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Looking at Trump as a Failed, Decaying Cult [1]

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Date: 2023-12-22  

A failed cult, such as the one led by Donald Trump, decays in predictable ways.

Once the cult fails to deliver on its main prophecy, the downward spiral takes control.

Let’s consider Trump’s “Make America Great Again” as the prophecy of his cult. And let’s consider his inability to win re-election in 2020 as his point of failure.

As nearly always the case with failed cults, the failure is explained by the leaders who use their PR skills as best they can. In Trump’s case, the bargaining after failure involves claiming the election was stolen.

This is so important to Trump and his followers because they cannot admit that their leader did not in fact “Make America Great Again.”

An article in Salon explains that the failure does not result in widespread abandonment of the cult, but it also stops its growth. This seems to be exactly the case with the Trump cult. Who has met a recent convert to Trumpism? Who has met someone who walked away from Trumpism? Actually, there are beginning to be a few of these.

But what then happens to the adherents of the cult? Well, like all of us, they die.

Of people who were 65 years old when Trump won in 2016, more than 16 per cent of them will no longer be with us for the 2024 election. When you consider people who were 75 in 2016, more than 40 percent will have left the voter rolls by 2024.

With Trump’s cult following diminishing rapidly and not gaining new members, that isn’t going to help him. Another interesting aspect of the demographics is a result of Trump’s embrace of Covid.

Dealing with Covid in the early days was not a good fit for Trump’s skill set — essentially an ability to shoot off his mouth. The fight against the disease was complicated and Trump does not do complicated. He chose to deny the epidemic and led his followers to reject the available medical care. That did not help his demographics as Covid remains a leading cause of death among people over 65.

We will need to work like hell in the 2024 election. We know how to do this. And if we all work together on this, we can get it done. It’s not bad to have “saved democracy” on your bucket list.

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