That I despise Trump and all he stands for no more means I prefer his predecessors …

… than the fact that I despise the venal warmonger who ran against him in 2016 ¹ …

… meant I preferred Trump. Either would imply my taking seriously the notion that the United States is a functioning democracy when, as Chris Hedges with customary eloquence pointed out in a 2022 piece I’ve cited many times, ² it is nothing of the kind.

As Caitlin Johnstone noted yesterday in Biden Was Preparing To Bomb Iran If Re-Elected:

Former senior Biden advisor Amos Hochstein said during an interview on Sunday that the Biden administration had been preparing to bomb Iran if they had won re-election in 2024.

Hochstein was asked by Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan,

In July 2024 Secretary Blinken claimed Iran was one or two weeks away from having enough fissile material breakout capacity to eventually make a weapon … So when Trump says he did what no other president would, is it just that  it fell on his watch?

Hochstein [Israeli born IDF veteran with a key role in the Biden Administration] replied:

I was supportive of Trump joining in in June to take the strikes that we had thought in the Biden administration we may have to take if there was a second term … and we did war games; practice runs because that may have had to happen under our watch as well.

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I want to make these things clear before getting to the main item today, another gem from the pen of the Presbyterian minister and Pulitzer awarded journalist, Chris Hedges. The tangerine narcissist has undoubtedly brought – to the sociopathic tendencies essential to winning the corporate oligarchic backing itself a sine qua non  of any credible bid for the presidency – a set of character traits quite his own.

That does not, however, make him unique as a POTUS. As another fine writer, Edward Curtin, recently emailed apropos my March 21 post, Why are America’s rulers allowing this?

Trump is not an anomaly except with his mouth, which is planned.  He is carrying out orders.  That is his job.  US troops (officially) will soon be in Iran.

Do bear this in mind while reading Chris’s piece, likening Donald Trump to a cult leader whose MAGA base is disintegrating ³ along fault lines exacerbated by Trump’s bizarre persona, to be sure, but more deeply rooted in the truth that Ending The Forever Wars and Bringing American Jobs Home were never in his gift. The 47th POTUS is there, like those who came before, on the sufferance of powerful interests with too much to lose ⁴ from any such cockamamie projects.

I’ve been in two cults. One, the Trotskyist sect Workers Power, ⁵ showed only weak signs. ⁶ The other, a ‘spiritual’ cult led by the late Andrew Cohen, was full blown. ⁷ Cults fascinate me, and all who have broken free of a charismatic leader ⁸ will recognise – in the outlandish disconnect from known realities on display in senior devotees like a Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem or Karoline Leavitt ⁹ – the sacrifices demanded by all cult leaders, for which the near certain reward is to be thrown under a bus.

For the narcissists who lead such groups, everything could never be enough.

But while the antics of a Donald Trump (and those of his high priests) echo in major ways those of leaders (and their  high priests) in the ‘spiritual’ world, there’s a key difference, flagged by my earlier remarks on the gap between appearance and reality in the US presidency itself. For all their flaws, and for all their brilliance, men like Andrew Cohen and Osho Rajneesh, and women like Mother Meera and Mata Amritanandamayi, answer to no one. That’s what makes them – at least in the West, where the guru phenomenon heralded by Beatles and Maharishi is alien and by that fact poorly understood – so dangerous within their smaller fiefdoms.

As for Trump, of course he’s an emperor without clothes, and that matters. What matters more though is that, like all his predecessors going back at least as far as LBJ, he is emperor in name only. Bear this in mind as you read Chris’s piece of two days ago.

Trump the God

During the two years I spent writing “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” I encountered numerous mini-Trumps. These self-proclaimed pastors — very few had any formal religious training — preyed on the despair of their congregants. They were surrounded by sycophants and could not be questioned. They merged fact with fiction, peddled magical thinking and enriched themselves at the expense of their followers. They claimed their wealth and ostentatious lifestyle, including mansions and private jets, ¹⁰ was a sign of being blessed. They insisted they were divinely inspired and anointed by God. They were, in the hermetic circles of their megachurches, omnipotent.

These cult pastors promised to use their omnipotence to crush the demonic forces that created misery in the lives of their followers — unemployment and underemployment, evictions, bankruptcies, poverty, addiction, sexual and domestic abuse, and crippling despair. The more power the cult leaders possess — according to their followers — the more certain is a promised paradise. Cult leaders stand above the law. Those who desperately place their faith in them want them to be above the law.

Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious adulation and total obedience. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claim that Donald Trump is able to draw a “perfect map” of the Middle East, or White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s statement that Trump is always the “most well-read person in the room,” are two of innumerable examples of the abject fawning required by those in a cult leader’s inner circle. Blind loyalty matters more than competence.

Cult leaders are immune from rational and fact-based critiques amongst those who invest hope in them. This is why Trump’s hardcore followers have not abandoned him and will not abandon him. All the chatter about fissures in the MAGA universe misreads Trump cultists.

All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the prejudices, worldview, personal style and ideas of the cult leader. Trump, with his faux “Trump crest” revels in Louis XIV-inspired tasteless kitsch awash in gold Rococo and glittering chandeliers. The women in Trump’s court have “Mar-a-Lago Faces” – overinflated lips, taut, wrinkle-free skin, silicone gel-filled breast implants and chiseled cheekbones, capped off by gobs of make-up. They wear stiletto heels and garish outfits that Trump finds appealing. Trump’s men, who in his eyes must be telegenic and from “Central casting,” dress like 1950s advertising executives. They sport Trump-gifted Florsheim black shoes, specifically $145 Lexington Cap Toe Oxfords.

Cults impose dress codes that mirror the style and taste of the cult leader.

The followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, dressed in red and orange robes, often combined with a turtleneck and beads. Heaven’s Gate members wore Nike Decade trainers and black jogging bottoms. Men in the Unification Church, known as Moonies, wore crisp white shirts and pressed slacks. Women wore dresses. They looked as if they were on their way to Sunday School.

Like Jim Jones, who convinced or forced over 900 of his followers — including 304 children aged 17 and younger — to die by ingesting a cyanide-laced drink, Trump is aggressively courting our collective suicide.

Trump dismisses the climate crisis as a hoax. He unilaterally withdraws from nuclear arms agreements and treaties. ¹¹ He antagonizes nuclear powers, such as Russia and China. He impetuously launches wars. He alienates and insults U.S. allies. He dreams of annexing Greenland and Cuba. He embraces holy crusade against Muslims. He attacks his political opponents as enemies and traitors, belittling them with crude insults. He slashes social programs designed to sustain the vulnerable. He expands an internal security apparatus — masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons — to terrorize the public. Cults do not nurture and protect. They subjugate, annihilate and destroy …

Read the full piece (1920 words) …

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1. I should say, “the venal war monger who, having with the aid of a corrupt DNC stolen the primaries from Bernie Sanders, ran against Trump in 2016″
2. Here’s the (abridged) passage I most often cite from Chris Hedges’ 2022 piece:

   Those who wrote trade deals to profit from underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run healthcare for profit are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that spy on the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.

   Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.

3. To be clear: it’s me saying the MAGA is disintegrating. Chris Hedges says different but we agree on far more.
4. See my posts on Michael Hudson, and those on US Neocons & Israel’s far Right.
5. While I’ve criticised Workers Power in passing, that was over its witlessly de facto siding with the US empire against Bashar al-Assad, not its being a fledgling cult,
6. Workers Power had, and as far as I know has, no leader with charisma. A more developed cult on the Left was Gerry Healey’s Workers Revolutionary Party. Healey, like Trump and Osho, had his own ‘high priests’ in the shape of Corin and Vanessa Redgrave.
7. I wrote several posts on my experiences with Andrew Cohen as part of an unfinished series abandoned years ago because (a) I’d reached a point where I’d need to reconnect with his teachings using materials no longer in my possession, and (b) my attention was shifting to the geopolitical stage which now takes up the lion’s share of my focus.
8. For a scientific approach to cults I commend The Guru Papers by Diana Alstead and Joel Kramer. (What gives their work wider applicability is its recognition that the abuses and their underlying logic also operate in the corporate world and in toxically co-dependent sexual relationships. Its real focus is power, with the guru-chela relationship an unusually distilled form which makes it ideal for scientific study.) As for the many texts on specific examples (including three hostile to Andrew Cohen, one of them – “he’s not the messiah; he’s a very naughty boy” – by his mother) a Netflix offering on the Osho/Baghwan cult’s relocation to Oregon USA stands out as a gripping docudrama on the logic, psychologic and political causes and consequences of cults. Speaking of science, see my own, How I joined a cult: Part 6.
9. I had thought the desperate media briefings of Karoline Leavitt’s predecessor, the Biden White House mouthpiece Matthew Miller, could not be beaten on Comical Ali denialism. I thought wrong.
10. Most gurus in the West – especially those who hail from the East and arrive ill prepared for its worldly temptations – are undone by wealth and/or sex but for Andrew Cohen it was neither. He made much of this but failed to recognise his own dependency on a drug more addictive than either: power, not as a means but as an end in itself.
11. George Bush also unilaterally withdrew from treaties, in his case the ABM Treaty in 2002, and for the same reason as Trump the real estate broker. With Russia on the ropes under Yeltsin he saw it as “no longer a good deal”  for the US. This is early evidence – though not as early as the NATO expansion under Bill Clinton which brought in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – of why corporate media’s wall to wall narrative that Russia’s February 2022 SMO was unprovoked is as absurd as it is widely accepted.