It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the word cult affixed itself to Donald Trump and his movement. It may have been as early as 2016, when, weeks before the Iowa caucus, Trump declared with god-man-like aplomb that he could shoot someone in Times Square and not lose a vote. It may have been mid-2018, when Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, fretted as he left office about the “cultish” turn in the party. Or maybe it can be traced to a New York Times editorial board op-ed, published a few days before Corker’s comments made the news, which nervously noted the rapid transformation of the Republican Party into a machine for devotion to a single mortal. Certainly, by January 6, 2021, and the mouth-frothing fervor of Stop the Steal, cult had gone from being a political jab to a term of art, widely employed to describe the apparently invincible thrall in which Trumpism holds millions of Americans.
The impulse to understand MAGA this way is owing in part to the efflorescence of stories about cults across pop culture. From Wild Wild Country’s account of the rise and fall of the self-styled free-sex guru Rajneesh for a generation of wealth-seeking believers in Reaganomics to The Vow’s portrayal of NXIVM’s transformation from corporate management seminar to sex-trafficking ring; from Warren Jeffs’s polygamous Latter-day Saints–offshoot commune in Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey to the charismatic hold of spiritual influencer Teal Swan in The Deep End, thirst for tales of charismatic leaders, secret rituals, and salacious scandals seems unquenchable. Between the major streaming platforms, Netflix, Hulu, Max, Disney+, and Prime, more than five dozen cult documentaries are currently available in a panoply of flavors: sex, UFO, meditation, doomsday, and on and on. We are in a billion-dollar cult culture boom.
As a mass delusion fueled by charisma, shared grievance, aspiration, and a stubborn rejection of inherited truths, Trumpism bears no small resemblance to these insular, shadowy communities of faith and heterodoxy that have enthralled and entertained us. Over the past near-decade, people across the otherwise fissured political spectrum have become armchair experts in strange but potentially revolutionary groups, their imaginations caught up in escalating radicalism. And across dozens of stories, they are hooked by a single enticing promise: All cults fall. In TV cults, the skeptic is always vindicated.
This, in fact, is the real satisfaction of the cult narrative: the reinforcement of the fantasy that we who watch are different—better, smarter, and more equipped to hold power and influence—than those who believe. Having spent hours engrossed in the details of being in a cult, we imagine ourselves to have understood a dangerous phenomenon without ever having been subject to that danger. Not only might we glimpse that elusive Secret, we see the invisible wires and sleights of hand and, maybe most importantly, the way it all turns out. We already know that it is doomed. We are the new prophets, gifted with future sight.
In the waxing days of Trump’s second presidential act, this is the true appeal of seeing MAGA as a cult: It’s an alibi for liberals who are less trying to fathom the reasons for the man’s return than dreaming of his movement’s catastrophic collapse. The same combination of moral superiority and narrative certainty that foresees the imminent end of Heaven’s Gate as they look to the sky for escape also fuels the internet’s hunger for signs of #MAGARegret and makes the gleeful schadenfreude of “FAFO” (fuck around and find out) a new political rallying cry. As the Democratic Party continues to wring its hands in meek and ineffectual dismay over the Trump administration’s daily onslaught, its base has discovered the illiberal pleasures of scrolling TikToks that stitch videos of Trump supporters weeping over slashed farm subsidies or shuttered businesses against a gospel choir chorus of “I never thought the leopards would eat my face.” Sadism, reveling in the suffering of others, is—as a rule—frowned upon, but when its satisfaction is turned toward a cultural phenomenon we have been told is too extremist or dangerous to exist in the mainstream, it comes to be a salutary violence. For their own good. Hard lessons, like a sharp slap to interrupt a hysteric outburst, school people back into good behavior. Except when the finding out doesn’t seem to come.
Despite having been told for so long that they were wrong—uneducated, impolite, fanatical, gullible, racist, backward—MAGA supporters ascended to the highest ranks of American politics. From inside the Oval Office, they hear their own rageful, incoherent sputtering at the injustices of the Deep State and The System issuing from the mouth of the most powerful man in world. It’s heady, it’s fortifying, it’s vindicating. This is the part of the cult narrative where the tearful pleas of loved ones to come home bounce back “Return to Sender.” This is also the part that devotees of cult media and Trump opponents struggle to come to terms with: People don’t want to leave what has given them such psychic and social gratification, especially to return to what didn’t serve them in the first place.
So we wait, with unconcealed anticipation, for the MAGA faithful to suffer the same fate as the brainwashed devotees of Mother God, who were arrested for carting their leader’s mummified body through the desert in hopes of finding the salvation she promised, or of Charles Manson, whose “family” followed him all the way to prison for life. Meanwhile, Trump supporters seem to remain impervious to the lessons they were supposed to have found out. And indeed, the more they refuse to repudiate the president and their own beliefs, or admit the causal connection between his policies and their tribulations, the more the left fantasizes their misfortune. We crave their reckoning as the satisfying (and promised) final act in the real-life docuseries we’ve been mainlining since before the pandemic. But what if the arc of history doesn’t bend toward justice so much as turn back in on itself? What if the story of cults that so tidily predicts the end of Trump is as anesthetizing and deluding as the ideology it claims to oppose? It’s gripping entertainment, but cult media’s promises of guaranteed closure are not so much real as a compensation for what we already know.
After the cameras stop rolling, after scenes of comforting closure are edited together, the story of a cult goes on. It continues in the courtroom, as undaunted adherents of Warren Jeffs crowd the spectator box. It continues as millions of Americans keep flocking to Rajneesh’s Indian ashram. People continue to believe. Cults don’t just die, they shift so that they can meet new social and psychic needs. Cult documentaries can’t tell us what happens next because their power lies in their endings—the fiery siege, the tearful confession, the moment of brutal awakening—endings that are designed to produce social repression.
Repression, Freud says, is the “relaxation of the censorship—the formation of a compromise.” Everyone gives up a little (or a lot) of what we want in exchange for the muffled security of being “normal.” A standard assumption about groups that share unconventional beliefs and rituals is that, by declaring them a cult and pushing them outside the bounds of acceptable society, we can curtail their influence. Indeed, that is precisely what these documentaries aim to do; to show and then contain the dangers that cults pose to the social compact. The truth is that when we’ve agreed to live within the safe strictures of normativity, it is almost unbearable to see people living beyond our psychic means. We must believe there’s a cost.
Crafted to impress upon everyone who tunes in precisely what the price of straying outside the bounds of decorum and constraint is, cult media has inadvertently written a new coda. That final episode is the beginning of the story’s second life: the memes, the merch, the folklore, the obsession. Jonestown didn’t end with the Kool-Aid; it became a metaphor for not heeding caution. Manson went to prison but became a cultural icon. Stalin was embalmed, but his political blueprint persists—in India, in Turkey, in America. The cult documentary’s finale is just the opening act of its cultural immortality. Our hunger for the collapse of Trump’s movement isn’t just about justice—it’s about the thrill of witnessing a story we know how to consume. But history doesn’t follow scripts. Faith and loyalty are not so easily shaken. What appears to be the end of the story is, in fact, often a lesson against the calculus of consequences. Cults don’t disappear; they go viral. And the reckoning we’re waiting for? It might just be the prologue to something we don’t yet know how to fear. After all, 30 years after the fiery siege in Waco, the scene of the inferno out of which abandoned followers of David Koresh staggered blinkingly into federal custody, Donald Trump held the first official rally of his second presidential campaign there. One end, another beginning.