The Cult of Trump

by Steven Hassan

  Trump is not the first president to exploit the power of the bully pulpit or to explore a new media platform, like Twitter. Nor is he the first to have a favorite media organization. As Mayer points out, “James Madison and Andrew Jackson were each boosted by partisan newspapers.” But rarely has a president used his media partnership to such partisan ends. Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt were presidents who explored new media platforms but they did so to address and benefit the whole nation rather than to speak directly to their own partisan base, or to fill the coffers of their chosen media partner. Trump is perpetually campaigning, kicking up political dust, creating crises. It’s all good business—and not just for Fox. As Les Moonves, former president of CBS, famously said, Trump’s candidacy “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”5 The same could be said of cable networks like CNN and MSNBC.

  Trump did not bring about his presidency single-handedly, as much as he might like us to believe he did. He was in the right place at the right historical moment. To paraphrase Obama, he is the symptom of a celebrity-promoting media culture based on corporate greed, manipulation of public opinion for personal gain, and marketing by wealthy corporations and elites using every influence trick in the book to get what they want—to cut corporate taxes, boost the use of fossil fuels, and promote right-wing political and religious views. The rise of the conservative media empire has been many decades in the making and so has Trump’s Fox-inspired, Twitter-fueled bully pulpit. In its broad outlines, the Cult of Trump was taking shape long before Trump stepped into the shoes of leader. To get a fuller understanding of how that happened, we must cast a backward glance at the intertwining history of the media and the presidency.

  THE BEAUTIFUL PULPIT

  The term “bully pulpit” may seem practically designed for Trump, who has used his office to insult, deride, and humiliate people. But when President Theodore Roosevelt coined the phrase, “bully” had an altogether different meaning. It was an adjective, not a verb, meaning “wonderful” or “superb”—as in “bully for you!” What made the pulpit of the presidency so bully for Roosevelt was the way it could be used to persuade people of a particular agenda.

  Like Trump, Roosevelt was a convention-defying president who came to Washington with the goal of shaking things up. A dynamic speaker, he would often cast aside the microphone at rallies‚ projecting his voice to its limit in order to speak to tens of thousands of people. More remarkable was the way he seemed to emotionally connect with them. He courted publicity aggressively. He frequently invited the Washington press corps to the White House, monitored the whereabouts of photographers at events, hired the first government press officers, and staged publicity stunts, like riding ninety-eight miles on horseback to defend new navy regulations that officers be required to take a ninety-mile riding test. “It was bully,” he was reported to say as he bounded into the White House after finishing his ride. Though he loved the attention, and many would agree he had a strong streak of narcissism, according to David Greenberg writing in The Atlantic, most of his stunts were done “not simply to boost his ego but also to effect his vigorous reform.”6 He understood the power of publicity in furthering his agenda. “Roosevelt ushered in an age in which presidents would be perpetually engaged in the work of publicity and opinion management—the work of spin.”

  PRESIDENTIAL PROPAGANDA

  The need for opinion management increased dramatically during World War I when President Woodrow Wilson created a new federal agency, the Committee on Public Information (CPI), that “put the government in the business of actively shaping press coverage” while waging “a campaign of intimidation and outright suppression against newspapers that continued to oppose the war.”7 At the time, most Americans got their news through newspapers—in New York City, nearly two dozen papers were published every day in English alone; dozens of weeklies served ethnic audiences. Through the work of people like Edward Bernays, the CPI would become a full-scale media organization, creating its own media—newspapers, newsreels, broadsheets, posters, and speeches—to recruit soldiers, sell war bonds, and stimulate patriotism. It would promote a grand narrative—that “the nation is involved in a great crusade against a bloodthirsty, antidemocratic enemy” and “making the world safe for democracy”—at the same time that it curtailed one of the pillars of democracy, freedom of the press.8

  With the rise of radio in the 1920s, news could be disseminated much more quickly—indeed, almost immediately—and it could be conveyed in a new way, by an actual human voice. Between 1933 and 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would masterfully exploit this more intimate medium in a series of thirty “fireside chats,” talking the country through the dark days of the Depression and World War II. Speaking in a confident and reassuring voice, he tried to calm the fears of an anxious nation, explaining his policies in an effort to prevent rumors and fearmongering from dividing the American people.9 Roosevelt’s fireside chats may seem a relic of a bygone time, especially in the age of the Trumpian Twitter storm, but they were “a revolutionary experiment with a nascent media platform,” according to Adrienne LaFrance, writing in The Atlantic. “Imagine if Roosevelt had used his radio access to relentlessly criticize individual Americans by name.”10

  Yet, as Roosevelt was trying to soothe and unite, some were using radio to sow discord and fear. During the 1920s, a Roman Catholic priest named Father Charles Coughlin took to the airwaves to preach directly to his millions of followers. Coughlin had been a fan of FDR but had come to see him as too friendly with Jewish “money-changers” and capitalists. He would later use his radio show to broadcast anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and to praise the fascist policies of Hitler and Mussolini as an antidote to the growing threat of communism. He would tout isolationist views with slogans—“Less care for internationalism and more concern for national prosperity”—that sound remarkably modern. Coughlin’s views clearly resonated with many Americans. By 1939, when he was forced off the air, he had an audience of 30 million people.

  Coughlin’s show had especially disturbed the members of a new watchdog group, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), who had been alarmed by the use of what they saw as wartime and foreign propaganda in the United States. They formed the IPA to promote free thought and the spirit of democracy by educating the public about the dangers of propaganda. Toward that end, they commissioned a book, The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin’s Speeches, outlining seven of his techniques, many of which are being used today by Trump and his conservative media supporters:11

  1. Name-calling: Attaching negative or derogatory labels to a person or idea can make us reject and condemn them without examining the evidence. Trump, along with Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, make extensive use of this, turning words like “liberal” and “socialist” into insults; assigning nicknames to opponents; pinning words like “stupid,” “weak,” “dangerous,” “disgraceful,” and “bad” on people or ideas that they disagree with.

  2. Glittering generalities: Associating positive virtuous words with a person or idea can make us accept and approve them without examining the evidence. Trump uses words like “smart,” “tough,” “great,” “amazing,” “terrific,” and “classy” to describe people whom he likes—including dictators.

  3. Transfer: Associating an admired, respected, or revered person, institution, or idea with another in order to make the latter attractive. The converse is also true: being associated with a disrespected, disgraced, ridiculed, or scorned person, institution, or idea can cause us to reject it.

  4. Testimonial: Having a respected person say that a given idea or program or product or person is good or bad can lead us to accept it. Endorsements are common in American political life, as popular candidates support and lend legitimacy to less popular ones.

  5. Plain folks: This occurs when a speaker attempts to persuade his audience that their ideas are good by claiming that he or she is just like the
m—of the people, plain folk. Trump is a brash billionaire who has nonetheless fostered a sense of identification with his audience by promoting an outsider, nonpolitician image and by mirroring their issues and emotions, taking their struggles—for example, the closing of coal mines—as his own cause.

  6. Card stacking: Selectively citing facts or falsehoods, illustrations or distractions, and logical or illogical statements in order to give the best or the worst possible case for an idea, program, person, or product. Trump’s vilification of immigrants—using faulty data and outright lies—is a prime example, where the group is blamed for the actions of a small handful of rogue individuals.

  7. Bandwagon: Claiming that all members of a group accept a policy, idea, or action in an effort to encourage others to follow—essentially, to jump on the bandwagon. According to Trump, if you’re not with him trying to “make America great,” then you are part of the problem.

  FAIRNESS DOCTRINE: BIRTH AND DEMISE

  The size of Coughlin’s audience showed there was a market for a variety of listener niches. As radio grew in popularity, a dilemma arose. There were only so many frequencies designated for wireless communication and a lot of people were competing for airspace. In 1934, the U.S. government established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate interstate communications. Broadcasters had to receive FCC licenses in order to broadcast, which is still the case today. The advent of licensing raised a question: if radio waves are a public asset, should they be used for the public good? The FCC thought so and in 1940 issued the Mayflower Doctrine, which stated clearly that the public interest is not served by partisan programming: “Radio can serve as an instrument of democracy only when devoted to the communication of information and the exchange of ideas fairly and objectively presented. A truly free radio cannot be used to advocate for the causes of the licensee. It cannot be used to support the candidacies of his friends. It cannot be devoted to the support of principles he happens to regard most favorably. In brief, the broadcaster cannot be an advocate. Freedom of speech on the radio must be broad enough to provide full and equal opportunity for the presentation to the public of all sides of public issues.”12

  Though noble in its goals, this near-total ban on partisan programming proved to be unworkably broad, and, after World War II, suffered multiple legal challenges. In June 1949, the Mayflower Doctrine was repealed. A few months later, the FCC established the Fairness Doctrine,13 which allowed that the public interest “can only be satisfied by making available… varying and conflicting views held by responsible elements of the community.”14 This demand to air alternative views placed broadcasters and also the FCC in a difficult spot. Broadcasters were expected to determine how to apportion their air time when dealing with controversial issues, and how to arrange for fairly presented opposing views, while the FCC was expected to determine whether any individual stations ran afoul of this legislation. Taking advantage of the ensuing confusion, preachers and ministers, some of them wealthy and looking to become more so, rushed in to buy up slots previously reserved for more community-based religious programs. A new era of televangelism began.

  Unsurprisingly, legal cases arose and were pretty much handled on a case-by-case basis. It was not a tidy system, and it would not apply to cable news. But despite its many issues, the Fairness Doctrine maintained a fragile balance, helping to set the tone for a “fair and balanced” media landscape—until 1987, when Ronald Reagan used his presidential veto to prevent Congress from codifying the doctrine into actual law and then directed the FCC to abolish the Fairness Doctrine altogether.15 As Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg observe in a New York Times piece, “Planet Fox: Inside Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence,” Reagan’s actions “spawned a new generation of right wing radio personalities who were free to provide a different sort of opinion programming to a large, latent conservative audience that was mistrustful of the media in general.”16 Coughlin had already shown that many Americans were hungry for this kind of programming.

  THE CONSERVATIVE MEDIA COMPLEX

  During the 1960s, FM radio broadcasting had increased dramatically. FM radio’s ability to better handle stereo audio made it an obvious choice for high-fidelity music and the market responded accordingly: by the end of the 1970s, FM’s listeners outnumbered AM’s. The audio limitations of AM radio made it a natural fit for talk and news programs—in fact, they were among the very small variety of programs that remained on AM frequencies. But in the late 1980s, with the Fairness Doctrine revoked, AM radio took off. Functioning now under wholly capitalist incentives, the AM radio stations suddenly had a new product: talk radio. Serving the public interest quickly transformed into interesting the public—sometimes with salacious, shocking, and highly opinionated content.

  One man who did more than anyone else to usher in this new era was Rush Limbaugh, a modern-day Charles Coughlin. Moving from his Sacramento, California, station to New York City in 1988, he started The Rush Limbaugh Show, a nationally syndicated talk radio program that would soon become one of the most popular in radio history. Its mix of political commentary, news, and entertainment proved to be enormously influential, giving rise to a host of imitators who quickly filled the airwaves with conservative ideology.17 Limbaugh’s personal appeal is not to be discounted. David Foster Wallace, writing for The Atlantic, described Limbaugh as a “a host of extraordinary, once-in-a-generation talent and charisma—bright, loquacious, witty, complexly authoritative.”18 Limbaugh’s “brilliantly effective” rhetorical genius was to label the rest of the media “biased,” thus functioning as “a standard around which Rush’s audience could rally, as an articulation of the need for right-wing (i.e., unbiased) media, and as a mechanism by which any criticism or refutation of conservative ideas could be dismissed.”

  By leveraging conservative dissatisfaction with mainstream media sources, Limbaugh created a loyal following and an audience hungry for supposedly “unbiased” media. The nascent conservative media complex grew, fueled by the 9/11 attacks, which led to a bevy of new radio shows hosted by outspoken, charismatic, and highly paid individuals like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Glenn Beck. Like Limbaugh, they would cultivate their audiences using many of the same influence techniques that Coughlin used, and that are used by cult leaders—sowing confusion, distrust, and fear while providing a heavy dose of exaggeration along with black-and-white, us-versus-them thinking. It is interesting to note that Vice President Mike Pence, who in the early 1990s hosted a conservative radio show, studied Limbaugh’s radio persona and even referred to himself as “Limbaugh on decaf.”19 Pence remains close with Limbaugh and does interviews with him.20

  They weren’t the only ones to use radio to captivate and influence conservative America. Christian televangelists had become extraordinarily successful as well. In 1973, the Trinity Broadcasting Network was founded—the first of a number of evangelical media outlets. Much in the same way that talk radio served as an incubator for influential voices, so too did the Christian media network—Franklin Graham, Joel Osteen, Pat Robertson, and others became superstars. The Trinity Broadcasting Network would come under significant scrutiny for flagrant misuse of donated funds and would endure lurid scandals. Pastor John MacArthur, host of his own international radio show, would describe Trinity as a bunch of “religious quacks”21—a network “dominated by faith-healers, full-time fund-raisers, and self-proclaimed prophets” preaching the prosperity gospel. It appears to be a winning formula. Trinity is currently the country’s third-largest broadcast group and the world’s largest religious television network, with more than 18,000 television and cable affiliates and twenty-eight international networks, including the internet.22 They are currently estimated to reach some two billion viewers. Like right-wing talk radio, Trinity forms an important pillar of support for Donald Trump.

  FOX NEWS

  As depicted in the documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad, Frank Senko’s right-wing radicalization began when he started listening to Bo
b Grant and Rush Limbaugh’s radio shows during his work commute, but the deal would be further sealed when he starting watching Fox News. Fox News would do for conservative television what Limbaugh did for radio—cultivate an audience that would thrive on the kind of anti-mainstream-media, antigovernment, racist, xenophobic, hate-filled, and fear-based messaging that Trump would later serve up. And it can be said to have begun with one man—the late Roger Ailes.

  By all accounts, Ailes was a towering figure on the conservative media landscape, one who may have done more than anyone else to pave the way for Trump’s presidency. He got his start in TV early and was one of the first to see how the future of the American presidency lay in television. As the story goes, in 1967, a twenty-eight-year-old Ailes approached Richard Nixon backstage on The Mike Douglas Show, where Ailes worked as an executive producer. Nixon, who had performed abysmally in his televised 1960 presidential debate with John F. Kennedy, and who was appearing on Douglas’s show to drum up support, said to Ailes, “It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected.”23 Ailes shot back, “Television is not a gimmick.” Ailes became Nixon’s media consultant.

  One of Ailes’s greatest strengths was his insight into human nature: he understood that people like to think they are rational, but they are actually driven by emotions—anger, fear, nostalgia, even disgust.24 The role of television was to provoke emotional reactions in the viewer. He also knew that television—at least prime-time TV—was a shallow medium: “Television rarely tells the whole story,” he famously said, in a speech entitled “Candidate + Money + Media = Votes.” But superficial stories could be effective if they triggered the right emotions. He helped Nixon, a famously untelegenic presence, appeal to the public with what came to be known as the sound bite—a short phrase that would stick in people’s heads. With Ailes’s considerable help, Nixon won the presidency, as described in Joe McGinnis’s book, The Selling of the President 1968.25 (As it turns out, Nixon was also advised by consultant Roger Stone who, by then, had met Trump through lawyer Roy Cohn. Stone would remain friends with Trump for decades, advising him on his 2016 presidential campaign, and was eventually indicted for perjury and obstruction.)26