#strongmen

The Cult of Trump

How ritual, spectacle, and devotion turned politics into worship

James B. Greenberg

Sep 24, 2025

In a democracy, leaders are meant to be accountable to citizens. In a cult, followers are accountable only to the leader. Donald Trump has blurred that line so completely that his authority no longer rests on policy or law but on worship. That is why he is more than an authoritarian politician: he is a cult leader. Authoritarianism and cult politics often blur together, but it is the cult side of Trump’s power that helps explain why the usual checks—facts, courts, even elections—fail to break his hold.

The architecture is familiar: a single figure elevated beyond error, surrounded by followers who are convinced they alone possess the truth. It’s us versus them. Outsiders are cast as enemies; independent thought becomes betrayal. Fear is cultivated deliberately through threats of punishment, exclusion, and eternal loss. Doubt is punished, often through public humiliation or social exile. To leave the group is to invite ruin.

Thanks for reading James’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Trump carries this logic into politics. His rallies echo revival meetings: chants replace debate; flags substitute for argument. Supporters echo his words, however implausible, and through repetition those words harden into belief. Loyalty is no longer measured by civic action or ethical conduct; it is gauged by the willingness to defend him at all costs, even when the claims defy reason.

Anthropology teaches us that rituals do not merely symbolize belief—they create it. They establish realities that cannot be verified yet are treated as unquestionably true. Trump has mastered this. The more implausible the claim, the greater the loyalty it demands. By accepting the impossible, followers demonstrate their faith, and through that faith, he tightens his grip. What outsiders call lies, insiders recognize as tests of devotion. And it isn’t only imposed from above: his followers themselves help sustain the illusion, repeating his words, chanting, and reenacting the rituals that bind them together.

Cults consolidate power by sealing off members from doubt. Trump’s movement does this not by sequestering people in communes but by surrounding them with a media cocoon that filters out contradiction. Fox News, social media feeds, and partisan networks serve as both pulpit and barricade. Breaking away is not a matter of changing parties; it is losing a community that now defines salvation in political and even spiritual terms.

Vulnerability provides the raw material. People shaken by job loss, illness, or grief are primed for promises of deliverance. Trump channels their despair into anger at scapegoats—immigrants, elites, academics, environmentalists. The world’s complexity is boiled down to enemies and threats. In return for obedience, he offers the simplest and most powerful of gifts: belonging. It is an old mechanism—collective fears and frustrations focused on an enemy, whose condemnation unites the faithful.

But belonging comes at a price. Cults demand visible proof of devotion, whether in money, labor, or sacrifice. Trump’s fundraising appeals and endless merchandise function like tithes. Small donations accumulate into vast sums, transforming individual faith into collective capital. Participation is not just emotional but financial, binding people more tightly the more they give.

The demands escalate. Cults often measure faith in suffering, and Trump has shown indifference to the costs borne by his own followers. Pandemic deaths, the toll of climate disasters, and violence carried out in his name are brushed aside as collateral. Like rulers who displayed their sovereignty through control over life and death, his movement transforms vulnerability into proof of faith. The willingness to endure loss, even death, becomes the mark of loyalty.

History gives us examples. Roman emperors fused spectacle with cruelty, turning the coliseum into a theater where power was enacted before the crowd. Caligula demanded recognition as divine, staging executions not just as entertainment but as demonstrations of his god-like power. Historians remind us this “divinity” was more political theater than literal belief, which shows how performance itself became the basis of legitimacy. In the twentieth century, Sun Myung Moon wove theology, economics, and politics so tightly that followers could no longer separate one from the other. In each case, symbols, rituals, and public displays turned rulers into figures around whom the universe seemed to revolve.

Trump belongs to this lineage of power performed through spectacle. His rallies operate as ritual theater. Faith in God merges with loyalty to the state, and both are redirected toward him. Arenas become sanctuaries where devotion is enacted, fear stoked, and cruelty displayed as entertainment. The politics of spectacle is not incidental: it is the very mechanism by which followers are bound.

That is why ordinary checks on power falter. Facts, court rulings, even elections cannot dislodge devotion once it has crossed into worship. Argument collapses in the face of faith. Belonging, once fused with salvation, resists rational appeal. And in a media environment driven by provocation, every outrage is amplified, keeping Trump at the center of attention, which is where cult leaders must remain.

Political ecology sharpens the point. Cults do not emerge in a vacuum; they thrive in environments of disruption. Economic abandonment, institutional retreat, and ecological crisis create fertile ground for movements that promise certainty amid collapse. Trump’s appeal rests less on policy than on the offer of order to those who feel abandoned, however false that promise may be.

The danger lies not only in Trump himself but in the machinery that sustains him. Ritual, repetition, financial extraction, fear, and performance wear away the foundations of civic life. We are offered discipleship instead of citizenship, ceremony instead of democracy. The cost is political and human: the erosion of our ability to live together without bending to the will of one man. A nation of citizens cannot survive if it allows itself to be turned into a congregation.

Suggested Readings

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951.

Beard, Mary. The Roman Triumph. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton, 2020.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Lifton, Robert Jay. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Rappaport, Roy A. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Wolf, Eric R. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.