The Cult of Trump and Other Cults: How They Work
Eerie, Indiana knew the devil was in the details
On April 12, 1992, in the town of Eerie, Indiana, a man who introduced himself as “The Donald” walked into a store and made an offer to the shopowner that the shopowner found too irresistible to refuse.
The Donald claimed he was a successful businessman, and said he could make this business owner richer than his wildest dreams. The Donald said he would flood the local television airwaves with commercials for this store, and that within 72 hours everything in the store would be sold.
The business owner was ecstatic and signed a contract with The Donald without looking at the fine print.
The advertising campaign began; the ads appeared simultaneously on every television station in town. The messaging in the commercials was so subliminally pernicious that every person watching—and this happened to be every person in town—was turned into a shopping zombie.
The zombies then descended on the store, hell-bent on shopping, and within a few hours, everything in the store was gone.
The Donald had an ulterior motive: he was looking to steal the soul of every shopper, because he didn’t have a soul of his own. It turned out The Donald was the devil in disguise, and had come to Eerie, Indiana to carry out his devious plan.
Fortunately, he was thwarted by an IRS agent, whom, just as The Donald was in the final stages of carrying out his plan, confronted The Donald with the fact that he had not paid taxes in years and was going to be audited.
This sent The Donald into an angry tailspin and caused him to plummet back to Hell, freeing the shoppers from their zombieness and saving them from his evil clutches.
You may have figured out by now this isn’t a true story. And you may think it’s a story written in the last few years.
It’s actually an episode from the horror science fiction television series Eerie, Indiana, that aired for one season on NBC, from September 15, 1991 to April 12, 1992.
The episode I detailed, called “Zombies in P.J.s” premiered on April 12, 1992.
Got that? This episode, which is a direct dig at Donald Trump, first aired over 30 years ago.
You see, thirty years ago it was common knowledge that Donald Trump was a con man (and to some, the devil in disguise). He had been making a name for himself since the 1970s, and by 1992 he was the epitome of American excess, and widely seen as a buffoon and punchline for countless jokes.
Yet, some 24 years and seven months from when that episode premiered, The Donald had the last laugh, when he was elected president of the U.S.
Obviously, he couldn’t have been elected if he was still widely seen as a joke. By 2016, he had developed a rabid following, centered around a cult of personality, and that’s what carried him to the presidency.
Even though in 1992 it was well known how much of a grifter he was, and his personal bankruptcies and business failures were public knowledge and spoken about widely across the media, his continued public persona after 1992 convinced enough people that he wasn’t the person the general consensus clearly stated he was.
And to this day, the cult of Donald Trump has only gotten stronger and more hardened. It’s been aided and abetted by other cults—the cult of QAnon, the cult of the stolen election, the cult of messianic devotion, the cult of January 6, and other cults—to the point it has positioned the United States into a murky territory where fact and fiction are increasingly difficult to filter and separate.
How does this happen? How are people so easily swayed to fall in line and become members of a cult?
It’s easier than you think.
All it takes is a psychopath with no qualms about pulling the wool over people’s eyes. Some do it for financial gain, while others do it because of their own messianic delusions, which lead them to desire power over others.
Sadly, the followers look up to the leader and without question, believe everything they are told—hook, line, and sinker.
If they do question, they are advised that they are not a true believer and are kicked out of the cult.
Take Jim Jones, who led his cult, The People’s Temple, into a mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. More than 900 of his followers, including Jones, died.
Or Marshall Applewhite, who told the followers of his cult, Heaven’s Gate, that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ, the end of the world was upon them, and that God was an alien. He encouraged them to give away all their money and cut off contact with their families. In March 1997, 39 followers, including Applewhite, died together in a mass suicide.
Then there’s Keith Raniere, whose group, Nxivm, which began in 1998, was infamous enough to garner its own HBO docuseries, “The Vow.” Nxivm attracted many highly intelligent and successful people, all who saw Raniere as one of the smartest people on the planet. They believed his teachings had the potential to liberate mankind.
When disciples saw the truth and left—he had created a sex cult in which women were branded and then served up to satisfy his lust—Raniere went after them with a vengeance, thanks to one of his benefactors, an heiress to the Seagram’s fortune, who bankrolled his legal Armageddon against defectors, in the process financially destroying his self-perceived enemies.
Raniere finally got his comeuppance in October 2020, when he was sentenced to 120 years in prison. His current address is the United States Penitentiary, in Tucson, Arizona. His release date is June 27, 2140, so mark your calendars.
There is a standard methodology to attracting people to a cult. It comes down to telling and repeating the Big Lie.
Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda for Nazi Germany’s Third Reich, said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it…the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
And Adolf Hitler, Goebbels’ boss, laid out his ideas in his book, Mein Kampf, saying:
“That in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”
Hitler’s guiding philosophy was this, as stated in the psychological profile done of him by the Organization of Strategic Services: Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
According to Ivana Trump, Donald Trump’s first wife, The Donald kept a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, called My New Order, in a cabinet near his bed. And Trump once admitted to owning a copy of Mein Kampf.
The biggest influence on Joseph Goebbels wasn’t Adolf Hitler; instead it was Edward Bernays, the Austrian-born American who is considered the father of public relations for his masterful integration of propaganda, public relations, and psychology.
Bernays, who was born in 1891 and died in 1995, came to his understanding of human psychology naturally, as Bernays was a double nephew of Sigmund Freud—his mother was Freud’s sister and his father was Freud’s wife’s brother. This familial knowledge permitted him to use precise psychological techniques in the furtherance of public relations.
In his seminal 1928 book Propaganda, Bernays stated how the masses are irrational and subject to herd instinct—and described how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways.
Drawing on the insights of his Freudian bloodlines, he called his approach “the engineering of consent,” and said his work provided leaders the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.”
In doing so, Bernays demonstrated that it was necessary to appeal not to the rational mind, but to its unconscious and emotional segments.
Joseph Goebbels was an early student and admirer of Bernays’ work, and exploited his ideas to create a cult around Hitler and further the aims of the Reich.
Because it was public knowledge that Goebbels used Bernays’ ideas to the advantage of Hitler, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was warned against allowing Bernays to play a leadership role in World War II. Bernays was described to FDR as “a professional poisoner of the public mind, and an exploiter of foolishness, fanaticism, and self-interest.”
Edward Bernays was a master of social engineering—the herding of the masses towards a certain end goal.
And while Bernays’ ideas at one time were deemed dangerous, we are long past those days. Now his handiwork is behind every cult’s machinations.
All it takes to herd the masses is to push the Big Lie, to tell, as Joseph Goebbels understood, a lie big enough to fool people, and then to keep repeating it, which then convinces people to believe and accept it.
This then leads to the engineering of consent, and gives cult leaders the means to, as Edward Bernays said, “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.”
You want to believe Donald Trump is fighting elites and the deep state, is a messenger of God, had the election stolen from him, is the most honest human being around, and is a humble and truth speaking public servant who is being framed by angry Democrats, the FBI, the CIA, the media, and other entities?
Then you need to know you have been socially engineered, and have been herded towards a certain goal.
That certain goal is: the continued kleptocratic aims of Donald Trump and his cronies—to continue to steal money from the government, as all kleptocrats do, and to grift money from his followers, as all cult leaders do.
And Trump is aided and abetted by a complicit Republican Party and a universe of like-minded media, all who masterfully use the techniques of Edward Bernays, Joseph Goebbels, and Adolf Hitler in continually telling and repeating Big Lie after Big Lie.
A cult leader can only be as strong as their followers allow them to be, and in this case, as in Hitler’s case, by shouting the Big Lie over and over again—and having it broadcast over and over again by his enablers—Trump has cultivated and developed a large and devoted following, one big enough to disrupt civil society, the public good, and democracy.
That’s what happened on January 6, 2021, when Trump’s followers believed his Big Lie that the election was stolen and stormed the Capitol.
The residents of Eerie, Indiana knew, way back in 1992, that The Donald was evil. If enough people are able to get out of the cult in our current times, then they too will know that not only The Donald, but everyone who tells and repeats the Big Lie, is evil.
Otherwise, they will continue to be socially engineered and herded into selling their souls to Donald Trump, along with his fellow grifters, enablers, and sycophants.
And the rest of us will also pay a price—as did the Germans who resisted Hitler.