Though cults generally fall into one or more of the above categories, there are numerous other variations, from computer to science fiction and UFO cults. Heaven’s Gate falls into the last category but it was also a religious cult—and it is often true that cults fall into more than one category. NXIVM was a sex cult as well as a commercial cult. Political cults may use religion as a cloak, as do the Moonies and some Christian right groups. Cults can be huge and have many millions of people, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a group that satisfies many of the main criteria of the BITE model. Others may be tiny, consisting of just two people.
Personality Cults
Sometimes the charisma, fame, money, and celebrity of a single person—often male—can form the basis for a high-demand relationship or group. These microcults may consist of a few members or even just an abuser and his or her victim. In such cases, a person controls or dominates another person to such an extreme that they cannot think for themselves, rendering them dependent and obedient. The abuser can be a spouse, a parent, a therapist, or someone completely unrelated. Many domestic abusers are adept in BITE model techniques, and use them to control their victims. Most abusers are male but there are a percentage of women who fit the profile. Personality cults can also exist on a massive scale, especially in political cults. Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s face is plastered all over North Korea, where he is idolized and venerated as a deity, though that is partly due to the structure of his office. At some point, most cults do depend on the power and charisma of their leader.
Trump is an interesting and unique case. He ran the Trump Organization as a business that used his personality to sell products, especially real estate, but he has also branded product lines from casinos to steaks, vodka, and an airline—all failures. When he became a reality TV star, a persona of savvy businessman was constructed through careful editing and information management. I would describe his presidency as a personality cult that uses politics and religious right-wing ideology—anti-abortion, antiscience, antidiversity, white power, if not outright racism—to sell himself and, by association, the Republican Party. But the influence goes two ways. Organizations holding those right-wing ideologies use Trump to sell their own political and religious agendas. Former FBI director James Comey likened Trump to a mafia kingpin, another nod to the cult of personality surrounding him.
In their edited anthology, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Bandy X. Lee and her colleagues describe what they perceive to be Trump’s psychological makeup—the mental instability, extreme hedonism, grandiose omnipotence, and narcissistic tendencies. In fact, the list applies to many cult leaders—Sun Myung Moon, L. Ron Hubbard, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Keith Raniere, to name just a few. Most cult leaders were either born into a cult, later joined one, or had significant exposure to authoritarian figures. The question arises, how do these experiences contribute to the making of a cult leader?
In their 1991 book, Age of Propaganda, Anthony R. Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson provide, somewhat tongue in cheek, a formula. In a chapter titled “How to Become a Cult Leader,”7 they describe seven “mundane but proven-effective tactics,” which I summarize here:
Create your own social reality by eliminating all sources of information other than that provided by the cult (in Trump’s words, fake news). Provide a picture of your world (a walled-in America) that members can use to interpret all events.
Create an in-group of followers (Trump supporters) in contrast to an evil out-group (Democrats, Mexicans, Muslims) to be hated and feared.
Create an escalating spiral of commitment, beginning with simple requests (small donations, rally attendance).
Establish your credibility and attractiveness through myths and stories that can be passed from member to member (that Trump made his own fortune and was chosen by God to lead the nation).
Send members out to proselytize the unredeemed (Campaign!).
Prevent members from thinking undesirable thoughts by continually distracting them (with outrageous tweets or by manufacturing your own fake news).
Dangle a notion of a promised land before the faithful (Make America Great Again, but only for true believers).
“When it comes to teaching your social reality,” Aronson and Pratkanis advise, “there is one additional point to keep in mind: 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 appears to have taken this advice to heart, not just in the way he states and restates fabrications and falsehoods, but also in the way he tells, over and over again, self-serving, often inaccurate versions of his own life story—stories that blur the line between myth and reality.
CHAPTER TWO The Making of a Cult Leader
In early 2019, a political brawl broke out between President Trump and Congress over Trump’s plan to build a wall on the U.S. southern border. This led to the longest government shutdown in history. For Trump, it was all about making good on a campaign promise. He threatened to—and later did—declare a national emergency, using false information about a huge migrant caravan supposedly filled with drug dealers and rapists to drum up fear and to justify his actions.1 His insistence on a wall put more than 800,000 government employees out of work (and pay) for thirty-five days. Meanwhile, thousands of people, many fleeing dangerous situations in embattled Central American countries, were unable to exercise their legal right to seek asylum because of the backlog at the border. Trump’s actions, which appealed to his most loyal base, constituted an unprecedented act from a man who is used to having his way—and using any means to get it.
Trump loves to wield authority, though he often does so in a ham-fisted and frenetic fashion. Like all cult leaders, he came to his authoritarian tendencies through a long and varied life, filled with a variety of formative experiences. He has reinvented himself many times—president is his latest manifestation. To hear him tell it, his life story is that of a self-made man who has weathered many ups and downs by dint of his personal attributes, and most of all, a belief in his own abilities.
Trump has seized upon and created opportunities, yes, but he has also been helped, and even rescued, many times—by his father, his creditors, by the Hollywood producer Mark Burnett, and later by those who helped make him president. Like all of us, Trump has been shaped by people and events that reach back decades in time, to his early childhood, and even before that.
To understand how he has come by his particular constellation of traits requires looking at his personal narrative. What is interesting is that though Trump’s story diverges in many respects from other cult leaders—he was born into wealth, while many had much scrappier beginnings—it is possible to discern a pattern: a cold or absent mother, an authoritarian father or other relative, a childhood filled with acting out and aggressive behavior, in some cases exposure to a military setting, spending time with a church or set of teachings, and falling in with other authoritarian figures, in some cases other cult leaders.
Of course, Trump’s story is uniquely his own, but what is striking considering his views on the Wall and the migrant caravan is how closely it resembles a classic immigrant tale.
* * *
In 1885, a thin, blond-haired man named Friedrich Drumpf—later changed to Frederick Trump—left the Bavarian town of Kallstadt carrying only a small suitcase, and arrived by boat in New York City at just sixteen years of age.2 He worked as a barber before moving to the Pacific Northwest, where he made a name for himself running restaurants, boardinghouses, and brothels in the booming mining towns. In 1901, he returned to Kallstadt a wealthy man, where he met his wife, Elizabeth, and planned to settle, but the Bavarian authorities, ruling that he had emigrated to avoid military service, revoked his citizenship. After appealing unsuccessfully, the couple moved to New York, where Frederick successfully continued his work managing hotels and restaurants and developing real estate.
In 1905, the couple had a son, Fred. When Frederick died thirtee
n years later, during the 1918 flu pandemic, Elizabeth, displaying remarkable business talent, hired a contractor to build houses on an empty piece of property left to her by her husband. She sold them and lived off the mortgages paid by the new owners. When Fred was a teenager, she folded him into the business, founding Elizabeth Trump & Son (later known as the Trump Organization). Fred took to the business quickly, displaying a flair for showmanship and salesmanship, eventually becoming one of New York’s biggest real estate developers.
He would go on to marry Scottish immigrant Mary MacLeod and have five children. The fourth, born in 1946, was Donald J. Trump. In 1950, Fred built, and moved his family into, a huge twenty-three-room, nine-bathroom redbrick mansion, staffed with a cook and chauffeur and fully equipped with a color television, a luxury back then, and an intercom system.3 Sophisticated and impeccably dressed, Mary played the “perfect housewife.” As Trump remembers in The Art of the Deal, she was “enthralled by the pomp and circumstance,” and seemed happy to take on the societal duties as the wife of a real estate mogul.
MARY, FRED, AND DONALD
Mary was apparently less enthusiastic about her maternal duties. Trump’s childhood friends report that they rarely saw her. “His father would be around and watch him play. His mom didn’t interact in that way.”4 Though Mary clearly played a role in young Trump’s life, it is defined, in some ways, by her absence. To this day, Trump rarely mentions her. “You don’t have to be Freud or Fellini to interpret this,” said Mark Smaller, past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA), speaking with Michael Kruse for his Politico article, “The Mystery of Mary Trump.”5 Kruse quotes other experts, including past APA president Prudence Gourguechon, who describes the all-important role that the mother plays in establishing the cognitive and emotional architecture of a person. “The capacity to trust. A sense of security versus insecurity. Knowing what’s real and what’s not real. Your mother helps you identify your feelings and develop a cognitive structure so you don’t have to act on them immediately. And I think it’s fair to say that the capacity for empathy develops through your maternal relationship.”6
A disruption in the bonding process, called “insecure parental attachment,” during the first two years of life can predispose a person to developing a narcissistic personality disorder, which we will explore in the next chapter. It turns out that several cult leaders, including Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and David Koresh, had problematic relationships with their mothers, and in some cases no relationship at all. Manson’s mother would go out drinking and actually went to prison for robbery, and would abandon him to relatives or neighbors. Koresh grew up believing his aunt was his mother and spent time shuffling between relatives’ houses. Jones’s mother was out working, leaving him to wander the neighborhood even as a toddler.
By Trump’s own account, the most formative influence on him was his father. Tough, demanding, and a workaholic—he wore a tie and jacket even at home—Fred was not an affectionate parent, which was true of many men of his generation. He was hypercritical and did not offer praise. According to Harry Hurt III, author of Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, ever since he was a little boy, Trump’s father had been “hammering the same lines into his head: You are a killer… You are a king… You are a killer… You are a king. Donald believes he can’t be one without the other.”7 Fred would also point out repeatedly, “Most people are weaklings. Only the strong survive.”8 According to Leonard Cruz, author of A Clear and Present Danger: Narcissism in the Era of President Trump, children who have experienced a lack of warm parental affection can behave in inappropriate ways. “It might evoke ways of acting that are increasingly bombastic and attention-seeking. The child becomes almost exaggerated in the ways they try to court attention.”9
By his own admission, Trump was a difficult child. As he confessed in The Art of the Deal, “I was a very assertive, aggressive kid. In the second grade, I actually gave a teacher a black eye—I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled. I’m not proud of that, but it’s clear evidence that even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a very forceful way. The difference now is that I like to use my brain instead of my fists.”10
Jim Jones would get into shouting matches on the school grounds. In his book, Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People, Tim Reiterman quotes Jones as saying: “I was ready to kill by the end of the third grade. I was so fucking aggressive and hostile.… Nobody give [sic] me any love, any understanding.” Future cult leader Charles Manson would get others to do his bidding. As a youth, he persuaded girls to beat up boys he didn’t like, and would insist the girls had acted on their own—a foreshadowing of his later actions. Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum Shinrikyo, was born sightless in one eye and attended a school for the blind. Though his partial sightedness elevated him to the role of protector, he occasionally acted as a bully, reportedly breaking a classmate’s eardrum in a fight. When chastised, he threatened to burn down the dormitory.11
As a child, Trump misbehaved so often and was sent to detention so frequently that his initials, DT, became his friends’ shorthand for “punishment.”12 One student, Steven Nachtigall, now a doctor, described Trump as a “loudmouth bully” who once jumped off his bike to “pummel” another boy.13 Charles Walker, one of Trump’s teachers, after learning of Trump’s presidential run, reportedly described him in even less flattering terms: “Even then he was a little shit.” Trump would later describe his approach: “When somebody tries to push me around, when they’re after my ass, I push back a hell of a lot harder than I was pushed in the first place.”
“GOD’S SALESMAN”
Trump’s early and aggressive quest for attention and validation would find an outlet in the teachings of Norman Vincent Peale, who was the pastor of Marble Collegiate Church, located on West Twenty-Ninth Street in New York City. Fred was an avid follower and would travel with his family into Manhattan every Sunday to hear Peale’s sermons. When Peale first began preaching at Marble Collegiate, he spoke to sparsely filled pews—only a few hundred attendees in a space designed for thousands. Peale would soon change that by offering his congregants a more dynamic and supposedly pragmatic view of Christianity.
“We have made the mistake of thinking that Christianity is a creed to be recited,” he wrote. “On the contrary, it is a power to be tapped.”14 Peale’s influence grew quickly. He would host a long-running weekly radio program, called The Art of Living; found the organization and magazine Guideposts; and write several books, including You Can Win and The Power of Positive Thinking. The latter became a huge bestseller, selling millions of copies and remaining on the New York Times’ bestseller list for 186 weeks. With chapter titles like “Expect the Best and Get It,” and “I Don’t Believe in Defeat,” Peale’s book promised absolute self-confidence and practically made self-doubt the work of the devil.
“BELIEVE IN YOURSELF! Have faith in your abilities,” the book begins, painting a bold, black-and-white ideology. “Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy, but with sound self-confidence you can succeed. A sense of inferiority and inadequacy interferes with the attainment of your hopes, but self-confidence leads to self-realization and successful achievement.”
Nicknamed “God’s salesman,” Peale taught a kind of forerunner to contemporary prosperity gospel—if you believe in yourself 100 percent and pray for financial success, God will grant you blessings. In a religious tradition where material wealth and success are the consequences of faith, poverty and failure are the wages of sin and doubt.
Peale taught his followers to control their thoughts by pushing aside self-doubt, a form of self-hypnosis akin to thought stopping. Such a practice banishes doubt but also leaves no room for skepticism, criticism, introspection, or any of the other tools necessary for free thought.15 The flip side was a kind of positive magical thinking:
if you think and will something strongly enough, you can make it happen—a kind of early version of the new age “wishful thinking” philosophy offered in The Secret, The Law of Attraction, and other works. Charles Manson learned a similar approach through a Dale Carnegie course he took when he was a young man in prison, doing time for a car theft. As Jeff Guinn observed in his biography, Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, later in life, people would say it was like he could read their minds. “ ‘He came and talked to me and it was like he was immediately the friend I’d wanted and had never had.’ Every line he used, almost word for word, comes from a Dale Carnegie textbook called How to Win Friends and Influence People.”16
Theological critics accused Peale of making religion about the person, and not about God.17 Mental health experts denounced his techniques as dangerous, possibly leading to delusions and harmful behavior, despite Peale’s inclusion of unnamed “scientific studies” that supported his philosophy.18
Peale was enormously popular with the Trumps, and especially young Donald. “I still remember [Peale’s] sermons,” Trump told the Iowa Family Leadership Summit in July 2015. “You could listen to him all day long. And when you left the church, you were disappointed it was over. He was the greatest guy.” According to Trump, the feeling was mutual: “He thought I was the greatest student of all time.”19
Peale remained connected to Trump for years. He would officiate at Trump’s first wedding, to Ivana, as well as the weddings of Trump’s two sisters, Maryanne and Elizabeth, and also at the funerals of Fred and Mary.20 Trump would often quote or thank Peale. In a 2009 interview, Trump credited Peale’s teachings with helping him survive his bankruptcies and other financial hard times. “I refused to give in to the negative circumstances and never lost faith in myself. I didn’t believe I was finished even when the newspapers were saying so,” he said.21 In August 2015 then-candidate Trump told reporters, “I am a Presbyterian Protestant. I go to Marble Collegiate Church,” adding that he tried to attend church as often as possible, even while traveling. Soon after, Marble Collegiate Church—which is Reformed Protestant rather than Presbyterian—published a statement saying that though Trump has a “longstanding history” with the church, he was “not an active member of Marble.”22
The Cult of Trump Page 4
