Is Donald Trump's movement really a "cult"? Well, I ought to know

In July of 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump announced that the fate of the country was in peril. In a televised speech, Trump announced that only one person was equipped to turn the sinking ship of America around. This wasn’t the first “fire and brimstone” political speech in our history, and certainly wouldn’t be the last. And this man once seen as a performative figure — a political sideshow — has metamorphosed into a towering and singular figure in America whose significance goes far beyond politics.

Some would argue his influence has taken on an almost religious character.

That speech at the Republican convention in Cleveland marked the moment when I started to internalize how much the political and ideological winds were shifting in the nation. At the time, Trump’s words shook me, and not only for the obvious reasons. It wasn’t his now-ubiquitous polemical flourish, or even what that implied about his approach to governing. It was actually his exact phrase that I couldn’t let go of: “I alone can fix this.”

To say that I alone can do virtually anything suggests a degree of permanency, perhaps even supernatural power. In a world that is entirely interdependent down to the molecules that make up our bodies, to suggest that any one person can singularly do anything without the support of others is quite a stretch. And hearing the phrase “I alone” invoked for me a memory of another time. I’d heard that phrase before, as a kid in Northern California, sometimes living on a commune and surrounded by hundreds of people who had all come together to do the same thing — worship a man named Franklin Jones. If you wanted happiness or salvation, you needed to follow him.

The overall message of one of Jones’ most prominent books could be summarized as “I alone am the way,” meaning the true path to enlightenment. He was a controversial guru and spiritual leader who also went by the names Ruchira Avatar Adi Da Samraj, The Divine World Teacher and True Heart Master Sri Sri Bagavan Adi Da, among others. He called his group Adidam. By the time I was a teenager, he had declared himself to be a unique incarnation of God, a physical manifestation of divinity here on earth sent to liberate us from what he called the “dark times” or “Kali Yuga.” His seminal essay was entitled “I Alone Am the Adidam Revelation.”

It will come as no surprise that Jones has often been described as a cult leader, although that was certainly not how I viewed him growing up. He was the wise and compassionate guru, as well as the person who captured virtually every moment of my parents’ interest and attention. I was along for the ride. As a teenager, my parents became Jones’ personal acupuncturists, which brought them very close to his inner circle of followers, at least until a falling out severed them from the group completely.

I lived quietly with the inner turmoil and trauma of my adolescent years in Jones’ group until 2017, when I released the documentary podcast series “Dear Franklin Jones,” which detailed my life in the group and featured interviews with other former members, including my parents. The success of that series forced me to confront difficult aspects of my childhood, including the fraught relationship I had tenuously built with my dad. By the time word got around about the series, my father and I were very much estranged. But after he was diagnosed with dementia and became unable to care for himself, I was forced to confront our toxic relationship while also becoming responsible for his care. It’s the subject of my new audio memoir, “The Mind Is Burning: Losing my Father to a Cult and Dementia.”

In my creative work and especially in writing my memoir, I have become attuned to making connections between my past and present. When I first heard Trump’s speech in 2016, those words — “I alone” — took me to a very specific, very raw place. It reminded me of the years I spent as a child under the specter of an authoritarian spiritual figure. As a child, I was led to believe that one man — in our case, an ordinary-looking guy from Jamaica, Queens, New York, exactly the same neighborhood where Donald Trump was born and raised — was in fact … God. The startling parallel between these two men, and that phrase in particular, remains intensely resonant for me. They both seem to be reaching towards a kind of ubiquity. An authority that transcends their own personhood. A godlike persona.

My journey to finding peace with everything that I saw and struggled with in Jones’ group was neither straightforward nor easy. In the years since then, I have continued to write and report on various fringe religious groups, including several that have been labeled as cults. What I continue to struggle with, however, is the word itself. Is it an extension of fandom, with public figures amassing cults of their own? Are the worldwide legions of “Swifties,” Taylor Swift’s most devoted fans, actually members of a cult? What exactly is a cult, and under the new Trump administration, are we living in one now?

Somewhere along the line, “cult” has come to mean so many things that I’m no longer sure it means anything at all. And no modern public figure is more often described as a cult leader than our duly elected president. A few months into his chaotic second term, the question of whether or not the movement that he has started is effectively a cult has become a live one once again. To appreciate how we got here, we need to understand the word itself, and how it caught fire in popular culture.

The meaning of the word “cult” has changed quite a bit. It was originally used simply to describe small, fringe religious movements — groups that were offbeat and outside the mainstream, but not necessarily sinister. In fact, many groups that were once considered cults, such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (better known as the Mormons) or the Seventh-day Adventist Church, are now widely regarded as mainstream religions.

Then came Charles Manson. The Tate-La Bianca murders of 1969 struck fear into mainstream America, and this frightening hippie who had supposedly compelled his acolytes to commit murder became the bogeyman of the counterculture era. Suddenly, a ”cult" meant something worse and more dangerous than a small group of ideologues or a charismatic leader. It could be a threat to public safety. Meanwhile, alternative religious movements were flourishing. There was the rebirth of evangelical Christianity known as the “Jesus movement,” the Hindu sect that became the Hare Krishnas and dozens more gurus and spiritual guides, churches and communes. Many were harmless, but others wielded deep and troubling control over their members.

Then, of course, came Jonestown.

More than 900 people died in a 1978 mass murder-suicide at a remote encampment in Guyana ruled by the Rev. Jim Jones. Cults were no longer just fringe oddities — they were existential threats. The images from Jonestown were horrifying: rows of bodies, cyanide-laced Flavor Aid, and chilling recordings of Jones commanding his followers to die for their cause. Suddenly, "cult" became synonymous with totalitarian mind control. The idea that someone could be brainwashed to the point of self-destruction shook the public to its core.

A wave of anti-cult activism followed. Families claimed their loved ones had been "brainwashed," and groups like the Cult Awareness Network emerged to fight back. Suddenly, any religious movement that deviated from the mainstream risked being labeled a cult. Once that happened, society saw these groups as dangerous. “Deprogramming” became a huge (and controversial) practice during this time. Families, terrified that their children had been sucked into cults, hired deprogrammers who sometimes literally kidnapped adults and forcibly tried to re-educate them to break free of their existing beliefs.

A vigorous debate on terminology ensued, rife with controversy. Some scholars began to use the term “new religious movement” to differentiate small religious groups from the stigmatized word “cult.” By the 1980s, the term “destructive cults” begain to appear. It seemed to offer a clearer definition of the kinds of cults that scare us, while also insulating anti-cult advocates from the threat of litigation, which became a tool of suppressing dissent for certain well-funded religious groups. The “cult wars” broke out — an intense series of disputes over what a cult actually was and what rights or recourse dissenters had against these groups, playing out both in the courts and in public discourse. More recently, documentaries like “Wild Wild Country,” “The Vow” and a million rehashes of the stories of Jonestown and the Branch Davidians of Waco have cemented an image of dangerous leaders with spellbound devotees who commit heinous acts.

But while these stories are frightening, the way that the concept of “cults” has migrated into pop culture has, in my view, effectively disarmed the term. We’ve made "cult" into a kind of aesthetic. It’s no longer only, or even primarily, about control and coercion. Now we use “cult” as a kind of metaphor to describe anything with an intense following. Just search the word on Etsy and you’ll find dozens of pithy phrases on cute stickers and T-shirts that minimize or contradict the word’s original import. And of course there’s also a mountain of product equating Trump and the MAGA movement with cultism: “If you’re not outraged, you’re in a cult.”

Seeing these ideas permeate the culture over the years has left me confused and frustrated. As someone raised in a group that went from a polite hippie-ish spiritual community to an isolated entity with its own cosmology, I think we’ve lost the thread. We joke about “cult favorite” beauty products and "cult status" movies, it’s a shorthand for devotion, loyalty and obsession. And when people talk about MAGA as a cult, it seems to exist in that hazy liminal space between a negative attribution of a fan group and something more sinister.

As American politics have become increasingly divisive and supercharged by misinformation, the term seeks to apply our understanding of dangerous and fanatical religious groups to extreme political beliefs. Is that a fair application? Is MAGA really a cult? The definition that makes the most sense to me is the one that tells us what a cult does, rather than what it is.

Robert Jay Lifton, one of the first scholars to explore on what cults are and are not, says that a cult exhibits three main characteristics:

1. A charismatic leader. A compelling thinker and speaker who can make people believe anything. Trump absolutely fits this bill. In fact, it appears to me to be one of his superpowers: the ability to read how a large population is feeling and to compel them to act in his interest. Which brings us to Lifton’s second defining characteristic.
2. A process. To be a cult, a group must have a philosophy unto itself, and a process of re-educating its followers in the philosophy of the group. For me growing up, that included communal acts of worship, rituals and an impossibly long reading list of doctrinal considerations from the leader. It’s a bit of a stretch, but MAGA, in a way, does appear to deploy a re-education process. If you are unhappy with the way your life is going and believe America is on the wrong track, the promise is offered that Trump is here to give your life meaning and make America great again.
3. Abuse. Once followers of a cult are under the sway of their leader and have been re-educated in the belief systems of the group, Lifton stipulates that they can be compelled to act against their personal interests. This can mean anything from giving away their personal wealth and belongings to the leader, all the way up to acts of terrorism or mass suicide.

When we reach the third point, I believe the purest definition of a cult starts to fall apart, and it becomes another culturally expedient term used to describe our complex political moment. Two-party politics contains a built-in dialectic about the interests of the people, in which each side will always accuse the other of acting against those interests. While one party or leader might possess qualities that appear cult-like, the U.S., at least for now, is still a democracy. There are nominally equal branches of government that provide important checks to the balance of power. Recent efforts to minimize the reach of the courts over executive privilege notwithstanding, the judiciary is still empowered to halt executive decisions.

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This is by no means to suggest that the mass destruction of the federal bureaucracy we are currently witnessing isn’t alarming. As a parent of two young boys, I am concerned about the character of the men in our highest office and how they present themselves to the public. I believe in the government institutions that make us a union of states rather than a pastiche of fiefdoms.

For the time being, however, I do not believe we are in a cult. One of the strangest things I witnessed during my years living in and around my parents' guru came after we had left the group. My father began to hold his own weekly meditation groups and became more outspoken about his spiritual beliefs and abilities. He started to believe that he had the ability to heal people by touching them, and that he could divine their futures with the help of his psychic abilities and tarot cards. He began to have visions of angelic souls from other dimensions visiting him with important messages for humanity.

He wanted the power and reach of the guru who had left him behind. He wanted to be a guru himself. Until, of course, he got sick, and then it all fell apart.

Few people would deny that Donald Trump has a powerful desire for authority and control. Many find that cumbersome, obnoxious or dangerous. But his desire for control does not make him a cult leader. We may have elected a president who seeks more than his fair share of authority over the three branches of government, but until or unless we disassemble those powers, there are still boundaries to his behavior. Whatever your feelings might be about Trump’s sociopathic behavior, the term “cult” doesn’t feel effective. Should his administration succeeds in dismantling the branches of government and giving full authority to one individual, that would be a different situation.

Trump’s worldview may be informed by an outsized ideology, and he is clearly energized by the vigor and purity of his believers. He hungers for the allegiance of the crowds at his rallies, and runs his staff through a byzantine maze of loyalty tests. A cult, however, is a group singularly directed by a sociopathic narcissist who seeks to control their followers to do their bidding and move in whatever direction they, alone, choose. For now, we still have a choice.