantis' office directed him to send them, and (2) he resigned rather than sending more. s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25...

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— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjsdc.bsky.social) October 21, 2024 at 9:42 AM

Ashley Smith is the cofounder of the "Reopen NC" movement. Her husband, Adam Smith, posted Facebook Live videos on May 22, 2020 that threatened: "But are we willing to kill people? Are we willing to lay down our lives? We have to say, ‘Yes.’ We have to say, ‘Yes.’ Is that violence? Is that terrorism? No, it’s not terrorism. I’m not trying to strike fear in people by saying, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ I’m gonna say, ‘If you bring guns, I’m gonna bring guns. If you’re armed with this, we’re going to be armed with this.’" He added, as Raw Story put it, "that he feels called by God and by his understanding of the Constitution to prepare for a violent showdown." He calls himself a "constitutionalist" and said that the lockdown situation "is a test. This is seeing if we are ready to accept the mark of the beast, if we are ready to accept this New World Order system they want to implement over humanity."

Selected tweets from a 5 June 2019 thread:

On August 21, 2019, the "King of Israel" tweets happened.

This interpretation:

If you want to learn more about QAnon, try this episode from Patrick Farnsworth's "Last Born in the Wilderness." It's the August 12, 2020 episode: "Jared Yates Sexton: QAnon — A License to Fascistic Impulses." If you only have one minute, listen especially to 10:30 – 11:30. "QAnon is an interactive supernatural New World Order," Jared Yates Sexton says, which "gives people who are powerless the sensation of having power, which is part of a cult."

Holding onto the illusion of the myth even as it flickers and dies is an act of pure desperation. I would hope that this woman and others like her would reconsider their devotion to a man who would subject them to this kind of thing, but I also spent years attending one MAGA rally after another where people adorned in his cheap merchandise were left to cook in the heat or to walk miles and miles in uneven and uncaring terrain because Trump and his crooked allies so obviously hold disdain for anyone who would buy their grift.

Because that’s all that’s left. Finally accepting the reality means not only giving up the illusion of MAGA but also discarding the lie that has been sold to Americans now for 250 years, to one ancestor after another, to our parents, our friends, our neighbors, our communities, every single one of us. It is the type of psychic pain that we would do almost anything to avoid. Including performing belief when no belief remains."

Stephen Miller Takes His 'Divine' Praise Of Trump To An Absolutely Bizarre New Level: Critics gave the White House deputy chief of staff holy hell over this one. Ed Mazza, HuffPost, Jul 6, 2026

Wow -- RNC video: "On June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, 'I need a caretaker,' so God gave us Trump." It only gets more unhinged and culty from there.

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 10, 2026 at 7:26 PM

It was made by a reactionary Christian psycho who says he "does not care about being factual" and "there's nothing I won't f---ing do or say."

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— Matthew Sheffield (@matthew.flux.community) September 10, 2026 at 8:31 PM

Ex-Trump Appointee Speaks Out On Leaving MAGA ‘Cult’: 'I Think Trump Is The Cult Leader'

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Thursday, December 14, 2017

December 2017 energy news: Bail out coal, let oil and gas keep releasing methane

Secretary of Energy Rick Perry is proposing a measure to subsidize power plants that operate with a 90-day backup fuel supply on site — that is, coal-fired plants, since renewable energy and natural gas pipelines cannot work that way — even though not even 1 percent of 1 percent of recent power failures were due to a lack of supply. According to a New York Times editorial on Dec. 7, "the primary aim here is to bolster the coal industry, which President Trump embraced unreservedly on the campaign trail and whose moguls embraced him right back," and the initiative would likely cause consumer electricity prices to rise by up to $11 billion "for no discernible public benefit." David Roberts wrote for Vox that this is essentially a bailout of the coal industry, as Trump has made it Perry's job "to figure out a way to stop so many coal-fired power plants from closing." The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) needs to vote on the measure by early January.

"This proposal has been so poorly thought out that it has made odd bedfellows of groups that are often on opposing sides of big policy debates. The oil and gas industry, for instance, has teamed up with renewable energy and environmental groups to fight it. Eight former FERC commissioners from both parties have sent a letter opposing the plan, arguing that it 'would be a significant step backward from the commission’s long and bipartisan evolution to transparent, open, competitive wholesale markets.'"

In a separate move, the administration wants to allow oil and gas companies to continue to release methane at current levels. In December 2017,

"the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which works under Secretary Ryan Zinke at the Interior Department, delayed the implementation of a rule requiring oil and gas companies drilling on federally owned lands to curtail the waste of methane by releasing it in the air. The rationale for delaying the implementation of the rule until January 2019 was that the regulation "may be rescinded or significantly revised in the near future," a hint that Zinke would like to dump it entirely."

The US shale oil industry makes money on oil, not the associated gas (methane) that comes out of the oil wells. Which is why they dump so much of it into the atmosphere. As shale plays age they get gassier. More gas for the same amount of oil. They will release even more methane directly.

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— Oilfield Witness (@oilfieldwitness.bsky.social) November 20, 2024 at 7:56 AM

This is from the new IEA methane report. The dark blue is methane emissions from oil and gas production. It is easy to see tha the US is by far the world leader in total emissions.

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— Oilfield Witness (@oilfieldwitness.bsky.social) May 8, 2025 at 8:41 AM

www.iea.org/news/methane...

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— Oilfield Witness (@oilfieldwitness.bsky.social) May 8, 2025 at 8:41 AM

‘Breakthrough’ as Turkmenistan starts fixing ‘mindboggling’ methane mega-leaks

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— The Guardian (@theguardian.com) August 31, 2026 at 2:42 AM
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Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Self-awareness in one's career

Your beliefs today

"Personalities, values and underlying beliefs...will influence what career people choose," writes Mary Hope in "Are You Just a Job Title? Work and Identity Explored." This is "the key to both professional success and contentment." More specifically, a person's underlying beliefs about how the world works helps determine the psychological profile of their job.

Psychological profile of a job

In "How Your Job Shapes Your Identity," The Book of Life raises questions about what kinds of thought and action your job requires you to do. Those questions could be paraphrased as follows. To look at the present or future? To promote positive outcomes or to warn of risks? To see things concretely or to interpret their meaning? To be suspicious of others' motives or to trust them? To see the better or worse sides of human nature? To seek consensus or go your own way? To withstand criticism or to be guaranteed respect? To have a clear path to advancement or accept chance? To deal with industry decline or industry growth? To set financial goals or to have other motivations? The article calls these "the psychological requirements and consequences of jobs — what mindsets a job breeds, what doing the job requires of your inner life, how it expands us and (crucially) limits us." The answers to the questions identify "what traits of human nature [the jobs] weaken or reinforce."

Has your work changed you?

Once a job is landed, it can influence or even replace one's original identity. "Role engulfment" describes what happens when people "lose all sense of themselves except as they exist through work," Hope writes. "For those people the loss of work or being forced to change career through redundancy or retirement can provoke a severe identity crisis, with people asking: ‘Who am I? What am I if I don’t work?’."

Role engulfment does not happen as a merely private process. It is often socially prompted. "In a rootless culture with no obvious class markers," that is, the United States, at least, writes Joe Robinson in "American Identity Crisis: Are You Your Job?,"

"the job defines the person and the pecking order. You are what you do. It’s a case of mistaken identity that is hazardous to your health, life, and even the work you do. In a 24/7 world where we’re always in work mode, there’s little escape from the identity that’s not you."

This "performance identity" leaves you vulnerable to

"false beliefs that rub out the real you — that all value lies in performance, that you can’t step back from production and tasks for a second, or you’re a slacker; that busyness is next to godliness; that self-worth comes from the productivity yardstick, net worth; or that taking time for your life is an interruption of production."

One goal of becoming more aware of one's underlying beliefs and the psychological profile of one's current job is to avoid having one's identity engulfed by the job. Another goal is to be better able to perform in one's current job or to choose a new job.

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Thursday, December 7, 2017

Nation, religion, language: Amin Maalouf on identity

Originally posted 17 July 2007 to JVoices.com, a blog that is going offline.

“What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages and several cultural traditions. It is precisely this that defines my identity. Would I exist more authentically if I cut off a part of myself?”
— Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, 1996

Maalouf observes the ironic fact that, the more connected one is to other people, the more specific is one’s place in the world, and this unique identity becomes a sort of isolation. “Every one of my allegiances links me to a large number of people. But the more ties I have,” he writes, as an Arabic-speaking Christian in Paris, “the rarer and more particular my own identity becomes.” He explains how we often arrange the separate elements of our identities in a hierarchy of importance but that hierarchy can change over time.

In considering the most popular identities worldwide today, Maalouf suggests that globalization is making nationalism obsolete, because, in a globalized age, we desire identities that are not tied down to a particular geographic area. So, where we humans once were nationalists, we are instead phasing in religious community. This partly accounts for the rise in religious fundamentalism today.

But Maalouf speculates that, religion, too, may one day be replaced by something that becomes more relevant, such as language. Language is a top competitor for the cornerstone of identity because one can specialize in multiple languages and because one must have the language of the dominant culture if one does not wish to be cut off. Religion, by contrast, is more exclusivist (one can generally only specialize in one religion) and arguably less fundamental to the larger culture than is language.

Maalouf regards the rise of English as a lingua franca as a positive influence if it can bring people together who otherwise could not have spoken at all, and a negative influence only in cases where it replaces a common language with a richer history. Today, he concedes, everyone needs three languages: English, for global business; then, a language he identifies with; and finally, a language he loves. He believes that freedom of speech should include the right to speak the language of one’s choice.

Book

Amin Maalouf. In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. (1996) Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. See pages 1, 13, 18, 94, 131-140.

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Is the American soul sick? Differing perspectives in 'The Left Hand of God' and 'Tempting Faith'

Originally blogged on 10 December 2006 for JVoices.com, a site that is going offline. I compared two books on politics and culture published that year, Michael Lerner's The Left Hand of God and David Kuo's Tempting Faith.

The Left Hand of God

God's "left hand" and "right hand," as Lerner defines them in his book The Left Hand of God, describe worldviews based on generosity and compassion (on the Left) and on competition and vengeance (on the Right). These two worldviews help explain the differences in politics and in religion associated with the Left and Right.

Lerner, a rabbi with Ph.Ds in philosophy and psychology who edits Tikkun Magazine, writes:

“...although the right may talk about love or invoke God, what they have in mind is the Right Hand of God. The Right Hand of God is the hand of power and domination, the vision of God in which love is presented as consistent with celebrating the pain inflicted on those who are perceived as evil. ... It’s this vision of a muscular religion, backed by a God of power, that ensures that no one will ever call them naïve, because in their actual politics they are not siding with the powerless but cheerleading for the powerful." (pp. 20-21)

The voices of fear and hope, the Right Hand and the Left Hand of God, “tend to operate below the surface of consciousness, [and] people often are not fully aware of which voice they are responding to at any given moment. Often they act in ways that seem on the surface contradictory... (p. 51) He explains that right-wing religious institutions manage to preach love while encouraging their followers to “align with a harsh, militaristic, and self-interested politics that is based on the (unstated) assumption that all that “love, kindness, and generosity" talk has no real world application outside of that church or religious institution." (p. 110)

I would quibble with Lerner on some points. First, the metaphor of God having two hands seems to imply that these two worldviews are different sides of the same coin and that they balance each other out, yet Lerner favors the Left and doesn’t advocate anyone running to the ship’s other deck, thereby creating a visual image of a one-handed god. Second, while solidly in favor of a woman’s right to have an abortion, he implies that the only truly spiritual emotional response to abortion is grief. Telling people how to feel generally does not work, and giving people permission to broach a taboo while encouraging them to feel guilty about it is, ironically, a classic Right Hand of God technique to gain power over them. Third, Lerner suggests that the question of same-sex marriage be solved by having the government refer only to “unions" while leaving the word “marriage" for religious institutions. He needs to consider how the ordinary inquiry “Are you married?" would translate into the invasive question “Are you religious?" Only the most determined atheists would delight in providing a negative answer, while millions of others in interfaith, spiritual-but-not-religious partnerships might feel “married" even though no clergyperson pronounced them so. But these opinions, which are slight missteps in my view, do not greatly mar the book, as Lerner does not claim to have all the right answers to these questions. He prefers to focus on the larger picture of a philosophy motivated by compassion, and this he achieves well. While acknowledging that people have shown meanness since time immemorial, he critiques the influence of a godless capitalism that has helped promote the anti-ethic of a “rip-off consciousness" — the idea that it is normal and acceptable to cheat one’s employees, customers, and government — leading to an all-encompassing “cynical realist" approach to life that replaces idealist, hopeful, generous intentions. Lerner believes that mixing spiritual values with left-leaning politics has the potential to bring about an ethical revival in the United States.

Tempting Faith

David Kuo’s Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction makes an interesting companion read because Kuo, like Lerner, diagnoses the political Right as being more interested in its own power than in healing the world. However, he speaks as a conservative political insider rather than as a progressive critic. Kuo was President Bush’s former Special Assistant and former director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Disenchanted after the faith-based charity initiative he helped to launch was stripped of most of its funding (he was promised he would be able to offer $8 billion in grants to faith-based charities, but ultimately only $30 million became available and it was controlled by another department [p. 211]) and applied in a discriminatory fashion (non-Christian groups were dropped from the application piles in at least one instance [p.215]), Republican speechwriter and politician David Kuo decided to reveal these inside power struggles.

As Kuo puts it, “Christian leaders are supposed to be putting Jesus above and before all things, enabling them to recognize and resist this seductive [political] power. Instead, it looks like they believe a political agenda is the most important thing." (p. xiii) If that is so, what drew him to the Republicans? “It is easy to say that I became a Republican because I went through a religious conversion, felt guilty about an abortion, or just needed a job. Those things are all true," he admits. “But if the Democratic Party had displayed a similar interest in addressing these cultural problems, I would have run to them. Instead, they embodied a hostility toward these issues and toward Christian involvement in the political world that was increasingly known as the last acceptable form of bigotry." (p. 52)

He gives some practical advice to those spiritually-inclined Leftists who would like to begin dialogue with spiritually-inclined Rightists: be curious about right-wing, right-hand-of-God celebrities and cultural influences. Demonstrating awareness of their existence is a form of respect. Ignorance harms well-intentioned diplomacy, as demonstrated by this blunder:

“They [Democratic aides for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid] asked me who to talk to. I started giving them names–like Tony Perkins at the Family Research Council. 'Who?' 'What’s that?' I mentioned the support for environmentalism at the National Association of Evangelicals and again they said, 'What’s that?' ... That Terry McAuliffe [leader of the Democratic National Committee’s faith-based outreach] didn’t even know the author of The Purpose Driven Life showed a staggering ignorance. Was it any wonder evangelicals preferred hanging out with Republicans?" (p. 256)

Lerner and Kuo arrive at different conclusions. Kuo recommends that Christians take a two-year “fast" from national political campaigns (from the 2006 publication of his book until the 2008 presidential election) to reconnect with their faith and values on a more personal level. (Kuo, newly diagnosed with a brain tumor, retired from the White House and became a fisherman, so that helps explain why he perceived the contemporary moment as a convenient and necessary time to take a break.) Lerner, by contrast, begins by asserting that “there is a real spiritual crisis in American society" that needs to be addressed (p. 14) and recommends that readers join his Network of Spiritual Progressives to begin infusing spiritual values into politics immediately; he does not suggest there is any greater insight to be gained by waiting. By contrast, Kuo says he once thought America had a spiritual crisis and that it was his job in the White House faith-based charity office to help fix it, but, after seeing the spontaneous outpouring of spiritual activity immediately following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he concluded that “[t]he American soul wasn’t sick." (p. 188)

Books

Michael Lerner. The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.

David Kuo. Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. New York: Free Press, 2006.

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Fallout from Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel

On Dec. 6, 2017, President Trump announced that he would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, something he had threatened to do at least since February. Palestinians chanted "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" at immediate street protests in Gaza City and Rafah.

Seventy years ago, UN Resolution 181 recognized Jerusalem as an international city to be administered by the United Nations. The resolution never took effect due to the Arab-Israeli war that immediately followed, as a result of which Israel took the western part of Jerusalem and Jordan took the eastern part. Israel annexed more of Jerusalem in 1967 after the Six-Day War.

According to J Street, "no action or decision of the international community has superseded the 1947 resolution. The consensus view of the international community" has been that Jerusalem's status "can only be determined by the parties as a part of a resolution to the conflict." This changed with Trump's announcement on Dec. 6 which makes the US the only nation to affirm Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem.

Reactions

In Gaza on Dec. 7, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said the the U.S. policy "could only be confronted by a renewed intifada [violent uprising] against the occupation." Reaction was also felt throughout the region, as Iraq's foremost Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani said that U.S. announcement "hurt the feelings of hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims.”

Generally, a mediator in any negotiation should not be perceived to have prejudged the outcome. EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said that this decision "discredited a bit the United States as an honest broker" and "makes it more difficult to play a role to relaunch a peace process."

Chief Palestinian peace negotiator Saeb Erekat told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that "President Trump has delivered a message to the Palestinian people: the two-state solution is over," implying that he does not expect future negotiations to produce an independent state of Arab-majority Palestine that is separate from Jewish-majority Israel. "Now is the time to transform the struggle for one-state with equal rights for everyone living in historic Palestine, from the river to the sea." A single state of Israel-Palestine in which Palestinians had full voting rights has long seemed unattractive to Israel since it would shift the nation's demographics to be majority Arab.

Trump once said that a peace deal was "frankly maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years," as he explained to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas over lunch on May 3. "We believe Israel is willing, we believe you're willing, and if you both are willing, we're going to make a deal." He added that he would "do whatever is necessary" to mediate. The White House released a comment that "any agreement cannot be imposed by the United States or by any other nation. The Palestinians and Israelis must work together to reach an agreement that allows both peoples to live, worship, and thrive and prosper in peace." This outlook now seems to have dimmed.

Update:

An opinion poll of Israelis taken Dec. 13 by Smith Research for the Jerusalem Post found that a majority of both Jews (77 percent) and Arabs (69 percent) feel that the Trump administration is more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian.

Also on Dec. 13, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), consisting of the foreign ministers of 57 Muslim-majority nations, met in Istanbul to announce that they will recognize East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state and that, without further action from the UN Security Council, they will appeal to the UN General Assembly.

Analysis of past actions in the Trump administration

Without taking any real action — such as moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, an act Trump said he will defer for six months — "he gets to declare victory on an issue important to some American Jews and evangelical voters," Howard Kurtz wrote for Fox News. Kurtz noted that Trump has made similar sweeping policy announcements while deliberately delaying their effects, such as his rejections of the existing Dreamers immigration program and the Iran nuclear deal.

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