narcissism
mebbe disambig redumbdent
SEE TRUMP CULT DEAR LEADER
but interesting that it is contagious?
strong man I alone can fix it = fascism
also // psychopathy sociopath
capitalism / libtard /ayn rand self-ish
NO LNX
A cult leader shows how Trump is taking America to a very dark place
:
Thom Hartmann July 13, 2025
Former FBI agent Michael Fienberg has gone public, pointing out that the agency, under the leadership of Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, is purging itself of people who are not members of the Trump cult (my phrase, not his).
Similar cult-like behavior is on vivid display with the White House press secretary, the head of DHS, and the head of the Department of Justice — among numerous other administration officials and elected Republicans — regularly spouting lies and half-truths that target women, immigrants, and Democrats.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is implying that the children who died in the Texas floods were the victims of a nefarious plot — presumably by Democrats or Jews who operate space lasers — to modify the weather, completely ignoring the fact that Republican-aligned fossil fuel billionaires have been engaged in a half-century-long scheme to sabotage our atmosphere with their carbon dioxide emissions in exchange for trillions of dollars in profits. Some of which, no doubt, have been shared with Greene or her campaign.
Multiple administration officials, elected Republicans, and rightwing media cult leaders on platforms like Fox “News” have been amplifying the racist, antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory,” that wealthy Jews are paying to “replace” white people in America with Blacks, Mexicans, and other people of color. This has led to ICE becoming the largest police force in America, with a budget larger than that of the entire Russian military, soon to be sweeping a neighborhood near you in their never-ending hunt for brown-skinned people.
Donald Trump didn’t need to lure his followers into a remote jungle, like Jim Jones did in Guyana. He didn’t need to physically isolate them from the rest of the world. Instead, Trump built his Jonestown right here at home, within the boundaries of our republic, brick by brick. He did it using over 30,000 documented lies, fear, rage, and the intoxicating promise of belonging.
Today, tens of millions of Americans are trapped inside Trump’s reality-warping cult. And just as Jones’ followers drank poisoned Kool-Aid believing it was salvation, Trump’s followers have swallowed his Big Lies and are now willing to sacrifice our Constitution, our democracy, and our future on the altar of one man’s insatiable ego.
This is an old story in new packaging.
Jim Jones wasn’t always a madman. In the beginning, he offered something people desperately wanted: community, belonging, equality. He drew in the lonely, the marginalized, the disillusioned. He offered them meaning, dignity, and the hope of a better world. But slowly, he twisted that hope into a tool of control, weaponizing his followers’ trust for his own wealth, power, and self-aggrandizement.
Donald Trump followed a similar cult leader’s path.
He didn’t invent the grievances he exploited. For decades, America’s middle class was gutted by Reaganomics and neoliberal trade policies. Jobs were shipped overseas. Unions were crushed. Wages stagnated while billionaires like Trump amassed obscene wealth.
Trump didn’t cause that pain, but he channeled it. He told working-class Americans that he alone could restore their lost greatness. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, he bellowed: “I alone can fix it.”
That wasn’t a campaign promise. It was a cult leader’s declaration. Like Jones, Trump positioned himself not as a servant of the people, but as their savior, the one indispensable man without whom all hope would be lost.
All cults, whether religious or political, thrive on division and a sense of victimhood. Jim Jones taught his followers that outsiders were out to destroy them, that they were surrounded by enemies, traitors, and saboteurs. He warned that the CIA, the media, and shadowy conspirators would annihilate Jonestown unless his people followed him without question.
Trump operates from the same playbook.
His enemies list is long: immigrants, Black voters, Muslims, women, Democrats, journalists, scientists, the “deep state,” election officials, even members of his own party who dare to tell the truth. He has spent years feeding his followers a steady diet of paranoia, victimhood, and grievance, convincing them that the only thing standing between them and ruin is him.
And just as Jones’ followers were taught to see dissent as treason, Trump’s followers are conditioned to see any criticism of him as an attack on themselves. They’ve surrendered their own personal identities to him and his cult. When he tells them that an election they lost was stolen, they believe it; not because the evidence says so, but because Trump says so. And in a cult, the cult leader’s word is truth.
Jones kept his followers in a physical jungle, cut off from the outside world. Trump does the same psychologically with the help of billionaire-backed media. His repeated attacks on the press as “the enemy of the people” are no accident: they are a deliberate strategy to isolate his followers in an information silo, where only his voice matters.
Fox “News,” Truth Social, MAGA podcasts, and a network of social media influencers form the walls of this new Jonestown. Alternative facts replace real ones. And when reality intrudes — when courts reject Trump’s lawsuits, when audits confirm his losses — his followers simply double down. “That’s just what the enemy wants us to believe.”
It’s classic cult behavior. And it’s why millions remain convinced that Trump won in 2020, that the COVID vaccine was a hoax or a plot, that January 6th was “legitimate political discourse.” Like Jones, Trump has taught his followers to see the world not as it is, but as he tells them it is.
When Jones’ utopia began to crumble — when defections and investigations threatened his power and a congressional delegation arrived to expose his lies and manipulations — he led his followers into mass suicide. Over 900 men, women, and children perished, drinking poisoned Kool-Aid to prove their loyalty.
Trump, faced with the reality of defeat in 2020, incited his followers to violence rather than admit loss. January 6th was America’s political Jonestown: a desperate, delusional last stand to keep their messiah in power. Trump didn’t just sit back as the Capitol was attacked. He watched with satisfaction, refusing to act for hours, while the very heart of our democracy was desecrated in his name.
And to this day, he defends that insurrection, calling those convicted of violent crimes “hostages,” giving pardons, and encouraging more violence if he’s indicted or loses again. Jones destroyed his followers; Trump is willing to destroy our nation.
I wrote about this back in the summer of 2023 in an article titled, “Will America Face “Narcissistic Collapse” as Trump Descends into Legal Hell?” Narcissistic collapse is what happens when psychopathic narcissists face defeat and humiliation and strike out against the world around them.
Think Hitler in his bunker when my old friend Armin Lehmann, then a 16-year-old Hitler Youth, handed him the news that the war was lost. Armin wrote a book about his experience, In Hitler’s Bunker: A Boy Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of the Fuhrer’s Last Days, which we discussed extensively when he was writing it and during the three years we traveled the world together, lecturing mostly across Europe and the Far East.
Hitler, in those final weeks — Armin told me and the historical record verifies — actually welcomed the destruction of Germany by American and Soviet bombs and tanks.
He hadn’t failed: his narcissism and the cult he had created and surrounded himself with wouldn’t let him confront that.
Instead, in his mind, the German people had failed, his generals had failed, his soldiers had failed. They had failed Germany, but, more importantly they had failed him and his cult — and he wanted them punished for failing him.
When he was finally pushed into full-blown narcissistic collapse — those final days that Armin spent with him — he succumbed to the fate of many severe narcissists who experience a failure so undeniable that it provokes full-blown narcissistic collapse: he killed his wife and then turned the gun on himself.
In the final stages of narcissistic collapse, long before suicide becomes an option, first comes the blaming and the attempts to punish others.
We see this now with Trump blaming the media, the courts, and the Democrats he now openly brags that he “hates” and encourages his cult followers to hate as well.
Historians and political scientists have long warned us about men like Trump. In Strongmen and on her Lucid Substack newsletter, Ruth Ben-Ghiat traces the path of authoritarians like Mussolini, Putin, and Trump: they all consistently cultivate a cult of personality, demonize opponents, destroy the press, capture the courts, collaborate with oligarchs, and use violence as a political tool.
Trump has followed that playbook to the letter.
Jason Stanley, in How Fascism Works and on his Forward Substack, identifies Trump’s tactics: appeals to a mythic past, relentless lying, glorification of violence, and the creation of a “victim” identity for the dominant group. Steven Hassan, one of America’s foremost experts on cults, calls Trumpism a “destructive political cult” in his book The Cult of Trump and on his Substack newsletter Freedom of Mind.
These aren’t wild theories. They’re the sober assessments of professional scholars and historians who’ve studied how democracies fall and how cults rise.
It’s easy to see Jones’ Kool-Aid as the symbol of his evil, but let’s not forget: Trump’s lies have already cost real lives.
His downplaying of COVID, his undermining of vaccines and masks, his promotion of quack cures like hydroxychloroquine and bleach weren’t just irresponsible: they were deadly. Hundreds of thousands of Americans would be alive today if Trump hadn’t turned public health into a culture war battlefield.
And now, his Big Lies about the election and the “deep state” are poisoning faith in our democracy itself. In poll after poll, a majority of Republicans say they believe Trump won in 2020. They believe it so deeply that they’re passing laws to suppress votes, installing loyalists to oversee elections, and preparing to reject any future result that doesn’t favor their Dear Leader. The poison is spreading and fast.
So what comes next?
Jim Jones didn’t start out plotting mass suicide. He got there one lie, one power grab, one act of cruelty at a time. Trump’s path is no different. His first term tested the boundaries. His second is breaking them.
Already, Trump openly promised dictatorship “on day one.” He’s already pursuing “retribution,” purging the government, and rounding up immigrants into camps. He’s gutted the civil service, weaponized the justice department, and is today using the military for domestic crackdowns.
This isn’t hyperbole. It’s all on the record. And it’s what happens when a cult leader gains the reins of state power, as the world has seen repeatedly throughout history.
We don’t have to follow Trump into the abyss. We can refuse the poison. We can choose the hard work of repairing our democracy, telling the truth, and holding this would-be strongman accountable.
But time is short. The cult is deep, and its leader is relentless.
History tells us where this path ends. Jonestown. Berlin 1933. Rome in 1922. Moscow in 2020. The question is whether we have the courage to change course before it’s too late.
Trump may not have led us into a jungle, but he has led millions into a psychological wilderness, where lies are truth, enemies are everywhere, and only he can lead the way out. Jim Jones led his people to destruction, all in the name of salvation. Trump is leading America down the same road.
We must say no. We must tell the truth. And we must do it now.
NOW READ: The most dangerous guy at Fox News is probably not who you think
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vic of bubble gertz finally implodes?
bubble provides praise and protects from crit/reality no court jester? mil and head of state laughing at you, fired by 81 million
9 24
MATT GERTZ (MEDIA MATTERS SENIOR FELLOW): If you go through the fact-checking in the debate, it's like four things. One of them is, "Actually, there were no pets being eaten in Ohio." One of them is, "You didn't actually win the 2020 election."
JOHN FUGELSANG (HOST): Small detail.
GERTZ: You know, it's just that we're talking about, like, basic stuff. You know, "Actually, violent crime is down, not up, according to the FBI." And I think the fourth one is --
FUGELSANG: And then "Women aren't murdering their newborn babies. Women aren't committing infanticide with the help of doctors and hospitals."
GERTZ: And, so, that's the whole list. Like, if you can't get through that level of fact-checking in your debate and you're also getting dramatically more time than Kamala Harris did -- I think he had, like, eight more minutes total, something like that. He can't actually drive a message. And the reason he can't drive a message, as I've written, is because he is so deeply entrapped in this right-wing media bubble. He just is focused on the bizarre fixations of the weirdos who love him and have their own TV shows.
FUGELSANG: That's it.
GERTZ: And, you know, at that point, you end up saying you you end up talking about how dogs and cats are being eaten in Ohio and saying things that are not just wrong, but if someone came up to you at a bar and started talking to you about that, you would move to the other end of the bar. Like, you would not want to be near someone who is randomly screaming about how the pets are being eaten. It's just, it is totally incomprehensible.
...
But if you're a normal person, like, if you're just going about your daily life, and all of a sudden -- and you say, "Huh. I think I want to find out some information about the presidential election. I'm gonna watch the debate tonight." And all of a sudden, one of the candidates is screaming about cats being eaten. You just -- that is not an appealing situation for you. And that, I think -- it's a huge problem for Donald Trump. It's a huge problem for the Republican Party as a whole that all of these crazy weirdos have such a huge impact on the party's message.
...
FUGELSANG: I mean, Donald Trump completely failed to bring anybody new to his ticket. But, Matthew, this has got to be because he's listening to these right-wing influencers. He doesn't seem to be -- listening to the people he pays to give him advice.
GERTZ: Yeah. I mean, I think that's a huge part of it and also that he is personally addicted, to getting his news from these crazy people. Like, on the one hand, they're speaking to him directly, like Laura Loomer apparently is now traveling with him to campaign events. But also, I mean, he gets his news from watching Fox News and seeing what people are Truth Social-ing at him and, you know, basically immersing himself in these crazy places.
This was the largest audience that either candidate is likely to see for the entire election cycle. Right? This was, it was 57 million people tuned into this debate. Dramatically more than either of them got for their convention speech, way more than, obviously, either of them will get for any other speech or television appearance or anything else. A huge opportunity to speak to people who might not be inclined to vote for you and make your case. And he just couldn't do it. He couldn't come close to doing it. He ended up babbling and ranting about all manner of nonsense partly because Kamala Harris was incredibly effective at baiting him, but partly because he is psychologically incapable of not taking that bait under any circumstance.
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7 22 an salon
famous British writer Samuel Johnson once criticized a political opponent's self-described patriotism by memorably pointing out that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Although Johnson lived before the advent of psychology and modern brain science, his observation has been at least partially vindicated by experts in subsequent centuries.
This does not mean there is anything wrong with celebrating the 4th of July with fireworks, good movies and learning about the founding fathers (even when it includes some ugly details). Feeling good about one's nation and your place in it is patriotism. But these days, many conflate patriotism with its more extreme cousin nationalism, which is predicated on superiority and competitiveness. You cannot merely be proud, but you must be proud of your nation's dominance – which means that you think in terms of winners and losers, friends and enemies.
Nationalism, because of its inherently tribal nature, can be as dangerous as the most potent illicit drug if the sentiment is used improperly.
One of the most famous early intellectuals to articulate a conclusion along these lines was Benedict Anderson, an Irish-American historian and political scientist. In his influential 1983 monograph "Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism," Anderson observed that nations are "imagined political communities" in that the nature of the community itself is, in a literal sense, rather arbitrary. Prior to the Middle Ages, people derived equivalent identities from things like their religious affiliations or loyalties to particular monarchical lines.
This changed during the Enlightenment period for a number of reasons: Latin was replaced among political leaders by their local vernaculars, capitalism cultivated a new class of business leaders that wanted to control the state, the Reformation weakened the power of the Vatican, royal governments were on their way out as democratic movements popped up everywhere, and the printing press allowed people to feel kinship based on common languages and geographical landmarks. Even the Western world's collective sense of time shifted from a theological to a more secular perspective, particularly as literacy became more prevalent.
When combined, each of these factors led people to crave a new sense of community. Hence we have the popular notion that one should feel a sense of community with others based on being part of a common "nation," which by definition is imagined because members have a sense of "horizontal comradeship" even though they have never met and often come from radically different backgrounds.
In theory, this may seem harmless, but as the bloody nationalistic wars that have marred human existence since the late 18th century prove — World War I perhaps most prominent among them — people are willing to kill for, and die for, their nations.
Even when the behavior is not seen as that extreme, nationalism can still bring out the worst in people.Take President Donald Trump, who psychologists noted has stimulated narcissistic behaviors in his followers by virtue of creating a cult of personality around his own seemingly narcissistic traits. While Americans were justifiably alarmed at that phenomenon, Trumpism is hardly alone or novel in tapping into collective narcissism. And what this leads to is not encouraging.
Writing for the journal Political Psychology in May, a group of American and British researchers examining Polish politics found that "national collective narcissism" tends to go hand in hand with nationalism, and additionally winds up being a strong predictor of whether a given person will hold nationalist sentiments. They concluded that "our analyses thus provide evidence that nationalism may be rooted in narcissistic exaggeration of the greatness of the national in-group rather than non-narcissistic national in-group satisfaction" — in other words, people are likely to hold nationalist views if they're already susceptible to narcissistic political styles.
Therefore, nationalism – which was created to form a sense of community – can bring out toxic traits in people. In addition, it is fueled by humanity's deepest insecurities and fears.(Hence the nationalist furor whipped up by a pandemic.) English author and psychology lecturer Steve Taylor PhD expressed a similar perspective in a 2020 article for Psychology Today.
"In my view, it makes more sense to explain modern day nationalism in terms of psychological factors," Taylor wrote. "There are some clues from the psychological theory of Terror Management. This theory — which has been validated by many studies — has shown that when people are made to feel insecure and anxious by being reminded of death, they tend to become more concerned with identity values such as nationalism, status and success."
To be clear, these sentiments do not only fuel nationalism. Arash Javanbakht, a psychiatrist from Wayne State University, further elaborated on the downsides of nationalism in a 2019 article from The Conversation:
"Tribalism is the biological loophole that many politicians have banked on for a long time: tapping into our fears and tribal instincts," Javanbakht wrote. "Some examples are Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan, religious wars and the Dark Ages. The typical pattern is to give the other humans a different label than us, and say they are going to harm us or our resources, and to turn the other group into a concept." Nationalism, while not the only manifestation of this tendency, is certainly one of the most prominent.