Take It From a Former Moonie: Trump Is a Cult Leader
On the afternoon of Nov. 18, 1978, Jim Jones called his followers to the central pavilion of Jonestown, a sprawling outpost in the jungles of Guyana, and ordered them to drink a lethal mixture of cyanide and fruit punch. Over 900 people perished that day, more than a third of them children. As he lay dying of a bullet wound to the head—a less painful way to go than cyanide and one that he probably orchestrated—Jones told his followers that it was “all the media’s fault. Don’t believe them.”
Those words, uttered so long ago, sound disturbingly familiar as we approach the 41st anniversary of Jonestown. We have a president who regularly disparages and blames the media, calling it “fake,” “false,” and “phony,” and who calls journalists “enemies of the people”—epithets that seem especially frenzied in the wake of the whistleblower complaint and the launching of the House impeachment inquiry. It might seem an outrageous proposition to compare Donald Trump to a murderous cult leader. And yet there are alarming parallels. Like Jones and other cult leaders, Trump exhibits features of what psychologist Erich Fromm called “malignant narcissism”—bombastic grandiosity, a bottomless need for praise, lack of empathy, pathological lying, apparent sadism, and paranoia. In short, he fits the stereotypical psychological profile of a cult leader.
I have seen that profile up close. Over 40 years ago, while a junior in college, I was recruited into a destructive mind control cult, the Unification Church, popularly known as the Moonies after its leader, Sun Myung Moon. I rose rapidly through the ranks and was invited to attend meetings with Moon and his top aides, where we knelt and bowed to our leader Moon. Two years later, after three days straight of leading a fundraising team—selling flowers on street corners—I fell asleep at the wheel and woke up as I plowed into the back of an 18 wheeler. Fortunately, I survived. My family hired deprogrammers and, after five days, I realized I had been brainwashed.
Since then, I have devoted myself to studying mind control cults and helping families rescue loved ones from their clutches. I have learned that mind control is not a vague, mystical process but, instead, is the result of a concrete and specific and systematic set of methods and techniques. Cult leaders may seem crazy, but they are cunning masters of manipulation, employing an arsenal of these techniques to render their followers dependent and obedient. It’s what I call the cult leader’s playbook.
As I argue in my upcoming book, The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How The President Uses Mind Control (Simon & Schuster), Trump has gotten where he is today in large part because he has exploited tactics straight out of that playbook. These include his grandiose claims, his practice of sowing confusion, his demand for absolute loyalty, his tendency to lie and create alternative “facts” and realities, his shunning and belittling of critics and ex-believers, and his cultivating of an “us versus them” mindset. These are the same methods used by Moon, Jones, and other cult leaders such as L. Ron Hubbard (Scientology), David Koresh (Branch Davidians), Lyndon LaRouche (LaRouche PAC), and, most recently, convicted trafficking felon Keith Raniere (NXVIM).
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/take-it-f ... ult-leader
