The cult leader's hold weakens
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America’s would-be dictator won’t fall because he’s acting
like the mastermind of the “deep state” conspiracy he’s coached his fervid
followers to believe. But the cracks in the Trump regime — which have been
growing since he reentered the White House six months ago — are all but certain
to widen into dangerous crevasses.
Trump has never been a broadly popular politician, and is by far the least popular person to be inaugurated as president twice. His political resilience derives from his power within the Republican Party — strength grounded in his singular grip on MAGA, which finds its only parallel in charismatic dictatorships like those of Putin and Mussolini.
A decade out from Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP,
today’s Republican “leaders” know nothing other than surrender. But his
bungled, increasingly desperate Epstein coverup indicates that his skills as a
cult leader are declining.
The murder myth
In January 2016, Trump infamously “joked”
that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I
wouldn't lose any voters.” He was not taken seriously at the time, though the
statement has since come to be taken almost literally by some pundits.
But the implication of Trump’s braggadocio — that his
complete hold on “his” supporters is baked in, no matter what — is false. Like
all cult leaders, Trump’s “control” of his people has always been grounded on
an assiduous and even obsessive attention to their psychic needs, wants, and
proclivities. While Trump is no genius, he’s a gifted performer, and he’s
devoted huge amounts of mental energy to understanding the desires of those who
worship him.
It is a measure of how good Trump was at pandering to his cult that his work has often been all but invisible to the vast majority of “savvy” observers, who are wont to declare that his enduring connection with MAGA amounts to something akin to magic. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A cursory review of Trump’s now lengthy career as a national politician demonstrates two things. First, that his personal obsessions with power, money, misogyny, and self-aggrandizement of a cartoonish nature is a constant, but lurks as a potential vulnerability, not the source of his appeal. And second, that his violence-tinged promises to his followers are constantly evolving in accordance with their wishes.
Trump is rarely the source of his conspiratorial notions. He
instead draws and then popularizes them from the always active bowels of his
raging cult. This is true of his persistent pandering to performatively
sadistic xenophobia, his amplification of antivax paranoia and other forms of
“health” quackery, and his abiding focus on culture war issues like transphobia
and demonizing diversity.
All of these reprehensible ideas — including the challenges
to President Obama’s citizenship that “launched” Trump’s political career as
his TV star was fading — came from what is now Trump’s base. But in each case,
Trump was the assiduous curator of the paranoid theories, hatreds, and
obsessions of others. His attention to the fringes of popular culture, and his
recognition of just what tidbits appeal most to resentful white baby boomers
like himself, has long been second to none.
The cult leader as chameleon
It’s a measure of Trump’s abilities that he has rarely come
close to losing the appearance of control over his herd, but there have been
previous moments where his status as leader of his extremist movement has been
open to question.
Perhaps the most notable example came in 2021 — and it had
nothing to do with January 6, when feckless Republicans like Kevin McCarthy
wrongly assumed the failed putsch would dethrone Trump. It came months later,
in the summer of that year, as antivax conspiracism moved to the center of MAGA
world.
Trump, the braggart, had long touted the false claim that he “invented” the covid vaccine. So he was in a potentially difficult position when a would-be usurper, Ron DeSantis, moved swiftly from being a vaccine advocate to positioning himself as the most extreme anti-vax conspiracy theorist among major American politicians.
But Trump skillfully headed off the threat. By mid-2021, he
had stopped touting his purported role in creating the lifesaving vaccine, and
instead promoted the “freedom” of his supporters to risk their lives by
refusing it. It was a measure of Trump’s brilliance as cult leader that he
managed to seamlessly transform himself from the father of the new vaccine into
a fully paranoid opponent of even long-accepted ones like the polio jab.
Trump similarly outflanked DeSantis’s effort to become the
leader of the “anti-woke” contingent of MAGA. After DeSantis began grounding
his bid for the GOP presidential nomination on a promise to “reject
woke ideology,” Trump outdid his rival by making bigotry of all shapes and
sizes central to his appeal. And since he retook office, Trump’s anti-woke
battle has rapidly moved from rhetorical to actual in arenas ranging from
hospitals to universities.
The reptile is poisonous
Trump’s chameleon-like ability to remake his political
appearance was always at risk of reaching its limit where the right-wing
conspiracies focused on Jeffrey Epstein and his vile criminal exploitation of
young girls are concerned.
After all, in reality, Trump was not only among Epstein’s
closest friends at the time his sex trafficking ring was at its height, he
himself has a history of sexual abuse allegations (including an adjudicated
case). So Trump trying to become the “truth teller” on Epstein inevitably
risked confronting his cult members with the deeply repugnant reality of their
leader, including his association with the very evils they attribute to their
enemies.
Trump must have concluded that he had little choice but to
pander to his base and their QAnon-ish mythology about Democrats engaging in
industrial scale child abuse. But while the Trump of just a few years ago would
have recognized the danger this particular conspiracy theory posed to him and
planned accordingly, the 2025 version did the precise opposite.
Not only did Trump bring into his administration right-wing extremist media figures who made massive sums amplifying Epstein-centered conspiracy theories, but he placed two of them (Kash Patel and Dan Bongino) at the top of the FBI. He also did nothing as arch panderer (and absolute fool) AG Pam Bondi tried to outflank Patel and Bongino by promising to release every item in the DOJ’s “Epstein files.”
Trump did not require a meeting with Bondi to learn that
those files contained references to him. How could they not, given that Trump
hung out regularly with his pal Epstein during a period that was central to his
multiple indictments? But it was not until the blowback threatened him that
Trump recognized his problem, and his response over the past several weeks has
only confirmed that his magic touch isn’t what it once was.
Initially, Trump responded by lashing out at his cult for
believing the conspiracy theories he had assiduously promoted to them, labeling
them “weaklings” and declaring that they would be excommunicated if they
continued to believe the QAnon gospel, which he called “bullshit.”
It was as if the frustrated leader was saying: You promised
I could commit murder without consequence, so what is the big deal about my
association with the world’s most notorious pedophile?
After that gambit failed, Trump turned to recycling old
conspiracy theories, like the “Russiagate hoax” that jumped the shark long ago,
apparently believing that yelling lies more loudly would drown out the clanging
alarm bells. That effort failed as well.
Now Trump has bizarrely turned to serially confessing to
disturbing aspects of his long relationship with Epstein. Recently, Trump has
taken to claiming that he broke with Epstein because the sex trafficker “stole”
young girls from his Mar-a-Lago spa, including the then 16-year-old Virginia
Giuffre, an Epstein sex abuse victim who later committed suicide.
As a former Trump aide has observed, the
implications are far from helpful for her former boss. Trump has not explained
why he thought Epstein and his associate Maxwell were trolling Trump’s club
looking for underage girls to “steal,” given that Epstein had no club of his
own.
This self-immolating response to the Epstein crisis is very
unlikely on its own to be enough to break Trump’s deep hold over his cult, but
the debacle is a stark demonstration of his waning abilities. Suddenly, the
smoothly operating machinery that allowed Trump to appear as the master of his
movement is clanking and creaking. And this could not come at a worse time for
him, as his deeply unpopular policies and erratic “governance” are making him
more and more unpopular.
Democrats, and indeed the majority of Americans who are not Trump supporters, should be happy at the growing cracks in his previously rock solid base. But at the same time, there are reasons to be concerned — the most important being that Trump is the president of the United States and will be for the next several years.
After all, Trump has already demonstrated that he will
attempt to make up for his diminished competence with ever increasing rage and
by lashing out at enemies. So as his hold over his cult diminishes, and his
political losses grow, he is likely only to get angrier and more willing to
take out his resentments on his true arch enemy: the American people.
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