What Cult Experts Can Teach Us About Persuading Trump Supporters
Three things to say to folks trapped in a closed belief system.
Voting for Trump isn’t the same as being in a cult, but some Trump voters exhibit thinking and behavior that’s cultish. Here’s what experts say you can do about that.
Last year, psychologist and former Moonie Steven Hassan published The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control in which he argued that Trump leads a cult of personality whose members are unlikely to be swayed from supporting him for any reason.
While I don’t know enough about cults to characterize the Trump phenomenon one way or another, there’s no getting away from the sense that something beyond ordinary politics is at work in the relationship between the president and his most ardent followers. The degree of devotion to Trump among some — by no means all — of his supporters seems shockingly out of proportion to reality and democratic norms at times.
For example, to demonstrate the fanaticism of some on the right, Hassan shared a conversation journalist Ed Pilkington reported having with a Trump rally attendee in 2018:
