The Cult of Trump

by Steven Hassan

  Ailes would later become a media consultant for Ronald Reagan. He also helped George H. W. Bush come from behind in 1988 to defeat his presidential opponent Michael Dukakis, using what he called his “orchestra pit theory.” As he told TV host Judy Woodruff: “Let’s face it, there are three things that the media are interested in: pictures, mistakes, and attacks… You have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit; who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”27 It’s a theory we see play out every day in the Trump presidency. Ailes realized almost from the start that television would be the future of American presidential politics. As he told McGinniss shortly before Nixon’s win, “This is the way they’ll be elected forevermore. The next guys up will have to be performers.”28

  In 1996, Ailes teamed up with Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch to create a cable television network—Fox News. Appealing to Limbaugh’s ideological audience, Fox News soon towered over the television landscape and it would do so by using and adapting for a visual medium many of the techniques that Limbaugh used. In her book Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control, neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor outline the tactics that Fox and other conservative media use to indoctrinate viewers:

  lie and skew

  confusion and doubt

  blame and divide

  brand and label

  language and framing

  fearmongering

  bullying and shaming.

  Ailes would use every trick in the book, but mostly he would use fear. A die-hard Republican, he flooded the media landscape with conservative messages and narratives designed to conjure up fear and ultimately to recruit followers—paving the way for Trump. “Fear, in fact, is precisely what Ailes is selling: His network has relentlessly hyped phantom menaces like the planned ‘terror mosque’ near Ground Zero,” writes Tom Dickinson in a Rolling Stone piece, “How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory.” “To watch even a day of Fox News—the anger, the bombast, the virulent paranoid streak, the unending appeals to white resentment, the reporting that’s held to the same standard of evidence as a late-October attack ad—is to see a refraction of its founder, one of the most skilled and fearsome operatives in the history of the Republican Party.”29

  Ailes would also shape the internal culture of the network. “Roger Ailes is not on the air. Roger Ailes does not ever show up on camera. And yet everybody who does is a reflection of him,” writes Dickinson. As it turns out, the Fox culture would include misogyny and outright sexual harassment, costing millions of dollars and leading to the resignation of Ailes and popular host Bill O’Reilly.

  Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch had his own agenda—namely, extending his global empire and making money. While he left the running of Fox mostly to Ailes, with Ailes’s departure Murdoch would continue Fox’s rightward push, indeed giving it a shove with the candidacy of Donald Trump. Though he initially considered Trump’s presidential aspirations to be a joke, he would exploit Trump’s candidacy and election to further his own goal of blurring the line between his media empire and governments around the world. Indeed, he would be a major influencer to help engineer the Brexit vote and elevate Theresa May to prime minister. “To see Fox News as an arm of the Trump White House risks missing the larger picture,” write Mahler and Rutenberg. “It may be more accurate to say that the White House—just like the prime ministers’ offices in Britain and Australia—is just one tool among many that [the Murdoch] family uses to exert influence over world events.”

  Today Fox’s influence continues as Lachlan Murdoch takes the helm from his aging father. In 2018, according to Adweek, “Fox News averaged its largest prime time audience in the 22-year history of the network, and for the third year in a row, finished as the most-watched network on cable television.”30 This means billions of dollars in revenue each year.

  THE RIGHT-WING PROPAGANDA FEEDBACK LOOP

  Money may help to explain the rightward push, but according to Harvard scholars Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, there is something else at play. They analyzed millions of TV news stories, together with Twitter and Facebook shares and YouTube videos, and found that the right-wing media were much more likely to promote the disinformation, lies, and half-truths peddled by the Russian propaganda effort as well as conspiracy theories and misinformation coming from white supremacist and extremist sources like the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer. In their 2018 book, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, they argue that “the right-wing media ecosystem differs categorically from the rest of the media environment.” In mainstream left and centrist media, there is a commitment to observing agreed-upon journalistic standards of honest reportage. Furthermore, there is a media ecosystem that has within it an error detection and correction mechanism in which other journalists and media entities point out mistakes and errors made by others. These should be acknowledged and corrected publicly. Retractions and apologies are the standard. This mechanism is absent in the right-wing media ecosystem, creating a kind of propaganda feedback loop, whereby uncorrected lies and distortions are circulated and promulgated from one media outlet to the next, for example from extreme sources, like conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s InfoWars site, to Breitbart to Fox. If a demonstrably false story gets a lot of world publicity, it might be taken down, but no public acknowledgment that it was wrong is given. “It’s a pattern that is growing more pronounced as we move forward in the Trump presidency,” said Roberts at a talk at Harvard.31

  THE FAR RIGHT

  One of the biggest suppliers of erroneous hate-filled rhetoric is Alex Jones. He’s a popular figure who had more than 2.4 million subscribers on his YouTube channel,32 more than 6.7 million people a month on his website, InfoWars, and two million listeners on his syndicated radio show.33 In 2018, he was kicked off YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Spotify for violating their rules and because he was inciting his followers with hate speech to do violence, and to harass people like the parents of victims of the Sandy Hook school shootings.34 A longtime conspiracy theorist operating out of his basement in Austin, Texas, he has argued that the U.S. government was involved in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, that 9/11 was “an inside job,” that no one was actually killed at Sandy Hook, and that the Apollo 11 moon landing never happened. These sound like fringe ravings, akin to the lunatic theories put forth by notorious cult leaders like Lyndon LaRouche, who claimed there was a global conspiracy with the queen of England, the Freemasons, and the Jewish bankers to ruin the world, and Jim Jones, who claimed that the evil capitalists were out to kill him and his members.

  Alex Jones has millions of followers including, it appears, Donald Trump. On December 2, 2015, Trump appeared on the show, praising Jones and promising that “I will not let you down.”35 During the campaign, Trump and Jones shared the same alternative facts—like the infamous birther claim that President Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. He is also responsible, according to Network Propaganda, for taking and disseminating more than a thousand false propaganda stories from RT (the Russian state-run news organization), serving as the critical entry point for those false stories into the American media ecosystem. In 2018, Jones was sued by parents of children murdered in the shooting at Sandy Hook. He would later admit that the children had been killed36 and blamed “psychosis” for his actions, though he refused to acknowledge that his actions added to the grief and distress of the families. Adding salt to their wounds—and true to his conspiracy-mongering leanings—he claimed that the lawsuits were retaliation for Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential bid. His statement came only a few days after prominent Sandy Hook parent Jeremy Richman committed suicide.37

  Nor is Jones the only peddler of conspiracy theories in the right-wing media firmament. Breitbart News began as a conservative news and opinion website in 2007 by Andrew Breitbart, a conservative commentator who also cofounded The Huffington Post. W
hen Breitbart died in 2012, Robert and Rebekah Mercer bought the company and installed Stephen K. Bannon, a former investment banker for Goldman Sachs, as head. Under the new leadership, Breitbart News moved further right, veering into conspiracy-theory territory with outrageous headlines about Democratic politicians, including Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton.38

  Breitbart has also been instrumental in radicalizing the anti-

  immigration wing of the Republican Party—and the change has been dramatic. It is worth remembering that Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were strong supporters of immigration. During the 1980 GOP debate, candidate Reagan said of Mexico, “Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems?”39 That Republicans are now talking about a Wall instead of a fence is a measure of how far they have come, with help not just from Breitbart News but also from Fox News and other conservative media outlets who have trumped up fear of invaders to sell Trump—and their own products.

  CORPORATE INFLUENCE

  Even mainstream media is not immune to biased and misleading reporting. In 1988, media critic and scholar Edward S. Herman and linguist and activist Noam Chomsky wrote a scathing critique of the idea that the mass media objectively informs the public. As they laid out in their book, Manufacturing Consent, instead of acting as a check on the three branches of government—the fourth estate—mass media is carrying out a kind of state propaganda function by promoting the capitalist ideology of the media companies’ powerful owners.40 They identified five factors that may contribute to distorting the news:

  1. Ownership: Media firms are part of huge conglomerates, many of which have interests far outside the journalistic sphere. In cases where journalism might interfere with the conglomerate’s profit, the interest of the conglomerate takes priority over the interest of journalism or the public.

  2. Advertising: Advertising creates perverse incentives for media companies, transforming their audience’s attention into a product. As the media companies are ultimately beholden to whoever pays them, their priority is to hold the audience’s attention above all else, with little regard for their audience’s well-being. Without regulations guiding ethical activities, people have little recourse against corporate malfeasance.

  3. Sourcing: Journalism cannot be an effective check on power because the very system encourages complicity with governments, corporations, and other newsworthy institutions. Journalists rely on access to important sources, which might be limited or revoked if critical pieces are published. Often they are implicitly encouraged to simply repeat the information they receive.

  4. Flak: Powerful institutions might try to divert attention from unfavorable stories by discrediting and demonizing their source. Flak—a term that derives from the German word for anti-aircraft fire—can be directed at journalists, whistle-blowers, or sources, and is a way for powerful people and organizations to manage public information.

  5. Common enemy: To manufacture consent, you need an enemy—a target, a villain to fear: communism, terrorists, immigrants. It helps corral public opinion. According to Herman and Chomsky, this is done “partly to get rid of people you don’t like but partly to frighten the rest. Because if people are frightened, they will accept authority.41

  Today the largest corporations operate internationally and no longer feel obligated to one country, like the United States. The world has become increasingly interconnected and complex. However, those who hold the key to power are an elite minority. It is safe to assume that they can be counted on to make decisions that will perpetuate their power.

  MONEY TALKS

  As David Foster Wallace wrote in a 2005 Atlantic piece, “It is a fallacy that political talk radio is motivated by ideology. It is not. Political talk radio is a business, and it is motivated by revenue. The conservatism that dominates today’s AM airwaves does so because it generates high Arbitron ratings, high ad rates, and maximum profits.”42 The situation is exacerbated by the increasing homogeneity of the media landscape as media conglomerates solidify their hold. Today, more than 90 percent of all media in the United States is owned by just six companies.43 Clear Channel Communications44 owns more than 1,000 radio stations, and the Sinclair Broadcasting Group45 owns almost 500 local channels. This consolidation was made possible by the Telecommunications Act of 1996,46 which eliminated regulations on ownership that had been in place since 1934, and which allowed for “anyone to enter any communications business—to let any communications business compete in any market against any other.”47

  A blatant example of corporate influence is the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Among their hundreds of stations are many local ABC, CBS, and Fox affiliates. In early 2018, the company faced harsh criticism when it required local broadcasters to read from a company-generated script decrying the danger that mainstream outlets and “false news” posed to democracy. Timothy Burke, a video director at Deadspin, clipped together recordings of the announcers reading, in near unison, the mandated script, often without a trace of irony. The video went viral and quickly led to widespread criticism.48 Former news anchor Dan Rather commented, “News anchors looking into the camera and reading a script handed down by a corporate overlord, words meant to obscure the truth not elucidate it, isn’t journalism.… It’s propaganda. It’s Orwellian. A slippery slope to how despots wrest power, silence dissent, and oppress the masses.”49 Trump, evidently noting his own positive coverage by Sinclair, responded to the scandal: “So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased. Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke.”50

  In March 2019, conservative Nexstar Media Group purchased Tribune Media in a $6.4 billion transaction, making it the single largest television group in the United States. Time will tell how much this behemoth will influence American minds by dominating local programming.51

  MOON: MEDIA MOGUL

  Clearly, there is a lot at stake. After all, the average American household watches almost eight hours of television a day—and that’s in addition to other types of screen time.52 That’s a lot of time for TV networks to get their messages across—which is why cults have been so keen to enter the media market. Of course, the media surrounding the Cult of Trump is vaster and more complex than that surrounding most cults. The one cult group that comes anywhere close is my former group, the Moon organization, which has owned and operated hundreds of businesses, including media companies. The Moonies founded The Washington Times newspaper in 1982, but they have also owned dozens of other media entities, such as United Press International, purchased in 2000.53 In the 1990s, they owned TV broadcast facilities in Washington, D.C., that were used by most of the major networks including ABC and NBC. The organization has been heavily involved in advancing right-wing media not only in the United States but around the world. Their official line was that it is smart to invest in communication and media. But the cult’s ultimate goal was to take over media companies so that they could control messaging. It was all part of Moon’s grand scheme to take over the world.

  Before the fall of the Soviet Union, a strong political focus of all of Moon’s myriad organizations was the fight against communism, especially in North Korea and China. To put it in simple but bizarre-sounding terms, the Moonies believed that Christians and citizens of the free world were locked in a mortal struggle with the satanic forces of “materialistic communism.” If they failed to fight communism, they would grow weak and fall. The true solution—indeed, the world’s salvation—lay in establishing a theocracy with Moon at the helm: God would rule the world through him and his minions. Working through The Washington Times and other media companies was one way to get his message out. Though the newspaper was controversial for some time, it eventually got a foothold in the media landscape. Most people don’t know about its ownership or don’t care. Among some conservative readers, it has enjoyed
significant influence both inside Washington and internationally. Former president Ronald Reagan said it was his favorite newspaper and that he read it every day. So did George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush.

  And yet there have been notable critics. The newspaper’s founding editor, James Whelan, resigned in 1984 to protest what he claimed were attempts by the publisher to alter the news. Later that year, in a talk at the National Press Club, Whelan called the Times a “Moonie newspaper.” The paper trashed him and insisted that it was not controlled by Moon. Another editor, William Cheshire, resigned in 1987 claiming that Unification Church executives were controlling the paper’s editorial policy. Moon said in a 1991 speech that by then, nearly a billion dollars had been spent to run the Times. At least another billion has been spent since then though, according to The Washington Post, the total amount is closer to $2 billion. Why spend this kind of money on a paper that has not shown a profit? Where does the money come from? How could a convicted felon—Moon—be permitted to own a newspaper in American’s capital in the first place? Presumably, for Moon, the benefits went beyond financial profit. They included political influence in the United States and other countries and the ability to gather information and intelligence under the guise of journalism.