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Last week, I quoted Donald Trump addressing women: “I want to be your protector … You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger.” On X, Kendall Brown observed, “This is nearly identical to how Warren Jeffs spoke to women in his cult.” Jeffs was the leader of a breakaway Mormon sect who went to prison in 2007 for child rape, leaving behind 78 wives and a helpless community he had ruled like a mad king.
In one of my first columns this year for the Prospect, I wrote of my frustration with how few products in the ostensibly “nonpolitical” corners of American culture wrestled with the traumatic descent of so many of our fellow citizens into right-wing authoritarianism. Almost all of the cultural output wrestling with the problem came at it allegorically: as science fiction, as fable, as historical cautionary tale, as stories in a future time or faraway place. Almost nothing has been set recognizably in our own political world. Nothing that dares name the thing.
One abiding reason is the numbingly insistent avowals of our polity that the worst thing a political culture can be is “polarized”—as if polarity between fascism and those who seek to fight it is a bad thing and not an imperative. Something similar has happened in political journalism. I’ve written voluminously about the failure of the press, whose job it is to name and explain things plainly, to break with the rigid genre conventions that serve to make it harder instead of easier to grasp the present reality unfolding right in front of our noses.
People are desperate to understand how something like MAGA could have happened. Political journalism having failed them, people are voting with their remote controls. How does American culture comment on Trumpism while steering clear of “partisan” waters? It seems to me through at least 30 cult documentaries, docuseries, and films that have appeared since Trump’s inauguration, including four about Warren Jeffs.
THE POPULAR FASCINATION WITH ALL OF THIS is not new, of course. My childhood in the cult-panicked ’70s and ’80s, and surely yours, was saturated with these stories. All these classics now get updates.
Charles Manson, for example, is practically his own industry: Charles Manson: The Final Words (2017), Manson: The Lost Tapes (2018), Manson: Music From an Unsound Mind (2019), Quentin Tarantino’s phantasmagorical 2019 reimagination of the Tate and LaBianca murders in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, even something from last year called The Resurrection of Charles Manson. (“When a couple edits a Charles Manson movie in an Airbnb, the film’s dark events begin to come true,” says IMDb; 3.2 stars.)
Many of the recent cult shows, especially the slapdash talking-head retellings available on streaming networks, are kitschy, cookie-cutter bad. Some are excellent, including actor Leah Remini’s riveting three-season examination, Scientology and the Aftermath (2016), showing how cruelly and cunningly Scientology works to ruin the lives of apostates like herself, pointing to the truism that the best indication of whether a religion is a cult or not is not merely what happens when you’re inside, but what happens when you try to leave.
The sheer diversity of cultlike formations you can learn about from your couch speaks to the breadth of our modern forms of alienation, anxiety, and trauma, and the bottomless ingenuity of the malefactors adapting to exploit them as they emerge. Our cults, ourselves.
The association of today’s Republican Pary and its luminous god-king Donald J. Trump with cults began almost as soon as his first presidential campaign did.
New Agers seeking perfected bodies are splendid marks for Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator (2019). Southern women, taught to believe the Bible already contains all the answers to life’s dilemmas and eager to lose weight without exercising or restricting their food intake (the Gospel of Mark, after all, says all food is clean), flocked to the “Weigh Down” workshops at thousands of churches across the region. See the Lifetime film starring Jennifer Grey, Gwen Shamblin: Starving for Salvation (2023), or the docuseries The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin (2021).
Shamblin was once a media sensation; Larry King’s fawning interview with her played in a loop in her home. Ministers who host her program show no apparent concern when she suggests Nazi concentration camps as a useful role model; those prisoners lost plenty of weight, after all. But her empire is threatened with collapse when she rejects the theological doctrine of the Trinity. Following the setback, someone who was previously merely a fantastically charismatic creep decides that her persecution must mean she’s really in fact the One, securing a core of followers who agree. “She was the one hearing from God … and who were we to question what God’s telling her?”
The quarry of the prosperity gospel minister at the center of Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult (2024) are kids flocking to Los Angeles to build online brands producing dance videos—an expensive proposition, it turns out, and thus the appeal of a group house with state-of-the-art production facilities. The promise of getting closer to God in the process sounds like a bonus. Things only get fishy when Rev. Robert tells them he’s in possession of a message of salvation that “nobody else knows,” and that you’ll go to hell without it.
Those anguished by the futility of online dating are ready to be hoovered up into the “Twin Flames Universe,” as chronicled in Desperately Seeking Soulmate, one of two 2023 series on the sect. And the tie-dyed guru at the center of Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God (2023) leverages the banal promises of woo culture: “Be still & know that I am God,” a plaque reads, done up in the same style as the “Eat Pray Love” ones you might have seen in suburban kitchens.
Mother God is a former McDonald’s manager named Amy Carlson, and she specializes in harvesting minds cracked by psychedelics with the recruitment technique I learned to call “love bombing” in the cult awareness training sessions that were once a childhood commonplace, especially in Jewish communities. (“Michael opened the door, and it was the warmest feeling I’d ever felt … I literally went down to the bank down the street and emptied out my whole bank account. Cashed out my 401(k) and gave it to Mom.”) Many of those interviewed still affirm Mother God’s deity, after her mysterious death that drives the plot. (“We’re aware of the fifth dimension and the portal,” we hear the sheriff interrogate a witness, “so we don’t have to go through that again.”)
Surfing between these various cult stories reveals a number of classic patterns. One is setting acolytes against each other to compete to climb the ranks, to get closer and closer to Dear Leader, and thus ultimate holiness—a ruthlessly efficient machine exploitation, which often leads to economic exploitation. Like among the Mother God crew: “There were people who got to sleep in her room, and I wanted to work my way up to that level. The only way I could be of service was to clean.”
Or among the 7M TikTok-ers, “Hannah had full access to my bank account. Hannah said you had to do that, to get right with Robert. Which was getting right with God.”
Or Warren Jeffs, whose cult-controlled construction company won their contracts to build warehouses for Amazon and Walmart because “they had unlimited free labor through all the boys in the community … That’s your edge over legitimate businesses.”
THE ASSOCIATION OF TODAY’S REPUBLICAN PARTY and its luminous god-king Donald J. Trump with cults began almost as soon as his first presidential campaign did. But what would a docuseries about MAGA-as-cult—the one Netflix, Hulu, Max, or CNN would never produce, because that would make them unduly “partisan”—look like?
It could start with the truism that cult formation, as my binge-watch last week makes clear, works best among a population already primed for it: prosperity gospel evangelicals, psychedelic searchers, woo enthusiasts.
Or the modern Republican Party, since its capture by the conservative movement.
Amanda Montell, author of the bestseller Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, has a fun podcast called Sounds like a Cult, each weekly episode devoted to a phenomenon along a spectrum from obviously sickeningly and terrifying (the sex-slaver Keith Raniere; two documentary series about him, Max’s The Vow and Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult on Starz, both from 2020) to, well … really? (Though the episode on pickleball is surprisingly convincing.)
The episode on conservative youth activism is somewhere in between. It’s centered on an interview with an apostate, journalist Tiffany Nguyen, who got me thinking about one of those things us adolescents learned in our cult awareness trainings in the 1980s: Be wary of innocent-seeming, attractive-sounding inducements. Like a free vegetarian meal, which was how the Hare Krishnas got you, or a psychological reading, in the case of Scientology. Or a free journalism training summer camp. That is how aspiring scribes like Nguyen got hooked.
Cult minions learn that any problem unenlightened outsiders might think was caused by the group’s principles is actually due to their insufficient application.
The name of the sponsor, the “Leadership Institute,” sounded no alarm bells; they’re usually bland. They advertised their value neutrally as well, noting their alumni who’d gone on to big print gigs (Malcolm Gladwell!) or the network news. The inducements into a world of us-vs.-them thinking come slowly, embedded in useful tips like what a lede is and how to do an interview. Dropping claims that only the right values free speech, and the left subverts it, might serve as a red flag, if you’re sophisticated—which is why, like so many cultish formations, the right prefers to scoop them up when they’re too young to know better.
In another cultish hallmark, novitiates move up a ladder of engagement, each new step a marker of trust that allows them to glimpse the entirety of the project. For Nguyen, that meant being placed with a mentor—who happened to be a white nationalist. Then, by the time they’re placed with a conservative organization, they’ll have accepted certain principles on faith: that they’re not merely reporting on the world but fighting evil, so the ends justify the means. They’ll be armed with an arsenal of what the pioneering scholar of coercive thought Robert Jay Lifton calls “thought-terminating clichés”—like, when in doubt, to ask a Democratic official what they think the definition of “woman” is.
Similar formal apparatuses exist throughout the conservative movement: the Federalist Society to seduce young aspiring lawyers, the American Legislative Exchange Council for dewy-eyed state reps. And for mere foot soldiers, there’s the massive apparatus of campus recruitment, targeting alienated young people, especially young men, by weaponizing their sense of isolation through us/them narratives of a world that’s out to get them, to which they are taught they are, in fact, superior. The next step is a pilgrimage to CPAC—which has always been free for students to attend.
Cult minions learn that any problem unenlightened outsiders might think was caused by the group’s principles is actually due to their insufficient application. If you are a Republican, it’s the esoteric truth that conservatism never fails, it can only be failed; if a follower of Gwen Shamblin, that God wants you to be thin, and “the faster you do it, the holier you are.” (“By the grace of God I lost 117 pounds!”)
All failure signifies a failure to believe in those principles fervently enough, which means you’re not truly an insider, and therefore worthless. A “RINO” or a “cuck,” if you’re a conservative; a “suppressive person” if you are a Scientologist. An endless feedback loop, always leading back to the solution of fuller surrender. For “when you’re in that level of self-hatred, you’ll never see Mom as Mother God. You’ll only see her as Amy. She’ll only be a mirror of what you see in yourself.”
THE QUALITATIVE SHIFT THAT SIGNIFIES the post–Tea Party Republican Party as having finally passed into the realm of what I call fascism was the arrival of that missing piece, a leader taken as worthy of being worshipped, as if a prophet or saint or even God in the flesh. His “followers” experience him as a charismatic presence with mystical powers far beyond those of a normal being. Not merely someone who administers a government; someone who smites demons instead, cheating death through the grace of the Almighty.
If a cult is defined by what happens when you try to leave—well, listen to the harrowing episode of This American Life featuring the anguished arguments between Alexander Vindman, the colonel who testified against Donald Trump about his inducement of a quid pro quo from Ukraine, and his wife about whether they have to leave the country if Trump wins the election. If they work to isolate initiates from loved ones (always the most heartbreaking part of these documentaries)—well, there are whole support groups for people who can no longer be in the same room with red-pilled family members, anguished that they may never get their loved one back from the other side of the veil. Meanwhile, they drain the wallets of their adherents while promising to make them rich: Visit the websites hawking Trump Bibles, your Trump sneakers, your Trump watch—or Trump’s fantastic promises, 40 years after its first crashing failure, that tax cuts for the rich will miraculously flood the nation’s Treasury to bursting.
And did you ever notice how loyalists always find a way to excuse or not see sexual exploitation and violence committed by Dear Leader? And how it always, in the end, comes down to this: Surrendering to this new world of devotion and unitary thinking is the only way to be protected from an impossibly corroded outside world.
The suffusing unreality is the point. Their world must be entirely different from our world. All or nothing: That is how acolytes are convinced that they can never safely leave.
Is this too much, roping together January 6th and the mass suicide at Jonestown? Well, one of the attractive things about Amanda Montell’s book and podcast is that she understands the word “cult” as a heuristic, that cultishness is a continuum, and always context-dependent. In the case of MAGA, Tina Nguyen and Montell point to its “very specific plan to effectuate a vision that makes no sense to outsiders.” Cults have a built-in sunk cost dynamic: They depend upon ingraining people so deep within them that they feel like nothing without the cult.
Montel also noted something else—the part that arrested me most: “A cult tells on itself if it sounds too exciting.” That is, from the outside, it usually doesn’t look like a cult. The little town Warren Jeffs takes over, choosing its sheriff, writing its laws, is indistinguishable from those around it, just like the little community in a wealthy Nashville suburb where Gwen Shamblin establishes a perfunctory church overflowing with “bubbly, happy” people. The Duggars and their 19 kids, joined at the hip with the political operator Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, are normal enough on the surface to feature in ten seasons of a hit reality show. If you watch Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets (2023), one of the best cult series out there, you realize that TLC Network was making billions of dollars by laundering the works of Bill Gothard, one of the most horrifying authoritarian figures on the Christian far right.
“Sanewashing” is the indispensable new word for how elite political journalism cheats news consumers out of understanding what’s most cultish about Trumpism, by relentlessly focusing on what seems most normal about Republican politics. Maybe the people understand it better than their journalists: The most effective cults are the ones easiest to sanewash. They see it. Why can’t The New York Times?
