For her and for Cohen, leaving Trump’s orbit felt like escaping a cult—“the cult of Trumpworld,” as she put it. One person who appears still to be in Trump’s thrall is former White House press secretary Sean Spicer. Known for his combative and blustery defense of his boss, he would cover up and obfuscate his way through daily press briefings, repeating or defending demonstrably false assertions—most notoriously about the crowd size at the inauguration. Though he resigned after only six months, in his 2018 book, The Briefing: Politics, the Press, and the President, Spicer showers his former boss with praise: “I don’t think we will ever again see a candidate like Donald Trump. His high-wire act is one that few could ever follow. He is a unicorn, riding a unicorn over a rainbow. His verbal bluntness involves risks that few candidates would dare take. His ability to pivot from a seemingly career-ending moment to a furious assault on his opponents is a talent few politicians can muster.”
According to Spicer’s replacement, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, it may be a God-given talent. Sanders, who is an evangelical Christian, was an even more devoted spokesperson for Trump, deflecting, stonewalling, and lying with a completely straight, almost emotionless, face. She spoke with the conviction of a true believer, which she apparently is. The New Yorker called her “Trump’s Battering Ram.”9 Then there is presidential aide Kellyanne Conway, who, like Bannon, was appointed to Trump’s campaign by the Mercers. A longtime Republican strategist and expert in spin, she famously coined the term “alternative facts.” During the 2016 campaign, she defended Trump on national TV, sometimes with a slightly less straight face than Sanders. She appears now to be a Trump true believer, despite the fact that her husband, attorney George T. Conway, is a vocal critic of Trump. Like good soldiers, they fall in line, and even mirror him.
One of Trump’s most trusted aides was former White House communications director Hope Hicks, who was plucked from a Trump Organization PR firm. The former model, who became a gatekeeper of information flow to and from Trump, seemed to have a sixth sense about how and when to break news to him. She resigned in March 2018 after her subpoenaed appearance before the House Intelligence Committee, where she admitted to telling “white lies” on Trump’s behalf.10 She was made an executive vice president and chief communications director at Fox News.11 While Trump has surrounded himself with loyalists, some White House aides have apparently felt a greater allegiance to the country. Indeed, much to the president’s frustration and distress, Trump’s White House is one of the leakiest in American history. Yet his aides may have helped Trump’s presidency. The Mueller Report found that Trump’s efforts to obstruct the special counsel “were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”12
TRUMP’S BASE
The Christian Right
More than 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump and yet it’s important not to paint them with too broad a brush. In 2018, as migrant children were being separated from their parents, the National Association of Evangelicals, representing most of the major evangelical denominations, wrote a protest letter to Trump: “The Bible says that families came first, and government later.”13 Of Trump’s followers, those who attend church are generally more favorable to minorities than nonchurchgoing Trump supporters, according to Emily Ekins, director of polling and research fellow at the Cato Institute. “It seems church teachings can curb tribalistic impulses by regularly reminding worshipers that we are all God’s children,” Ekins writes, though such goodwill does not necessarily extend to the LGBTQ community.14
And yet those tribalistic impulses have been fanned by some churches, especially those of the New Apostolic Reformation, who want to turn America into a Christian nation, and who claim a religious-freedom justification to deny constitutional rights to customers, clients, or patients. We have already seen how leaders of the NAR appropriated Trump, casting him as a figure of deliverance. They are not the only ones to do so. According to a Fox News poll, nearly half of Republicans believe Trump was chosen by God to be president.15 But the NAR is especially effective at turning their members into true and active believers of Trump.
New Apostolic Reformation
With its network of “apostles” and “prophets,” each of whom claims to receive direct revelations from God, the NAR is a sophisticated movement using business strategies and complex systems approaches.16 NAR ministers tend to operate in a top-down, authoritarian, cultlike fashion, but they also communicate with one another and have their own hierarchical leadership structure. They all preach that the world is in the Last Days and that Judgment will be coming, and that behaviing faithfully is essential.
Their followers number over 10 million in America, and 300 million around the world.17 Many have been recruited through high-energy megachurches, as well as small ministries, Bible study groups, spiritual retreats, and an active online effort. Their meetings are carried out in a highly emotional, immersive, and experiential way. One might see demon possession, spiritual deliverance, faith healing, people acting “drunk in the Spirit,” and speaking in tongues, or glossolalia, in which believers think they are speaking ancient languages. Linguists who have analyzed the utterances say they are simply combining phonemes in a fluid way. In addition, there would be intense, emotion-driven chanting, singing, and praying, and the use of hypnotic visualizations. “It’s all about adrenaline. Music and preaching that is very emotively based—it’s all about getting people to experience what is said to be the Spirit,” said John Weaver, author of The New Apostolic Reformation: History of a Modern Charismatic Movement.18
The spirit world and supernatural beings play a big role in the NAR. According to Rachel Tabachnick, a former fellow at Political Research Associates, NAR is “an aggressively political movement within Christianity, [that] blames literal demonic beings for the world’s ills and stresses.” To combat these demons, and to deliver the world from darkness, followers are commanded to undertake a kind of spiritual warfare—to become spiritual warriors. In reality, they are being used to “advance a right-wing social and economic agenda,” Tabachnik writes.19
Inspired by their apostolic leaders, some of whom met with Trump at Trump Tower, followers of NAR would direct their energy toward getting Trump elected. They would spend hours doing intercessory prayers, making calls, electioneering, donating money, telling friends, and recruiting them to his cause. One follower, Mary Colbert, claimed to have heard from her husband about a firefighter, Mark Taylor, who had a vision in 2011 that God had chosen Trump to be president. To make the prophecy come true, she organized a prayer chain that grew into a worldwide movement, giving rise to a book and a film, The Trump Prophecy, produced by Liberty University, an evangelical school founded by televangelist and early Christian right leader Jerry Falwell.20 It is now the largest Christian university in the world. (Falwell’s son, Jerry Falwell, Jr., is a major figure in the Cult of Trump.)21 Promotional materials for The Trump Prophecy describe how God used this “team of passionate individuals to lead the nation into a fervent prayer chain that would accomplish one of the most incredible miracles our country has ever seen.”22
NAR members are among Trump’s most passionate and energetic believers, yet their spirit, savvy, and enthusiasm belies a darker reality. Many NAR ministries are high-demand groups that, according to former members and academics who study them, seem to fit the BITE model of recruitment and indoctrination. Members are conditioned to be dependent and obedient to the leader, who is said to give them “covering”—protection from evil spirits. Children and young adults are taught to mold themselves in the leader’s image. In many cults, members are taught to revere the group’s doctrine above all else. In NAR, a member’s first commitment is to the prophet or apostle, who is seen as a conduit to God, and so can set the group’s beliefs. The leader’s teachings often come in the form of experiences—with the spirit world, faith healings, hypnotic trances. If a follower doubts or questio
ns their experience, they are told that it is the work of demons, evil spirits, or Satan, or a lack of commitment on their part. They are told they must renew their commitment to be spiritual warriors to “win the world”—take it back from Satan and pave the way for the resurgence of a new Christian nation and world, in keeping with the Dominionist vision.
In much of NAR, as in most cults, complex realities are reduced to binary opposites: black versus white; good versus evil; spirit world versus physical world. Satan and demons are everywhere, tempting and trying to influence us. Demons are thought to possess outsiders or anyone who is critical of the group—parents, friends, ex-members, and reporters. Parishioners and followers are told they are “chosen” by God to carry out a mission. They are the special elite corps of humankind who will be rewarded by God for their efforts. Supporting and recruiting followers of Donald Trump is now a central feature of that mission.
This mission is shared between parent and child—and the NAR movement is careful about how they educate their children. Homeschooling is preferred. In fact, children from Christian backgrounds account for about 75 percent of American homeschooled children.23 From 2003 to 2007, the percentage of students homeschooled to “provide religious or moral instruction” rose from 72 percent to 83 percent.24 In this isolated environment, children are taught to be true believers, as shown in the documentary Jesus Camp. They are taught that homosexuality is abhorrent to God, science and secular history are illegitimate, and climate change is a hoax. As the film further shows, children are also often trained in political action, such as militant antiabortion activism, as a direct outgrowth of their religious teachings.25
The NAR mission is also shared between members, through discipling—essentially learning from one another by sharing experiences with God, telling one another what Christ has done for them personally. They basically indoctrinate one another. They are told that happiness comes through discipleship and that if they do what they are told, they will be loved—by Jesus and by everyone in the group. Members’ behavior is additionally controlled through a system of punishments and rewards. Competitions are used to inspire and shame members to be more productive. If things aren’t going well for the group—if recruitment is down, or people have left, or there is unfavorable media coverage—it is always individual members’ fault. They haven’t worked or prayed hard enough. Or it is due to their demons. To NAR believers, demons are real—they lie in wait, can drive people insane, or can even kill them. If a believer does become “possessed,” an exorcism is performed.
NAR followers come to live within a narrow corridor of fear, guilt, and shame. Unlike healthy organizations, which recognize a person’s right to choose to leave, this group tells members that people who leave are weak, sinful, gave into temptation, or the devil got to them. Phobia programming is a major mind control technique of any destructive cult, and NAR members are especially vulnerable. They are told that if they ever leave, terrible things will happen to them, their family, and humanity. If they do leave, they are shunned. Other members will be told that the person was possessed by the devil and to stay away from them. For those who grew up in one of these extreme groups, this means that all their family and friends will no longer speak or interact with them. As one might imagine, that alone is strong incentive to stay in the group.
Riddled with demons, doubt, and fear, NAR members are especially susceptible to Trump, a candidate who himself practiced a form of shunning, ejecting protesters and reporters from rallies; who emphasizes power and authority; who shames and bullies nonbelievers; and who uses fear and sees enemies lurking everywhere.
The Working Class
J. D. Vance grew up in the rust belt city of Middletown, Ohio, and the Appalachian town of Jackson, Kentucky—areas where the economy, and the chance for upward mobility, fell off in the 1970s and never fully recovered. In his book, Hillbilly Elegy, he writes simply and eloquently about the forgotten American working class. It is a class that includes people who have been marginalized by automation and other technological change and boxed in by systemic poverty. They are concerned about keeping their jobs, getting a paycheck, putting food on the table. They don’t have the luxury of thinking about second mortgages, college funds, or 401(k)s. Vance talks about the lack of agency felt by his neighbors—“a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.”26
Trump cultivated such disengaged, disenfranchised Americans while Hillary Clinton largely ignored them. They would be key to his win in 2016. Someone else with so much wealth, say, Mitt Romney or John Kerry, might have been seen as out of touch. Trump flaunted his wealth in a way that endeared him to them, claiming to have made his fortune with hard work, savvy negotiating skills, and by beating the “establishment” at its own game. During the first presidential debate, Trump bragged that avoiding federal taxes made him smart.27 He cast himself as an outsider, an underdog who understood the working-class malaise and would “drain the swamp” of political elites and bring change for the common man.
Trump read his audience and learned to speak their language. He saw their vulnerabilities—their alienation and distrust of government—and played to them. At rallies and in ads, he would utilize a kind of fourth-generation warfare strategy, blaming their situation on “global elites” who have “robbed our working class and stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”28 Trump spoke about saving the coal industry, using its decline as a metaphor for a dying way of life and promised to restore it, rather than help people move into twenty-first-century occupations. He spoke about rolling back climate change initiatives and stopping manufacturing jobs from being outsourced. He was going to lower their taxes, repeal Obamacare—which actually benefited many working-class people—and build a wall to keep migrants from stealing their jobs. He used all the influence techniques in his arsenal—inflaming resentments and anger, drumming up fear, exaggerating his accomplishments, insulting and demonizing the “other.” He also gave them a good story—a vision of a new America that looked a lot like the old one and providing assurance that he would “fix it.” He also put on a good show. They would come to love him for it.
The Republican Party
When Trump defeated a long list of Republican primary contenders, including Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, to win the nomination for president, most of the Republican Party fell in line. Even Senator Lindsey Graham—who called Trump a “kook,” a “jackass,” and “unfit for office” before the election—would become one of his staunchest supporters.29
Though many wondered if he was the right man for the job, Trump—who had earlier staked out a more liberal platform, saying he would preserve and defend social security, renegotiate NAFTA, pull back on Iraq and Afghanistan, and support LGBTQ rights—would reverse himself, pushing a pro-life, pro-gun, anti-immigration, anti-globalist, and anti-climate-change agenda. He was also boastful, self-confident, attention-getting, and emphatically anti-Clinton and Obama. That would help to persuade many of the rank and file, as well as politicians—congressional leaders, governors, mayors—to support him. Many Republican business and political leaders had enduring ties with the conservative Christian movement through their participation in such events as prayer breakfasts and Bible study groups sponsored by the Family and Ralph Drollinger’s Capitol Ministries. They would hold their nose and vote the ticket to get a Republican elected. With one or more Supreme Court seats at stake, it was imperative to stop Hillary Clinton.
The Republican Party is now widely seen as the party of Trump, to a large extent due to the same web of influence—spun by the media, religious, and populist groups—that helped Trump win the presidency. Trump’s approval rating with Republicans has never gone below 77 percent, according to Gallup.30 At the end of February 2019, it was 87 percent.31
Some of this can be explained by party loyalty. According to social science research, when it com
es to voting, party affiliation matters greatly. Most people stay with their party.32 This tends to be truer of Republicans than Democrats. When a candidate or elected official disappoints them, people will adjust their views of the candidate, or rationalize or justify their actions, rather than question the decision. Cult leader Lyndon LaRouche went from the extreme left, politically, to the extreme right, and yet most members remained loyal to him, believing that only he could save the world from ruin. It’s confirmation bias at work, and it has been working overtime for some Republicans. Trump’s core supporters—numbering about two in five of all voters, polls suggest—have stayed with him, despite his campaign violations, revelations of financial and sexual impropriety, disappointing midterm elections, and the longest government shutdown in history.33
In 2016, 42 percent of women voted for Trump. College-educated white women gave Trump 45 percent of their vote, and non-college-educated white women gave him 64 percent of their vote.34 Many have wondered how any woman, educated or not, could vote for a man who had cheated on all three of his wives and claimed to grab women’s genitals—especially in the #MeToo era. In their book, Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election, Christine A. Kray, Hinda Mandell, and Tamar Carroll set out to answer this question. “Republican women will mainly stand firm in their party affiliation. They are loyal to the party, even if political moderates and those who identify as the progressive Left have concluded that the GOP does not respect women’s voices and bodies,” they write.35 They found that while “Republicanism encompasses different visions of womenhood”—and Republicans like Iowa Senator Joni Ernst and New York Representative Claudia Tenney are providing new images of women who assert their power while staying true to the party—in general married women tend to vote in concert with their husbands.
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