Trump's Greatest Success: His Personality Cult

And a special free Lucid event on March 31, 8-9pmET

Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. Lucid’s third anniversary celebration continues with a new post and an announcement about two events. One is our regular weekly Friday Q&A for paying subscribers. It will be held on Friday, March 29, 1-2pmET. Our guest is Jeff Goodell, New York Times bestselling author of, most recently, the book The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. He has covered climate change for more than two decades for Rolling Stone and many other publications. He was a 2016 New America Fellow and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. 

Paying subscribers will receive a link to register for the Zoom gathering on Friday morning. If you'd like to join us, you can sign up as paid or upgrade your subscription. Here's a coupon for 30% off for a year, in honor of Lucid's third anniversary:

And on Sunday, March 31, 8-9pmET, I am holding a special event for all Lucid subscribers. For this larger-scale event, I will be taking questions ahead of time: please send your questions to me at contact.ruthbenghiat@gmail.com by Sunday morning (yesterday’s post said Monday, but this was an error).

You can register for this free event here. Make sure to check spam if you register and don’t see a join link from Zoom in your inbox. It is often there.

___________________

Autocratic personality cults are a continuing theme of Lucid, and I have focused on how they work, how they involve enablers, and what their appeal is for the authoritarian’s followers. Today’s post, about Trump's personality cult, combines new writing with links to some of my favorite Lucid essays on the subject.  

As early as 2015 I saw that Trump had the abilities needed to construct a formidable personality cult, and in Jan. 2016 I published this essay which predicted that if Trump won the GOP nomination, he would develop a charismatic leader cult along the lines of those constructed by Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi. At the time, it seemed far-fetched to many —we were six months out from him even receiving the nomination— but it appeared logical enough to me.

Personality cults require messaging machines and performances that stage the autocrat’s domination of all those around him, up to and including his ritual humiliation of ministers and party elites. Americans have now seen many of these performances first-hand by GOP politicians, and they are all the more pathetic for modeling submission to a man who is not even in power at present.

A June 2023 essay examined why the GOP is “still in thrall to Trump” and the place of corruption in that process. “Accepting the leader’s lies and violence ties them to him, making them partners in his crimes and thus vulnerable to being exposed,” I conclude. Cue the March 27, 2024 decision of the California State Bar that Trump's former lawyer, John Eastman, should be disbarred for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

Paying consequences for actions taken on behalf of the leader, and seeing the punishments faced by their peers (indictments, mug shots all over social media, as happened to Mark Meadows, who was named a co-conspirator of Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election) does not mean the enablers will disengage from the cult. Instead, those in legal trouble share the leader's desperation for a collective return to power and redouble their efforts to make that happen so that he can issue pardons and executive orders to make their troubles vanish for good. 

That’s why I conclude in my essay on Meadows: “Although there is a shade of humiliation, there is no visible remorse. Like so many others in the GOP, Meadows would likely do it all again if he knew it would succeed.”

And although Republican National Committee head Lara Trump now claims that the 2020 election is "in the past," this is window dressing. Trump and his enablers will never stop claiming that he won, because he would be nothing without the fiction of a victory that was stolen from him.

The Big Lie is the basis of his personality cult and the foundation of Trumpism as it stands in 2024. Trump as a wronged figure is fundamental to the victimhood persona that keeps his supporters tied to him, to the twisting of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol into a patriotic and morally righteous act, and to the depiction of the thugs involved in that coup attempt as "hostages" of a tyrannical regime that Trumpism must vanquish.

And since Trump is now selling Bibles, and comparing himself to Jesus, here is my essay on the link between an autocrat’s corruption and claims of his piety. The more his crimes come to light, the more he must surround himself with a halo of purity. It is one of the oldest authoritarian scams, and a mainstay of personality cults.

Evangelical leaders pray with Trump at the White House during his 2019 impeachment. Joyce Boghosian/White House

As the campaign proceeds, look for Trump to emphasize that he is the protagonist of a grand moral drama, and that he alone can save America.

And keep in mind the power of conviction to deflate such cults. Here is an interview I did in April 2022 with Politico magazine. Conviction means the strongman is exposed as not untouchable, and his aura of invincibility and specialness is shattered as he is held to the same standards as anyone else. In the words of Judge Tanya Chutkan, Trump's status as a former president did not give him "the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens."

No other politician has been able to construct such a powerful personality cult while operating in a democracy with an open media environment. Berlusconi came close, but he owned all of Italy's private television networks while he was in office, as well as the major television advertising companies, and he was able to engineer the dismissal of critics from state television.

We can laugh at personality cults and the ridiculous-seeming images of macho leaders they generate, but they are key to the success of strongmen, and can be devastating aids to the weakening and destruction of democracies.