Seventy-four million Americans cast votes in the last presidential election for Donald Trump. The crowd at yesterday’s insurrectionist coup was estimated at roughly 50,000 people. All were convinced by Trump over the last five years that their common enemies are the media, Muslims, Black and Brown people, anyone who is not a White American.
All are members of the destructive cult of Trump.
The Cult Playbook
By definition, a cult is a group of people joined together by a common ideological system, often which a charismatic leader. Consciously and manipulatively, cult leaders and their surrogates exert a systematic social influence that can produce substantial behavioral changes.
Every few decades, a public figure rises to a level of fame and notoriety for their cult following. In the ‘70s it was Jim Jones, an American cult leader who orchestrated a mass suicide of himself and his followers in a commune in Guyana in 1978.
Since June 16, 2015, it has been Donald Trump, whose announcement for the candidacy for president garnered the kind fan worship you can expect for a billionaire reality TV star. It also led to the beginning of years of indoctrination of his followers.
In a New York Times article on the psychology of cults, psychoanalyst and Associate Professor Stanley Cath said many cult followers have a history of failing to achieve intimacy and blaming others for their failures.
Donald Trump has spent years convincing his followers that minorities, Muslims, Democrats, and the media were responsible for all that ails the United States and only he can fix the problems that exist within our Democracy. Through a regular cadence of lies, distortions and misinformation, he burrowed into the consciousness of his followers, winning their hearts and minds, and often convincing them that he was some sort of benevolent savior who had come to fix America, despite visible and audible evidence to the contrary.
Every effective cultist behaves the same way. Through their indoctrination, they can convince people to align with them against what they are told is their common enemy. The problem is, this mentality has us as Americans fighting against our government and mounting a treasonous rebellion that has brought us to the brink today of what some never would have seriously contemplated again: a civil war.
That is way too much power to invest in one sick, demented head of state.
Time to End this Presidency
Trump must be called out for what he is: a seditious enemy of the state. He must be removed from the Office of the President. While there has been talk of cabinet members discussing invoking the 25th amendment, insiders believe that is unlikely to happen, given the president’s dwindling days in office.
How ironic is it that he was banned from Facebook and Twitter for hours, yet still has access to the nuclear codes? Surely, our cabinet members know that the destruction he can cause with those codes is orders of magnitude worse than the destruction he can cause with a tweet.
Although, there’s plenty of evidence that his tweets are enough to inspire his followers to commit violent acts against our government in his name. That ability alone should result in his removal from office.
It’s time to neutralize the cult of Trump.