“SO MANY GREAT, EDUCATED, FUNCTIONAL PEOPLE WERE BRAINWASHED”: CAN TRUMP’S CULT OF FOLLOWERS BE DEPROGRAMMED?

The term “cult” gets thrown around a lot to describe the intense passion of Donald Trump’s followers—but is it accurate? For Steven Hassan, a former Moonie turned cult expert and author of The Cult of Trump, the answer is decidedly yes. Trump, he holds, has all the characteristics of a cult leader, and his followers the qualities of a cult, from the all-consuming devotion to a single malignant narcissist to the daily consumption of “alternative facts” to immunize them against cognitive dissonance (a.k.a. reality).