Will Trump’s Trial Deflate his Personality Cult?

Will Seeing Him Diminished Correct the GOP's TINA (There Is No Alternative) Situation?

Last week’s essay addressed the question of how an authoritarian leader such as Trump would endure the experience of a criminal trial. Trump must feel rage and incredulity at being in this situation: a man who organizes spectacles around humiliating others now finds himself exposed and mocked daily (for his involuntary sleeping and farting).  

This week I want to consider how the unprecedented criminal trial of a former president may also bring us another uncommon spectacle: the real-time deterioration of a personality cult built on omnipotence, invincibility, and control, including intimidating others with his physical presence. These are all qualities and situations which the courtroom setting foils.

What might be the long-term effects of this tarnishing of his cult on his domination of the Republican Party and his devoted base?

Journalists and dismissed jurors who have seen Trump up close have commented on how diminished he looks with respect to his image at rallies, on television, and in the fantasies circulated by his fans.

This is unsurprising. This trial is a huge mental and physical exertion for Trump. The daily sketches from court artists show a man straining to cope: hardly the powerful, statuesque, and untouchable being that Trump’s cult, like all such personality cults, has presented to the public.

Former president Donald Trump turns to face the audience in the courtroom. Sketch by Jane Rosenberg. Pool Photo, via AP.

This situation will likely worsen as the Trump grows more worn out and angry and escalates his acting out with the judge, jurors, witnesses, and anyone connected to his trial. He has already violated the gag order imposed on him by Judge Juan Merchan so many times that the Secret Service is planning for his protection during a possible short-term confinement.

Already, a new Trump persona has appeared in the media: a Trump who has lost his magical touch and his aura of command. “Trump was going to dominate in the courtroom. Instead, he is shrinking,” reads the headline of a recent column by the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin.

What about Fox, the GOP’s de facto propaganda arm? The network cannot deny the vision of this reduced Trump. So anchors such as Jesse Watters resort to the familiar frame of Trump as a victim of the “deep state.” To explain his appearance, they label the requirement that Trump attend his trial, which means sitting in the courtroom for hours each day, as “cruel and unusual punishment.”

No matter that his lawyers, the jurors, the prosecution team, and the judge himself are sitting alongside him for the same length of time. As a “man above all other men,” the authoritarian cult leader cannot be treated like others.

Movement Within the Party: The TINA Problem

While it is still early in the trial, it is worth considering the effects of this shift in Trump’s image on the GOP, which has arranged itself around his personal desires and needs. Authoritarians use threat and corruption to impose the idea that they alone are qualified to lead the party and the nation: thus There Is No Alternative (TINA) to their domination.

TINA is why there is never talk of successors or other options in case something goes wrong. It is why the GOP is currently stuck around Trumpian hierarchies, such as Lara Trump heading the Republican National Committee, and loyalty requirements that police the speech and actions of GOP elites.

While Trump is currently the GOP nominee, the experience of seeing him in a vulnerable and haggard light could fuel existing private dissatisfaction with him as the face of the Republican party and give some GOP enablers an opening to violate Trump’s code of omertà (the Mafioso’s required silence out of loyalty).

That would mean more public criticism of him from within the Republican party. As the cult that legitimates his authority is undermined, movement within the party could occur. We are looking here for criticism by sitting GOP officials, since former ones such as Chris Christie and Mike Pence have often declared they will not endorse him and/or vote for him.

Movement Among Voters

Voters are a different story. Trump “intuitively grasps that for his followers his image as a strongman is on trial,” Sidney Blumenthal writes in the Guardian, and it is interesting that since the criminal trial started, GOP voters have expressed their dissatisfaction with the official nominee.

Nikki Haley received over 150,000 votes in the April 24 Pennsylvania primary –about 17% of the vote—even though she dropped out of the race in early March. We will see what happens in the upcoming May primaries of Maryland and five other states, and those to be held in June.

As a marketer, Trump would understand the Pennsylvania result as evidence there is something wrong with his product, with consumers saying they want something else. As an authoritarian, he will feel ever more vengeful and respond by attempting to consolidate his control over the party, including at the local and state levels.  

In any case, this trial might not move the needle among Republican voters. The latest Quinnipiac poll found that only 21% of all voters would be less likely to vote for him if he were convicted; 62% say it would not make a difference to their vote; and 15% say they would be more likely to vote for him.

Among Trump voters, only 5% say a conviction would make it less likely they would vote for him; 62% said it would not make a difference; and 31% say they would be more likely to vote for him.

The Durability of Personality Cults

One takeaway is not to expect a collapse of Trump’s cult soon. Even if Trump is confined due to being in contempt, he has long used the specter of his imprisonment to emotionally manipulate this followers, who vow they would support him if he ends up in prison.

It takes years to cultivate a personality cult, especially when you are forced to operate in a democracy, and it can take a long time for one to recede. Trump started his leader cult in 2015, building on established media relationships and associations of his billionaire persona with dominance and glamour. His strongman profile and propaganda points have been around for almost a decade.

History shows that shifts in perception that can lessen leaders’ holds over their followers usually happen over time. Ian Kershaw describes the end of a personality cult as a "slow deflation." Kershaw wrote about Adolf Hitler, whose leader cult was enforced by a one-party dictatorship. It took being bombed by the Allies for people to realize that the infallible defender of the nation they had worshipped was a propaganda creation.

In the USSR, Joseph Stalin’s personality cult famously disappeared almost overnight following Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech condemning such “cults of the individual.” Yet millions continued to be devoted to Stalin, and Vladimir Putin built on this subterranean longing when he started rehabilitating Stalin’s legacy.

Those are extreme situations, with dire consequences for nonconformity, but even in a democracy, disengagement from a leader cult such as Trump’s is a slow process. That’s because the behavior of many cult members is dictated by aversion to loss and intolerance of the cognitive dissonance that comes when the cult belief system is confronted with reality.

The more an individual has invested in the cult world, the more they are reluctant to admit to others, and to themselves, that they have misplaced their trust and love. Just as cultivation and conversion leverage strong positive emotions (belonging, safety), so does disengagement evoke strong negative emotions (shame, humiliation) that many wish to avoid.

This is another reason it is unfortunate that the New York court administration system decided to respect tradition and not to allow live video feed aired from the courtroom. This deprives cult followers of the chance to see their dynamic leader sleeping with their own eyes, rather than depend on sketches and second-hand descriptions they may see as biased.

One day, these people will emerge from the personality cult environment, but it will be on their own time. What the GOP and its local and state leaders do matters greatly in giving these people options other than Trump and a way to save face.