The cult of Donald Trump

The one thing you cannot say about the mob that stormed the US Capitol on January 6 is that they were crazy

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Trump supporters near the east front door of the US Capitol on January 6 (Getty)
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The thing we most need to understand right now is how you de-program people who have been in a cult. By cult, I mean a group of people living out an imaginary worldview created by a charismatic leader. They sometimes end with the guru hopping on a private plane to escape the authorities. Others end in mass suicide; others still go up in literal smoke, as David Koresh’s did. Or sometimes they collapse in a welter of claims of abuse, and corruption.

When the cult is political, and when the guru is the sitting President of…

The thing we most need to understand right now is how you de-program people who have been in a cult. By cult, I mean a group of people living out an imaginary worldview created by a charismatic leader. They sometimes end with the guru hopping on a private plane to escape the authorities. Others end in mass suicide; others still go up in literal smoke, as David Koresh’s did. Or sometimes they collapse in a welter of claims of abuse, and corruption.

When the cult is political, and when the guru is the sitting President of the United States, it all gets a little messier. And that’s what the core of the Trump movement is. Not all Trump voters, by any means. But the core: a cult. And these lost souls will believe anything and everything the leader says. 

Trump is currently denying that there was anything inflammatory in his speech that could be understood as incitement. But this is what Trump told them, just before they stormed the Congress: ‘We beat them four years ago. We surprised them. We took them by surprise and this year, they rigged an election. They rigged it like they’ve never rigged an election before… We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that’s what this is all about. To use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal.’

So the one thing you cannot say about the mob that stormed the US Capitol on January 6 is that they were crazy. From their point of view — i.e., a completely rigged election, fomented by Democrats and weak Republicans, suppressed by Fake News, in league with Big Tech — they were being perfectly rational. If it were true, after all, that a vast left-wing conspiracy had used specially constructed voting machines to rig the last election so that Donald Trump’s landslide victory had been erased, why would you not storm the Capitol? It would, indeed, be obligatory for a patriotic American to fight in such a case of treason. I might have picked up a musket myself.

The trouble is: Trump is mentally ill and delusional and will never concede an election he still claims he won in a landslide; and his die-hard followers will always believe him. That’s been the core problem for five years. Trump created a mass movement that took over an entire party. That party has done nothing but appease him. And the immense gravity of Trump’s charge — a grotesque rigging of an entire election — is so great that violence of various sorts is a terrifyingly rational response. That threat hung over the Inauguration, and will not go away after January 20. 

From that day on, America will not have just one man claiming to be the legitimate president, but two. Only Joe Biden will exercise any legal or constitutional authority, of course. But he will have a pretender to the throne, cavorting around the country, with a third of the country believing he is not the pretender at all.

The years in which Republican elites could pretend not to have heard Trump speak or tweet, or put the most benign gloss on grotesque rhetoric, or just muddled through as his unhinged ambitions became clearer, are now over. You either have to endorse the total illegitimacy of the last election and therefore of the US government (including the Congress, elected in the same ‘rigged’ election); or you can attempt to put a lawful, sane, democratic party back together again without him. 

The other day, a friend asked if I was leaving DC for a while. He was taking himself and his husband to the Delaware coast until the risk of violence subsides. Others are packing their bags. Walking the streets of my neighborhood, I’m beginning to see the shop fronts being boarded up, as they were last summer. We’re told there are multiple pro-Trump marches on state capitols looming in the near future, and a big crowd is expected in DC on January 17, as well as January 20, the day Biden is supposed to be sworn in.

A briefing for Democrats from the FBI about the plans for imminent far-right attacks on the capital has left them aghast, we are told. Anti-fascist groups are obviously going to organize a response. They created mayhem during the Trump Inaugural. Just imagine if they confront a mob of Proud Boys and far-right militias next week. It’s getting very Weimar-y.

For those of us who live here, violent and non-violent demonstrations become banal over time. We’ve seen it all. Half the city burned down in 1968. Riots I watched from my window as recently as 1990. The Million Man March. Last summer’s explosion. And on and on. But not this.

Not these streets emptied by COVID, and small businesses hanging by a thread. Not a defeated president boycotting the inauguration of his successor and screaming treason in the streets. Not the bludgeoning of a cop with an American flag on the steps of the Capitol. Not this evacuation, when usually people flood into DC for Inaugural parties and balls. Not this unbearable lull before something, perhaps even darker, returns.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the US edition here.