He Was Their President

Sole-proprietorship is, I think, a core principle of cult membership. Cults are not for outsiders and they aren’t particularly friendly to those “who are not us.” Donald Trump never made the slightest effort to be the President of the United States of America. Trump was only interested in the people who voted for him, who gave him their money and unconditional support, and who were willing to destroy the country the moment he asked them to do that; and he did and they obeyed.

Likewise, those people had never had “their own President” before. Even the worst of the past Republican Presidents at least pretended to care about the whole country. The Donald told them everything they wanted to hear and made it clear that he didn’t care about anyone but them; his followers, his “people,” his cult. Trump told them there was something special about being “uneducated,” unskilled, unintelligent and clueless, paranoid, lazy, and white. Their almost universal inability to “keep up” with everything from technology to the economy to popular culture united them into a crowd of has-beens who thought they were important because they belonged to the Cult of Donald.

That is a powerful message, even if it is all a lie that even Donald couldn’t maintain in private. Telling losers and fools that they are winners and geniuses is a tried-and-true formula for cult leaders and it is, historically, a too-often-tested formula for disaster.