Just Another Cult Leader
We've seen this before ... just not in the White House
Stay with me on this one. It’s going to get a bit religious-y for a moment, and then it’s going to explain why your neighbors are crazy. Here goes:
It’s many years ago, and I’m in an undergraduate course on the philosophy of religion. The day’s lecture was on God, and more specifically on God’s relationship to truth and how truth is both delivered and perceived. The question posed by the instructor is “Does God create truth, or does he simply report truth?”
Most of us believe that truth exists separate from any kind of creator, and we can find it by touching any number of sources, educational and religious alike. But some of us believe truth is created by whatever Almighty we prefer, and we look to that source, and only that source when seeking the truth.
This second group – the true believers – that’s your crazy neighbors with the signs and the flags and the Chinese-made red hats. They do not look for truth outside of the Dear Leader, which is why you can never explain anything to them, even as the country burns down around them.
To Trump supporters, he does not report the truth. He creates the truth. Read that part again. It’s the core of the problem. Nothing is true without Trump, or apart from him. And nothing can be true unless he or one of his apostles says it. Conversely, if he says one thing today, and the opposite tomorrow, the new truth is layered over the old one, and the base simply denies the previous truth ever existed. This is Trump’s real and terrible power. Those in thrall to him don’t just flip-flop with him – the erase the existence of whatever came before and behave as if today’s truth has always been true and always will be. And if it changes again tomorrow, they’ll just hit the reset button and move on. It happens almost every day now.
And if you can never be wrong, you certainly can never be held accountable. You can make any promise you like and break it immediately. You can betray your people with impunity, and as often as you like. And to your true believers, you can replace even God herself. This is how cults become cults, by learning how to create truth for their followers. This is why we can’t compare Trump to any other president because we have never seen anything like him before but comparing him to cult leaders like David Koresh or Jim Jones is easy.
Somewhere along the way, Trump has become a religion, and to many of our neighbors and many more of our Christians, he has become the only religion, greater than and polar opposite of the Jesus they pretend to follow. For many, the infrastructure of religion still exists – the buildings, the crosses, the stained glass, etc. – but it’s just a shell. The only thing left inside it is an orange tyrant who removed religion’s appeals to humanity and compassion and replaced them with unfettered permission to hate.
We have a cult leader in the White House. God help us.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days fighting for working families as the Executive Producer of The Rick Smith Show, and his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.
AMEN!!!!!!!
My greatest fear is that the "Supreme Court" will rule that anything "It" does is an "official" act regardless of context or true import to the good of our nation's democracy and therefore a okay. Gives me chills.