New York Daily News

THE CULT OF TRUMP

What Donald’s four-day festival of ego worship revealed about his candidacy

- BY MICHAEL D’ANTONIO D’Antonio is author of “The Truth About Trump”

The greatest political spectacle since the Democratic Party’s 1968 fiasco in Chicago, the GOP’s coronation of Donald Trump exhausted all of the usual political analogies. Yes, it was a circus. All party convention­s can seem like tent shows. But the usual comparison­s fail.

This time, unlike any other convention in memory, absent were the party’s most respected elders: two former Presidents, two recent nominees and most senators. And present — front and center, also as never before — was the candidate’s family. Their memorable performanc­es assured that the event was not so much a political gathering as the celebratio­n of an apocalypti­c cult of personalit­y.

In the case of Trump, we’re seeing and hearing a charismati­c leader whose followers are devoted more to the man, or rather his cartoonish image, than to any coherent set of ideas. As Trump explained himself in 2004, his life is “a comic book and I love living in it.”

In the story he has told, over and over, Trump is a hero who attracts loyal followers as he vanquishes enemies. (Consider the millions of social media followers he had before the campaign and you can see the level of hero worship he enjoyed.) In the past, his enemies were business competitor­s and doubters in the press. Today they are political opponents, most especially Hillary Clinton.

With his own effective and terrifying address, delivered in a screaming style, Trump displayed the oratorical skills that cult leaders possess. Over a lifetime he has combined these talents with an enormous fortune to create a following that is attached to him first, and party second. (This is how his daughter Ivanka could get away with admitting that she isn’t even a registered Republican.) The elements of the cult dynamic now in place include Trump’s apocalypti­c vision of our times, the enemy to be vanquished, a blinkered view of reality, and the cohesion created by the combinatio­n of threats and rewards he offers to the faithful.

“Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country,” said Trump beneath an electronic screen with his name – TRUMP – in glowing golden letters. Then, after the gloomiest assessment of the world since the end of the Cold War — “death, destructio­n, weakness” — he promised that he would make it all better.

“I am your voice,” he said in one moment. In another he said, “I will win for you.” But nowhere in a speech that took him an hour and 15 minutes to deliver did he add details to the vague promises he has made before. And nowhere in the text can be found any hint of the soul of Donald Trump.

Who is this man? As Ivanka said in her convention speech, he is “famous and not really well known.” That’s deliberate: Trump’s lifelong project has been to construct an image out of symbols of wealth and power. He is like one of those giant video screens that beams messages to throngs of tourists in Times Square. The image can be changed in an instant, in order to sell the man with a new version of the sales pitch. But it is as far from the real man as a flickering picture on the screen.

Always, with Trump, it is the man we are offered, not a program for achieving goals or a set of political set of principles. Fortunatel­y, or so the message goes, “when you have my father in your corner,” said Ivanka, “you will never again have to worry about being let down.”

The key word in Ivanka’s speech was “father.” Indeed, the Trump children, four of whom addressed the convention, used the word “father” more than 75 times. Here the echoes of a religious cult can be heard quite clearly. “My father is an exception,” she said. “Only my father will say I will fight for you.”

Of course there’s nothing wrong with adult children speaking of their father. However, the choice to have four different speakers repeatedly attest to his greatness as a paternal figure gave the proceeding­s a religious tinge. The person Ivanka described was not so much a man as a God-the-Father figure who “sacrificed greatly” to offer himself as our leader. How did he achieve the party’s nomination? The answer was in the first paragraph of Ivanka’s speech, when she said he had done it “through his own sheer force of will.”

The candidate himself has reminded us repeatedly that he sacrificed in order to run for President and even at times complained that he wasn’t getting paid to do it. For an ordinary presidenti­al contender, such a complaint would be quite damaging. In Trump’s case, it was quickly forgotten. Similarly, no candidate would want to tell the nation that he rose on the basis of the Nietschean will to power his daughter notes. The concept always evokes comparison­s to dictators and tyrants. But this is no ordinary candidate, and so the reference to “will” is offered for all the world to hear.

Deep in their hearts, Trump’s grown children may regret their father’s race-baiting, xenophobia and anger. But spend time with them, as I have, and you will discover that there’s no way to get the younger Trumps to voice any disagreeme­nt with him on any matter. When I spoke with Eric Trump, he told me, with a straight face, that his father is “a super genius” in the mold of Winston Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt. Donald Trump Jr. told me that

his father is simply geneticall­y superior. “That’s what separates him from everyone I know,” he explained.

Try as I did, hours of interviews with Trump’s three eldest children did not produce one word of dissent. This record of absolute support, even when it comes to issues that are clearly controvers­ial, is well establishe­d. When the press reported in 2012 that the siblings told Trump to stop suggesting President Obama wasn’t born in the United States, they denied that it happened. I couldn’t even get Ivanka, whose aesthetic judgment is impeccable, to admit that Trump Tower, with all its brass and pink stone, is the slightest bit tacky.

Why is the Trump clan so monolithic? Here again the cult dynamic is instructiv­e. Cults require absolute fealty and punish apostates with banishment. Donald Trump has always made it clear, as he explained to me, that he values loyalty above everything. In a discussion of the notorious (and deceased) lawyer Roy Cohn, Trump praised him as a man who “would kill for a person that he really liked.”

In a similar vein, Trump once blasted Chief Justice John Roberts of the Supreme Court, a man constituti­onally required to be independen­t, for being “extremely disloyal” to the President who appointed him.

For the disloyal, Trump reserves swift and extreme punishment­s. As he told me, if you cross him, “you are dead to me.” Hang around Trump and you will hear many stories to support his claim that “if you hit me I hit you back 10 times harder.” Faced with these options — banishment or retaliatio­n — family members and others who have benefited from Trump’s wealth and power fall in line.

Besides his children, Trump’s most devoted acolytes have included executives who stay with him for decades at a time, and personal assistants who keep his secrets. (In 40 years, he has employed just two.) In the campaign, he is served by the surrogates who appear in the press to argue that a man who traffics in racist messages and religious intoleranc­e is not a bigot. With straight faces and steely reserve, they deny the common meaning in the words Trump speaks, complain that the press is unfair, and echo the candidate’s mantras.

Many of Trump’s campaign staff are newcomers whose qualificat­ions begin and end with their commitment to the dear leader. Three of the main ones — Andy Dean, Katrina Pierson and Omarosa Manigault — have appeared on reality TV shows, which gives them something in common with a candidate who is best known as the star of the long-running “Apprentice” franchises. With scant political records of their own, but steadfast performanc­e skills, they reliably offer the cult leader’s bizarre perspectiv­e on reality.

This dynamic was displayed on the convention’s first day when the Trump campaign steadfastl­y denied the obvious plagiarism in Melania Trump’s convention address, which included passages lifted from, of all people, Michelle Obama.

After repeated denials, responsibi­lity for the copying was in the end accepted by a writer whose main occupation has been to serve the Trump businesses. How could the candidate entrust such an important job to someone who was a political amateur? The answer is that the cult values devotion more than anything else. This explains why, throughout the convention, prime-time speaking slots were handed to his wife and children. Never have so many members of a candidate’s family spoken at a presidenti­al nominating convention.

Do the kids, the associates and everyone else going through the motions in Cleveland really believe in the radical Donald Trump vision for America? Hardly. Are they conditione­d to do nothing but feed the ego of the man whose name is in bold, all caps, shiny lettering everywhere they look? Absolutely.

Like a typical cult, the campaign defined an enemy, in this case Hillary Clinton, as an extraordin­arily powerful and evil threat that must be vanquished. The apex of this argument came in Ben Carson’s convention speech. In a loop-de-loop fashion, he explained that a paper Clinton wrote in college, which praised the dead social activist Saul Alinsky, proves she is a servant of the devil. Alinsky once noted that “Lucifer” was a revolution­ary. Clinton liked Alinsky. “Think about that,” said Carson.

When it was his turn to speak, Trump offered a masterful amplificat­ion of the message of fear and anger that are the major themes of his cult’s belief system. He demonized illegal immigrants, a shrinking population that is more law-abiding than average, and repeated his pledge to build a huge wall on the border with Mexico. As he promised to “restore law and order” to a country enjoying some of the lowest crime rates in decades, Trump rarely stopped shouting until he reached his final line, which reiterated the overall campaign theme to “Make America great again.”

In style and substance, Trump sound very much like an endtimes preacher. This makes sense. Cults as we have seen them before are more evidently religious and have not threatened to put their gods in charge of the most powerful nation the world has even seen.

The cult of Trump exists apart from the traditiona­l Republican Party and outside the influence of thoughtful, moderating voices. Warning of the apocalypse and promising the world, the man who leads it could come to power. It is enough to make anyone pray that the nation be saved.

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