The Cult of Trump

by Steven Hassan

  THE SLIPPERY SLOPE

  In a New Republic article titled “Fox News Is Officially Trump TV,” Alex Shephard describes how far Fox News has slipped in journalistic principles since Ailes resigned in 2016. “Back in 2010, the network canceled a [Sean] Hannity appearance at a Tea Party rally, fearing that it would damage the institution’s journalistic integrity. That integrity is long gone, at least for the network’s late-night stars.”54 In November 2018, Hannity appeared on stage at a Trump rally, along with Fox News host Jeanine Pirro. Fox News had once promoted itself as “fair and balanced” but stopped using that motto in 2016.55 “Fox News has always been more of a Republican propaganda outlet than a news organization. It’s finally admitting it.”56

  Trump has filled numerous positions in his administration with people who once worked on Fox—Bill Shine, John Bolton, and Heather Nauert. Trump’s ties to Fox have strengthened in ways that are, according to former FCC chairman Reed Hundt, “extremely unusual, and the only way to explain them is that they’re pro-Fox, pro-Fox, and pro-Fox.”57 Jane Mayer describes the relationship between Fox News and the White House as a “revolving door,” where the influence goes back and forth in a seamless fashion.58

  New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has observed that television played a much bigger role in creating Trump than the internet did, even taking into account Russian and alt-right online interference. “It was television that convinced millions of Americans that Trump was a business genius despite his record of bankruptcy, and which gifted him countless hours of free advertising through unchecked coverage of his campaign rallies and Twitter feed.”59 Mark Burnett took a gamble when he asked Trump to do The Apprentice. It paid off hugely—for both of them. The same could be said of the conservative media machine, which provided Trump with a ready-made cult following, as well as a platform, and gained money and power in return. But they are not the only ones to be involved in a kind of quid pro quo with Trump. As candidate and president, Trump has been backed by an array of religious organizations for whom the stakes are even greater and include nothing less than turning our country into a nation run by and for Christians—a kingdom of heaven on earth.

  CHAPTER SEVEN The Influencers

  In early January 2017, as word was filtering out about Trump’s choices for cabinet posts, the British newspaper the Guardian observed that Trump’s list of picks revealed “a penchant for military brass, political outsiders, and Wall Street titans,” and “no particular faith in the value of prior government experience.”1 As they reviewed the list of candidates, a more bizarre pattern started to emerge. At the top was Rex Tillerson for secretary of state, a man with no governmental experience and close business ties to Vladimir Putin. For secretary of the Treasury there was Steven Mnuchin, a hedge funder and Hollywood producer who was known as a “foreclosure king.” Betsy DeVos, a critic of public education, was Trump’s nominee for secretary of education. For energy secretary there was Rick Perry, who had claimed during his own 2011 presidential primary run that he would eliminate the Department of Energy. And finally, Scott Pruitt, a climate change denier and longtime critic of efforts to protect the environment, was Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

  In those early days, some might have mistaken the outlandish array for a script for Saturday Night Live, or maybe Trump thumbing his nose at the establishment. Others might have seen them as the chaotic choices of a president-elect who never expected to win. But it was also possible to see in Trump’s roster a kind of strategy, one first articulated by the Christian right, to delegitimize the very structure of government and destabilize American citizens’ faith in facts, science, experts, and even democracy.

  A STRATEGY OF DELEGITIMIZATION

  Trump had questioned the legitimacy of government throughout his campaign. In speeches, tweets, and rallies, he described the Washington establishment as part of a rapacious “global power structure” with Hillary Clinton at the center. He would use Clinton’s use of a private email server to undermine her candidacy, famously ask for Russia’s help to further expose her, and claim that she was a felon who should be locked up. One of his most subversive moments came during the final presidential debate when he said that he might not accept the results of the general election if he lost. He was not simply attacking his opponent, he was attacking the legitimacy of a fundamental aspect of democracy—the electoral system.

  It was an unprecedented—and breathtaking—moment. Some might have seen it as Trump at his most outrageously provocative. And yet he was taking a page out of a book written by two Christian right strategists, Paul Weyrich and William S. Lind, called The New Conservatism. Though it was published in 2009, largely to mobilize a right-wing movement against Barack Obama, Weyrich and Lind had been developing and writing about their approach for decades. Lind was a member of a team of analysts who, in the late 1980s, had written about a military approach that sought to collapse enemies from within by disrupting their mental, emotional, and moral foundations, an approach they called fourth-generation warfare (4GW).2 Weyrich, a Christian right activist and cofounder of the conservative think tanks Heritage Foundation and Free Congress Foundation, believed the Christian right was engaged in an epochal struggle for dominance with an array of enemies—the left, secularists, gays, government, Jews, and anyone who opposed their vision of Christianity. They developed an approach to taking down perceived foes, one that used propaganda, confusion, a constant barrage of criticism, fearmongering, disruption, and other influence techniques, all aimed at undermining “the legitimacy of the dominant regime.”3

  Under their guidance, the Christian Right launched multiple propaganda campaigns, often through television, radio, movies, and documentaries—media that appeal to emotions rather than logic. Interestingly, Weyrich met Roger Ailes in 1973, and, according to independent writer and retired senior civilian intelligence analyst James Scaminaci III, would help lay the groundwork for Fox News. Of course, the internet opened up a whole new front for fourth-generation warfare—one that has been exploited not just by the Christian right but also by white supremacist and other alt-right groups, libertarian followers of the novelist Ayn Rand, the Russian government, and others. They have all been engaged in a massive effort to weaken, divide, disrupt, and delegitimize the U.S. government and install their own version of reality. Fourth-generation warfare is employed widely around the world. What is remarkable is that this sophisticated approach to modern warfare has been so systematically deployed by a powerful American religious faction against our own country.

  Just as Fox and the conservative media paved the way for Trump, so too the Christian right—along with the alt-right and libertarian groups—has provided Trump with messaging as well as a ready-made following. In the case of the Christian right, we are talking about millions of followers belonging to megachurches as well as small ministries‚ some of them quite authoritarian. Their followers are politically trained and ideologically educated to spread out, often with cultlike zeal, and campaign for Trump, whom they see as helping them fulfill their own mission of establishing a kingdom of heaven on earth.4

  All presidents come into office surrounded by a web of influence—donors, party officials, religious groups, political action committees, and lobbyists. But never has a president been enmeshed with such antigovernment and antidemocratic interests. Notable among Trump’s donors in this regard are Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer, who, like many wealthy elites, tend to put business before country, and who rescued Trump’s campaign in the eleventh hour by installing the norm-bashing, destabilizing, disruptive—if not outright antidemocratic—figure of Steve Bannon as campaign manager. As part owners of Breitbart, they also played a significant role in shaping the right-wing media that contributed to Trump’s rise. A fuller discussion of the role played by wealthy billionaires and corporations is beyond the scope of this book. But as Jane Mayer observed in her authoritative book, Dark Money, they had a huge hand in getting Trump electe
d.5

  PUTIN AND RUSSIA

  Few delegitimization efforts have had the scope and depth of the campaign waged by Russia, which is to be expected from a country with such antidemocratic leanings—and such a robust and long-standing mind control apparatus. In his book The Plot to Destroy Democracy, counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance describes how Russia deployed thousands of cyberterrorism agents to find ways to hack into the American psyche, systematically targeting individual Americans with lies, misinformation, and false narratives tailored to their interests and framed in ways that were intended to confuse, divide, and pit Americans against one another. Russia purchased Facebook ads for phony groups like “African-Americans for Hillary” that urged voters to tweet instead of going to the polls, in order to avoid the lines.6 They created Facebook accounts in the names of nonexistent individuals, like “Melvin Redick,” that directed people to links that provided false information about Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and other Trump “enemies.”7 They used many persuasion and mind control tactics that cults use—lying and deceiving (in fact, the whole enterprise was based on a grand deception, namely that the accounts were real); confusing and spreading doubt with alternative facts and narratives; blaming and dividing; branding and labeling; distracting and reframing; using loaded language;and most of all spreading fear by constructing false enemies.8 As Nance describes, the Russian plan was to “destroy a democracy by using the democracy.” Months before the 2016 election, members of the intelligence community—including the FBI, the CIA, and the National Security Agency—began investigating and concluded that Russian meddling took place during the 2016 elections. They presented their results on January 6, 2017.

  In her 2018 book Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, the University of Pennsylvania’s Kathleen Hall Jamieson9 used statistical data to argue that, through their social media campaign, Russia influenced enough voters in key states to tip the election to Trump.10 In addition, the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and the Clinton campaign.11 There is evidence that they infiltrated actual U.S. voting systems.12 Some people pointed to other factors that may have played a role in Clinton’s loss, including the way she waged her ground game, neglecting to campaign effectively in Michigan and Wisconsin.13 14

  THE MUELLER PROBE

  In July 2016, then FBI director James Comey launched a counterintelligence investigation into possible ties between Russia and the Trump election campaign. Trump fired Comey on May 9 of the following year. About a week later, former FBI director Robert Mueller was appointed to lead the investigation and also to take over existing FBI investigations that Comey had been conducting before he was fired, including those looking into Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former national security advisor Michael Flynn’s ties to Russia.

  On April 18, 2019, a redacted version of Mueller’s report was released to the public. (This came several weeks after Trump-appointed Attorney General William Barr released a four-page summary that would make the report appear far less damning for the president than it actually was.) Any doubts about the effectiveness of the Russian interference campaign were laid to rest by the report, which laid out in unprecedented detail, across nearly 200 pages of the 448-page document, the steps Russia took to spread disinformation, divide the nation, and undermine the 2016 election in an attempt to get Trump elected. It confirmed—and expanded upon—what the intelligence community had discovered about fake social media accounts and hacked emails, and found evidence that at least one county in Florida had been hacked by the Russians. It also outlined the role played by WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, and confirmed that he had received the emails from Russia, and not from a DNC employee, as he had claimed.

  Though Mueller could not find conclusive evidence of “criminal conspiracy” between Trump’s campaign and Russia, he found “numerous links” between Trump campaign officials and the Russians. He examined ten instances of possible obstruction of justice by Trump and though he was unable to convict, his report made it clear that Trump’s obstruction of the FBI and special counsel investigation “crossed constitutional boundaries and could have merited criminal prosecution if not for a Justice Department policy against indicting sitting presidents,” wrote Noah Bookbinder in The New York Times.15 Even some in the conservative media agreed. “Depending on how you look at them, it might be enough to prosecute,” said Fox News judge Andrew Napolitano. “But it did show a venal, amoral, deceptive Donald Trump, instructing his aides to lie and willing to help them do so.”16 In May 2019, over 980 federal prosecutors, including Republicans and Democrats, had signed a statement posted on Medium that Trump’s conduct as described in the Mueller report “would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.”17

  All along, Trump has repeatedly described the investigation as “a disaster,” “a hoax,” “a witch hunt,” and “a disgrace” promulgated by the “fake news” media. His rants are reminiscent of cult leaders like Lyndon LaRouche, who would go on tirades about the conspiracy against him on the part of the CIA, the Jews, and the British government, and who think they are above the law. Trump described the Mueller investigation as a personal attack rather than a bipartisan investigation conducted by a Republican. Mueller and his colleagues would indict thirty-four people, including Flynn and Manafort, and also Trump campaign members George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, and Roger Stone. In addition, Mueller indicted thirteen Russian nationals, three Russian companies, and twelve members of the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU.18

  Though Trump may not have criminally conspired, he has appeared, on occasion, to undermine American interests and institutions in favor of Russia. In July 2016, at a news conference in Florida, Trump made his famous request. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’ll be able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said, referring to deleted emails from the private account Hillary Clinton used when she was secretary of state. Later, as president, he would hold a private meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki during which he would confiscate his translator’s notes and take Putin’s word over that of the CIA, FBI, and NSA regarding Russian interference. He would also compliment Putin’s strength as a leader. Many have observed that Trump seems to be in Putin’s thrall. It is worth asking the question, Why? Through much of his campaign, Trump was pursuing a lucrative deal to build a hotel in Moscow, as his former lawyer Michael Cohen revealed in testimony before Congress. In truth, Trump’s ties to Russia go back decades.

  TRUMP VISITS MOSCOW

  When Trump first visited Russia, Putin was a low-level KGB agent in Germany, trying to recruit assets. According to author Luke Harding, Trump’s first visit to Russia in 1987 was the result of just such a “fishing expedition.”19 Trump was invited to Moscow by the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Yuri Dubinin, at a time when the KGB was actively seeking recruits. It would be the first of several visits during which Trump was wined and dined—often under twenty-four-hour surveillance.

  On September 2, 1987, not long after he returned from his first trip, Trump took out a full-page ad in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post, blasting American foreign policy.20 Framing it as an open letter, Trump made his case for “why America should stop paying to defend countries that can defend themselves”—a foreshadowing of his later critique, as president, of NATO. The following month, he gave what sounded like a campaign speech in New Hampshire, one that seemed more congruent with the Kremlin’s political goals than with America’s.21

  Trump’s ties to Russia appear to have strengthened in the early 1990s. Two of his businesses, the Trump Taj Mahal casino and the Plaza Hotel, had gone bankrupt and the Trump Shuttle folded. He was massively in debt when Russian oligarchs, flush with cash, rescued him. “He could not get anybody in the Unite
d States to lend him anything. It was all coming out of Russia. His involvement with Russia was deeper than he’s acknowledged,” writes Michael Hirsh in his article “How Russian Money Helped Save Trump’s Business” in Foreign Policy.22

  Initially the bailout came in the form of real estate partnerships and the purchase of Trump condos. In the early 2000s, Trump began working with two Russians who would help him make his transformation “from builder to brander.” As Hirsh observes, by 2015, when he announced his candidacy, Trump was already “enmeshed in this mysterious overseas flow of capital.”23

  A CLOSER LOOK

  Some of Trump’s policy decisions since becoming president appear to support or advance Russian objectives, including weakening NATO, slashing the State Department budget, loosening ties with our allies, and ultimately weakening America’s power and prestige. Withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal was yet another Trump move that appeared to serve Israel and Saudi Arabia more than it did our own or NATO’s interests.

  Trump has yet to take a stand against Russian aggression upon foreign territories, such as Ukraine, as well as Russia’s continued support of Assad’s regime in Syria. He has ignored, downplayed, or outright rejected the findings from the American intelligence community about how Russia infiltrated social media to influence the election. At the 2018 Russian–United States summit in Helsinki, he stood before the international press and sided with Putin, saying that the Russian leader “was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,” a stinging rebuke to the American intelligence community. He praised the Russian president as “very, very, strong” and pinned the tensions between the two countries on “years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity.” It was at this same conference that Putin acknowledged that he had wanted Trump elected. Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum later commented in The Atlantic, “We still do not know what hold Vladimir Putin has on Donald Trump, but the whole world has now witnessed the power of its grip.”24