What Makes a Cult Leader?

The term cult of personality is sometimes attached to the relationship between President Donald Trump and the most dedicated members of his support base. But what does the evidence suggest? Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, an expert in the psychology of zealotry, has outlined three primary characteristics commonly shared by cults:

1. A charismatic leader who becomes an object of worship beyond any meaningful accountability and becomes the single most defining element of the group and its source of truth, power, and authority.

Trump seems to fit the bill. Allegiance to Trump currently appears to be the only path to political relevance within the Republican party. The majority of his base repeats his demonstrably false statements: "The 2020 election was rigged." "I never had sex with that porn star." "My crowds are the largest."

The cult process is marked by the gradual creation of an alternate reality in which the truth is what the leader says it is because he said so. There is no legitimate opposition to a cult leader. Any challenge to the leader’s conduct or claims is seen as a hostile, bad-faith attack on the group.

Those who wish to hold Trump accountable from the inside are generally labeled RINOs, traitors, and snitches to be condemned.

Viewed from the cultist process perspective, then, the pre- and post-New York City guilty verdict response of Trump’s core supporters (and the politicians who represent them) was predictable: The courts are corrupt, the judge is biased, the trial is rigged, deep state forces conspired to destroy us.

After the New York conviction, Trump's dedicated supporters and their representatives in effect chose Trump over the ongoing legitimacy of the judicial processes. Cult leaders cannot be wrong. They can only be wronged.

2. A process of indoctrination, coercive persuasion, or thought reform that leads to group members doing things that are against their own best interest but serve the interest of the group leader.

Here, too, much of the evidence appears to fit. The former process is seen in the ongoing work of right-wing media to create a reality that supports Trump regardless of factual truth. The latter is exemplified by the January 6 U.S. Capitol event, in which thousands of people were moved to violence (and some, later, to prison) on Trump's behest only to hear him deny all responsibility.

3. Exploitation of group members by the leader and the ruling coterie.

There's much evidence in Trump's history of a tendency toward exploitative behavior. As an individual, he’s known for stiffing people who work for him. As a businessman and political leader, documented corruption has attended virtually all his ventures, including the Trump Campaign, the Trump Foundation, the Trump Organization, Trump University, and others.

The list of Trump appointees who have been convicted and sentenced to prison includes his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, his former campaign vice chairman Rick Gates, his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, his former adviser Roger Stone, and his former White House aide Peter Navarro, among others.

In sum, there is strong evidence to suggest that a cult dynamic has developed between Trump and many—although by no means all—of his most ardent supporters. But how do so many people fall into a cult’s orbit? This is not a simple question to answer.

For one, the tendencies that find extreme expression in the behavior of cultists are—in moderation—often useful for social and individual survival. The ability to rally behind a powerful individual and do their bidding can be useful for survival. As I have written here before, going along with the people around you is often more likely to save you than insisting, alone, on some factual truth.

Yet many good things become destructive in the wrong measure. Those who worship blindly will soon be led astray. Unchecked authority will soon become corrupt.

Psychologically, one way to understand what we’re seeing with a large swath of Trump's supporters is by using a framework proposed by the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, who focused on the "motivational primacy of self-experience." Kohut proposed that when the early environment does not provide the necessary relational support for the young child, the result is high disintegration anxiety. In response, certain pathological behaviors are mobilized to stabilize the self-structure. A wide variety of pathological states may thus be understood as efforts to restore a sense of self-cohesion in the face of self-disintegration threats.

President Donald Trump Essential Reads

Golf, Integrity, and Presidents Past

Does Trump Believe His Own Lies?

Kohut was interested in individual development. However, individuals live in groups and create societies. Individual tendencies thus often find representation in the social structure. (As an individual, you develop ways to defend yourself against threats. So do all societies.). Internal individual dynamics can be extrapolated to the societal realm.

In Kohut’s framework, the anxiety of self-disintegration leads to a search for stabilizing influences, which often manifests in pathology. Indeed, research on susceptibility to cult recruitment has found that cult members tend to show generalized ego weakness and emotional vulnerability, deteriorated family relations and support systems, and debilitating situational stress or crisis.

Similarly, groups of people whose self-identity is under duress may seek to restore identity and cohesion in pathological ways. Just as a vulnerable individual may look to a group to shore up his sense of self-identity, so a threatened group may rally behind a leader’s idealized persona to shore up its besieged identity.

In America over the past several decades, a large group of mostly white, male, rural, and working-class people has been feeling increasingly abandoned by the culture, as social and economic forces such as immigration, globalization, secularization, and digitation have undermined its livelihood, status, cultural hegemony, ideas of masculinity, and prospects.

It is quite plausible, psychologically, that in Trump, some members of this group may have found a voice for their grievances, a balm for their ego injury, a totem for their rage. Cultist devotion to Trump may offer clarity, excitement, and hope to supplant feelings of inferiority, vulnerability, and disenfranchisement.

Cultist processes, however, often beget violence. Kohut saw the emergence of various destructive behaviors, like violence, as products of self-disintegration. In his view, self-disintegration involves "narcissistic rage," which Kohut defined as aggression aimed at others who threaten or have damaged the self. (In childhood, these "others" are parents or caregivers who are charged with caring for the child, which Kohut termed “selfobjects”).

Such rage may drive people, and groups, to shed traditional beliefs and accepted groups and opt for more radical ones. The cult leader becomes a symbol of the group's anger at negative or dismissive responses from the culture at large.

In a sense, cult membership often represents an attempt to retaliate against a hostile world. Such an attempt carries risks. The most powerful human destructiveness, Kohut noted, “is encountered, not in the form of wild, regressive, and primitive behavior, but in the form of orderly and organized activities in which the perpetrators' destructiveness is alloyed with absolute conviction about their greatness and with their devotion to archaic omnipotent figures.”

And while it's true that over time some cults may evolve to become benign (for example, the Mormon church), the prospects of a peaceful resolution to the Trump cult are presently unclear. Psychology research has long shown that, generally, past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.