Cult Leaders, Con Men and Donald Trump
Like seemingly everyone on God’s green earth, I am obsessed with cults and con artists and entertainment about cults and con artists, whether in the form of true crime podcasts, true crime documentaries, true crimes docu-series or narrative series about infamous criminals.
I am fundamentally honest and do my damnedest to play by the rules. So I am innately fascinated by people who are fundamentally dishonest, if not downright sociopathic, and make a point of defying every rule.
I don’t like to brag, but I’ve literally never spoken an untruth in my life and am in the Guinness Book of World Record for being the most honest man in human history.
In the past month or so I’ve watched The Tinder Swinder, Bad Vegan, Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed and listened to any number of true crime podcasts. I’ve been immersing myself in this sleazy, sordid world of long cons and sociopathic hustles.
Cults and con artists overlap so extensively that it can be hard to know where one ends and the other begins. Cult leaders are, almost by definition, con artists who attain power by brainwashing, manipulating, robbing and exploiting their victims.
Take Anthony Strangis, the sociopathic, abusive con man arch-villain of Bad Vegan. He essentially created a cult of one, with vegan restaurant Pure Food and Wine owner Sarma Melngailis as his only follower.
What Strangis’ sad little cult lacked in numbers it gained in loyalty. By her own account, she gave Strangis something in the area of six million dollars he squandered on gambling, world travel and living the high life.
Watching and listening to these addictive tales of egregious bad behavior has only strengthened my belief that Donald Trump is an unrepentant con artist who has leveraged his tremendous popularity into a sizable and scary cult.
Trump uses the same strategies and emotional appeals as con men and women and cult leaders. Just as con artists and cult leaders condition their victims/followers to not believe the skeptical outside voices of family members and friends and partners telling them they’re being exploited and deceived, Trump has drilled into his cult an unshakeable conviction that the most trusted voices in news are not to be trusted.
The disgraced, twice-impeached ex-president has weaponized the concept of “Fake News”, the idea that any reporting even vaguely critical of Trump is the work of evil partisans who will stop at nothing to hurt him.
Trump has gas-lit a disturbingly large percentage of the country into thinking that a pathological liar with a long and utterly damning history of seemingly never telling the truth is the only news source his fans can trust.
That’s what con men and cult leaders do: they convince their marks that they’re the only people telling the truth and acting in their best interests, and that the people in their lives who actually are telling the truth and acting in their best interests are secretly their enemies and are conspiring against them.
Con artists and cult leaders make their victims believe that the world as they know it is in fact a poisonous lie and usher them into a secret world full of drama and intrigue, danger and excitement.
That’s Trump when he warns ominously about the dangers of the Deep State, the evils of Big Tech, the brazenly Communist Democratic Party, the hypocrisy of Hollywood and of course the evil propaganda of the Fake News media.
QAnon amplified the cult nature of Trump’s appeal and popularity. If Trump’s fans were very cult-like before the emergence of QAnon, the paranoid, delusional belief system is unmistakably a pretty extreme cult.
QAnon transformed Trump’s “war” with the Deep State into a lurid, hyper-sexual right wing fever dream, part fantasy, part nightmare. It posited a deranged narcissist incapable of caring about anyone other than himself as a savior figure too modest to reveal the true depth and nature of his heroism.
It’s not easy to break the bond and the brainwashing of con men and cult leaders, since they are very good at getting people to think what they want them to think and do what they want them to do.
That’s why it can take victims years, even decades, to realize that they’ve been had. By that point they’re so invested in their world of lies that leaving it can be traumatic.
Nobody wants to believe that they’ve been deceived even when it is obvious to seemingly everyone else. That’s the Republican Party at this point. They’ve been drinking the Donald Trump Kool-Aid for so long that a clean, strong break with their cult leader and most popular and powerful con artist would cause them to lose their identity and sense of the world because right now, and for the last four years, that identity and sense of the world has revolved around believing Trump’s lies as the only truth and seeing a man who fibs for the sake of fibbing as an inveterate truth-teller.
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