Fake enemies, loaded language, grandiosity, belittling critics: Cults expert claims Donald Trump's tactics are taken straight from playbook of Sun Myung Moon, David Koresh and Jim Jones

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

In his upcoming book   The Cult of Trump , noted mind control expert Steven Hassan claims Trump has copied dictators and cult leaders throughout history

Trump has exploited the cult leader playbook:  'absolute confidence, grandiosity sowing fear and confusion, lying about the facts and belittling critics’

‘The question is to what extent does Trump exhibit a similar malignant narcissistic profile of a destructive cult leader just like Moon’, asks the author

Trump uses the same arsenal of indoctrination techniques to grab attention and devotion – ‘shunning, shaming, expulsion' 

Hassan maintains the president sounds like cult leader Jim Jones, who directed a mass suicide and murder of more than 900 followers at Jonestown in Guyana in 1978

In his dying breath, Jones said  it was ‘all the media’s fault. Don’t believe them’ 

Hassan says the clichés Trump uses and the loaded language fan fear and implant phobias

Trump uses rallies that he ostensibly attends to help other Republicans get elected  as charging stations where he can demonize his perceived enemies

Hassan writes that the Trump presidency can be evaluated by studying the psychology of mind manipulation and influence from these past cult leaders so that we don’t ignore the lessons of history – of Jonestown and other destructive groups --- at our own peril. 

It is fear that defines Trump’s philosophy, his personality and his presidency, according to the author.

One of his first campaign issues was to build a great Wall along the Mexican border to ‘insulate, isolate and elevate America’ from the rest of the dangerous world.

The concept of the Wall allowed Trump to play on images of murderers and rapists gathering at the southern border -- instilling fear in people’s minds of the danger posed by these presumed unruly and hostile immigrants – and that included Mexicans and even Muslims -- all part of the vast migrant caravan.

He pumped up the immigration crisis at the border trying to get funding for the wall and belief in the fear he conjured up.

Trump’s other enemies include globalists, radical left-wing Democrats, socialists, Hollywood actors, and the liberal media.

According to him, they all want to destroy America.

Trump has copied dictators and cult leaders throughout history with his fear mongering and playing on existing fears, amplifying those fears and distorting them with competing versions of reality and then using the tag line, ‘Trust me’, or ‘Believe me’.

He now sounds like cult leader, Jim Jones, who directed a mass suicide and murder of more than 900 followers at Jonestown in Guyana in 1978. In his dying breath, Jones said it was ‘all the media’s fault. Don’t believe them’.

Trump is a master media manipulator who never played by traditional political rules.

He called media outlets to insult his opponents, brag and lie about his own accomplishments while getting billions of dollars worth of free publicity because of the outrageous things he was willing to say.

The clichés he uses and the loaded language from ‘lock her up’, build the wall, and insulting nicknames for his opponents from Crooked Hillary and Pocahontas are all for mind control – to fan fear and implant phobias.

He consciously lied about questioning President Obama’s birth certificate – to grab headlines.

All of these techniques are just another bullying behavior of an impulsive, incompetent president who rants on through his barrage of daily tweets sowing confusion and distorting reality, according to Hassan.

Trump uses these rallies that he attends to help other Republicans get elected to office as charging stations where he can demonize his perceived enemies.

He exhibits the same sense of entitlement in evading paying tax, just like Sun Yung Moon, as well as a serious lack of empathy after Puerto Rico was wiped out by Hurricane Maria in 2017 and he refused to send money but instead went down and tossed out rolls of paper towels.

He expressed envy when he witnessed the massive number of people admiring North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un and Russian President Putin under their regimes.

‘He knows the cult playbook tactics’, writes the author.

He uses false enemies citing the Mexicans, Muslims and media to reinforce the us-versus them thinking.

He sets up mass rallies with supporters wearing slogans on wardrobe and chanting slogans and he continually fans fear and implants phobias.

Lies are standard operating procedure and by 2017, Trump had told 2000 lies but that number climbed to 10,000 two years later, according to the Washington Post that’s keeping a close tab.

Again, lies are ‘right out of the Cult Leader Playbook’, writes Hassan, and are used to stoke fear and hold onto power – just a business strategy to keep people watching.

Trump has reinvented himself many times, and the latest from being a brash and controversial reality TV star to the most powerful person on earth, solely thanks to the Apprentice.

He had no ideal ideology other than the one he had as a businessman – which was winning.

Fred Trump first rescued his son and took him under his authoritarian wing when his cold mother cared little about her children.

Cult leaders Charles Manson, Jim Jones and David Koresh all had an absentee mothers and that created ‘insecure parental attachment’ as well as narcissism, writes Hassan.

Fred exposed his son to religion through Norman Vincent Peale, considered a cult leader when Peale claimed he was God’s salesman.

Fred regularly took Donald into NYC to hear Peale speak and it was a highlight of Trump’s youth spent in Queens.

‘If you believe in yourself 100 percent and pray for financial success, God will grant you blessings’, Peale preached.

Peale used repetition and rhythmic vocal cadences as well as vivid imagery in his preaching and that effect remained with Trump all his life that he regurgitated for use with ‘the Wall’ and ‘dangerous foes’.

Fred Trump pumped up Donald by telling him, ‘You are a killer. You are a king’.

But when the little ‘king’ who was an aggressive little bully started collecting knives, Fred packed him off to military school where he continued to bully other kids and teachers as well.

One teacher from his military school recently remembered Trump as a troublemaker in school: ‘Even then he was a little sh*t’.

Trump wanted to be recognized as handsome and charming but those two descriptions never came up in his profile description.

He had always been fascinated with Hollywood and movie making and desperately wanted to attend USC but he was rejected because of lousy grades so he turned to Fordham University in the Bronx, a Jesuit school.

After two years, he transferred to the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated without honors.

From there it was business with dad who had a longstanding reputation for being a swindler who went after mid and low income housing in New York’s outer boroughs.

Fred had a reputation of being mobbed up and made use of mob-owned construction companies.

He was pals with Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief council and fixer during his communist and homosexual witch hunts in the ‘50s.

Cohn became Trump’s lawyer and fixer in the early eighties when he was looking to escape his father’s outer-boroughs empire and move into Manhattan’s real estate world.

But first Trump had to borrow more than $60 million from dad to start his business in New York, hang out at trendy nightclubs and bars with models – and learn the ways of Cohn.

Cohn had a reputation for attacking, never apologizing, stopping at nothing to reach his goals, distracting his opponents as well as lying and cheating.

‘Those are the rules of war. Donald learned that from Roy’, stated Trump adviser and Cohn protégé, Roger Stone.

When Trump was cast as host of the Apprentice, he was labeled as a D-lister. He was a clown-like figure who couldn’t be taken seriously.

‘We knew Trump was a fake...but we made him out to be the most important person in the world, made the court jester the king’, stated the show’s supervising editor, Jonathan Braun.

The smoke and mirrors rehabbed Trump’s image into a ‘Master of the Universe’ and the show was the single biggest factor that put Trump in the national spotlight.

Damaging racist and sexist remarks are purported to be on those Apprentice tapes that have been secreted away.

Shows were also reportedly heavily edited because Trump was not articulate.

Trump ran with the notoriety of the show after fourteen years to promote his self-branded companies and seek out licensing deals.

Following the cult leader profile, Trump is known to lie, cheat and steal with no empathy, no conscience in his own businesses.

‘The question is to what extent does Trump exhibit a similar malignant narcissistic profile of a destructive cult leader just like Moon’, asks the author.

He uses the same arsenal of indoctrination techniques to grab attention and devotion – ‘shunning, shaming, expulsion and physical punishment’.

Trump has more than 3500 litigations in the courts that he has used to harass and discourage people. He was the plaintiff in 1900 cases.

Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter, wrote, ‘Trump felt compelled to go to war with the world. It was a binary, zero-sum choice for him: you either dominated or you submitted. You either created and exploited fear or you succumbed to it’.