Death Rattle of a Cult: Trump, Epstein, and the Long Knives of the Right...

With Fox sharpening the blade and MAGA losing its grip, America teeters on the edge of a political Jonestown...

“He who does not punish evil, commands it to be done.” —Leonardo da Vinci (anticipating Merrick Garland?)

Elon Musk is probably chuckling as Trump flails; today’s firestorm around the Epstein documents arguably started when he tweeted that Trump was in the files. Which has led to some significant changes in the Trump/media/politics/deep-state landscape that it’s important to review. They include questions about the future of Trump, his cult followers, a possible power struggle between Trump and Murdoch, and JD Vance’s Presidential ambitions.

To begin: if you want everything around the Epstein furor to make sense, all you have to understand is that Donald Trump has been leading a cult.

Like Jim Jones did. Like Charles Manson did. Like Rajneesh did here in Oregon. Unlike Manson, but more like Rajneesh and Jim Jones, however, Trump’s cult is fairly large and preexisted his appearance on the scene. And that’s part of his problem.

It’s large enough to have in it three kinds of people.

The first kind of person is the “true believer.” They make up most of the Trump cult members, what we call MAGA. They’re usually pretty much willing to overlook anything Dear Leader does, much like the devoted followers of Rajaneesh and Jim Jones.

And then there are the “facilitators.” These are cynical people who don’t believe the cult leader’s BS, but go along with it — and even promote it — because it works to their benefit. They are typically parasitic. They usually make their money from the members of the cult, or get power from them (votes in this case), and often use their position in the cult to gain other benefits like sexual favors or fame.

In this case the facilitators are the Republican politicians who are begging money from their followers and voters, and then vote to screw those followers on behalf of the cult leader — Trump — and his billionaire friends. The morbidly rich keep the cult facilitators in line by funding their elections and, in the case of Republican Supreme Court justices, their lavish lifestyles.

When you understand that it’s a cult and that some of the people who seem high-up in it are true believers and not facilitators, suddenly Marjorie Taylor Greene’s behavior makes sense when she seems to attack Trump: she’s a true believer. She’s completely bought into the conspiracy nuttery that brought him to office twice.

You also begin to understand why Chuck Grassley ran that Senate judiciary committee the way he did to push through Emil Bove over the objections of the Democrats and literally hundreds of former lawyers, judges, and Department of Justice officials: Grassley is a cynical facilitator.

And you understand why the Republican Congressman from Kentucky, Thomas Massey, has joined with Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna to demand release of the Epstein documents and essentially turned on Trump.

Massey represents the third kind of person in a cult, who only shows up typically toward the early stages of the collapse of the cult, and then presents a real danger to the cult leader.

This third category are “the true believers who have suddenly seen a crack in reality,” the false reality that the cult leader has created around them. You could call them “former true believers.” Once they saw the light through that crack — saw the real world — they realized that they were being lied to.

When a cult is on the verge of collapse, these kinds of people become more and more numerous as more and more people begin to wake up from the cult leader’s trance.

At that point, they turn on the cult leader the way a spurned lover turns on the previous object of their affection. They become angry and vengeful. They demand answers. They want to know how they got sucked in and why: “Who did this to me? And to whose benefit?”

This is how Donald Trump’s world is disintegrating right now, and the danger is that, like Jim Jones, Charles Manson, and Rajaneesh, he may destroy a lot of lives when he goes down.

He may not kill them like Jim Jones did — although he already arguably killed a half-million of his cult followers with the malicious, incompetent way he handled Covid — but he will destroy many of the people and institutions around him. This is what narcissists do when they begin to psychologically collapse.

As I noted two weeks ago, my late friend Armin Lehmann was there when he gave Hitler the information that the war was lost. He stood outside Hitler’s door when he shot himself. He wrote a book about it, and told me that Hitler wanted Germany destroyed by the Allies because the German people, he believed, had “let him down.”

This is “narcissistic collapse,” which I’ve written about several times over the past dozen or so years. Donald Trump is almost certainly going to hit this state of mind (he’s already close), and many of his “true believer” followers are in the midst of their own personal narcissistic collapses right now.

And that is what makes this a very dangerous moment for America.

Suing Rupert Murdoch, for example, was an extraordinarily reckless and dangerous thing for Trump to do. Newscorp isn’t going to roll over and pay Trump a bribe, in all probability, because he needs them more than they need him.

Murdoch, after all, is the guy who created the cult that Trump has come to dominate: they’re called “Fox News viewers.” He created it long before Donald Trump came along: he and Roger Ailes simply let Donald Trump into it back in 2015 because he was good for ratings and thus increased profits.

So, once Murdoch decided that Donald Trump could benefit his cult and make money for his television network (and even lower his taxes), he let Donald believe that he was the leader of the cult. And for many people in that Fox “News” Viewer cult, Trump actually did become the leader.

But the real guy who controls the cult is Rupert Murdoch. It’s not Donald Trump. Trump is just today’s figurehead. Sort of like with the Catholic Church, Trump is the pope right now. But when the pope goes, he gets replaced.

The institution lives on, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the Murdoch family is not going to let the cult that they’ve built with Fox “News,” the cult that has made them billions of dollars and given them the power to influence governments on three continents, dissolve.

They’ll jettison Donald Trump long before they’ll let go of that kind of power.

The way Rupert Murdoch’s father Sir Keith Murdoch first created this cult back in the 1940s was by feeding the readers of his newspapers in Australia a steady diet of racist outrage, fear, and anger. As historian John C. McManus writes in his definitive book Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943:

“As American soldiers began arriving in numbers during the early months of 1942, they were greeted with tremendous enthusiasm by the Australians, many of whom couldn’t hide their immense relief at the soothing presence of the GIs. … Appreciative crowds gathered at piers and station platforms to greet incoming ships and troop trains. Waving and cheering, they studied the newcomers with great curiosity.”

But Sir Keith Murdoch thought he could make a pile of money by turning Australians against Americans. Inflaming nationalist and xenophobic sentiments would sell papers, goose advertising, and make him rich.

Thus, as McManus documents:

“A chain of newspapers owned by Sir Keith Murdoch, father of latter-year media magnate Rupert Murdoch, earned a reputation among the yanks as relentlessly anti-American. Truth, a particularly brassy Melbourne tabloid, often published lurid tales of GI rapes of innocent Australian girls and seduction of married women.

“On occasion, Australian soldiers vented their frustration over such tales with violence. Small groups of Diggers roamed around some of the cities, beating up any American soldiers whom they saw dating local girls. … An American soldier was even shot and killed one morning as he emerged from the house of a married woman.”

Eventually, the hate against Americans that Murdoch had stirred up blossomed into full-fledged riots in multiple Australian cities, creating a real problem for the war effort but boosting Murdoch’s newspaper sales (and, presumably, profits) into the stratosphere as his papers developed their own cult following in Oz.

Keith then passed the cult and the media outlets that had created it along to Rupert, who then took his brand of cult-forming “journalism” (Fox called it “entertainment” when they were sued by Dominion Voting Systems) to England and then, ironically, to America.

By definition, people who live in a cult live in an unreality. A fictitious world. That’s the key to how the cult and its leaders control them: they convince the cult members that they’re the only ones who truly understand how the world works, that they have “secret knowledge,” and that everyone outside the cult is either blind, evil, or both.

This creates an us-versus-them narrative so powerful it replaces facts, isolates them from reality, and makes loyalty to the cult and its perceived leader more important than truth itself.

People who watch Fox “News,” for example, believe that what they hear on NPR is “liberal propaganda,” which is why they support defunding public broadcasting. What they actually hear on public broadcasting, however, is just the news. It reflects reality. Actual reality. But they think it’s liberal propaganda because their cult told them so.

In much the same way Jim Jones’ followers and Charles Manson’s followers didn’t listen to their friends when they tried to share reality with them or point out how they had been indoctrinated, brainwashed, and lied to, the people in the Fox “News” cult don’t want to listen to reality. They want the comfortable lies and the excuses for hate and outrage that they have wrapped themselves in for years.

Murdoch now has to make a tough decision. He’s already gotten most of what he needed from Trump — a massive tax break for himself and his family, and deregulation of the broadcast and internet space — so he only needs Trump now because Donald makes for good television.

But “good television” can work two ways for a public official, for or against them. If Trump has sufficiently pissed off Murdoch, or he thinks that Trump’s beginning to harm the GOP and thus the cult that the Murdoch family and their well-paid talent largely control, he could give Trump the old heave-ho.

So if Trump gets thrown out of the Fox “News” Viewer cult — essentially gets fired as the cult leader — the cult will continue. It would simply lose a very small percentage of its hard-core true believers who’d completely surrendered their personalities to Trump, and even those folks are probably retrievable.

The problem for Murdoch and other facilitators of the Fox “News” Viewer cult that Trump now leads is who will fill the vacuum that’ll be created when Trump is gone, whether it’s from natural causes or an impeachment or 25th Amendment action that Murdoch and Fox could provoke. Who will continue to defend the interests of the morbidly rich and the monopolistic parts of corporate America and become the next leader of the GOP?

JD Vance is unlikely to be able to fill Trump’s shoes, which has to be giving Murdoch heartburn. Vance has virtually no hold at all on the Fox “News” Viewer cult that Trump today dominates.

He is not beloved by the cult; if anything they think of him as weak and effeminate. He uses eyeliner. He married a brown-skinned woman and has brown-skin children. His wife refuses to adopt Christianity.

“He must be weak,” is the consensus across much of the white racist base that constitutes the MAGA-sphere.

Nonetheless, Vance himself apparently thinks he can take over for Donald. He’s deluding himself, of course, but he appears to believe it. Just look at how he just publicly demanded that Donald Trump’s “artwork” be released by the Wall Street Journal or the FBI.

He knows a release of more damaging evidence of Trump’s long-term relationship with Epstein — and thus, in the minds of the cult followers, participation in the deep state conspiracy that exploits children while it runs the world — could inflict incredible damage on Trump, and even make Vance president.

What man who believes destiny and God want him to become president wouldn’t jump at something like that? Remember, JD Vance said the following about Donald Trump:

“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon… or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

“[Trump is] a disaster and a bad man. A morally reprehensible human being.”

“Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man.”

Vance understood the cult even before he cynically pretended he was part of it when he saw Trump was prevailing: like most other Republican politicians and the billionaires who fund them, he’s an exploiter, a cult “facilitator.”

It’s extremely unlikely, however, that he’ll ever become the leader of the Fox Viewer cult; it’s unlikely, in fact, that the subset of the Fox cult that has formed around Trump will survive as Trump followers.

As John Hobbes famously said, “Men heap together the mistakes of their lives and create a monster they call destiny.” With the Epstein revelations turning into a torrent, that’s now the story of Donald John Trump.

When Trump is gone — and that day will eventually come — his corner of the Fox “News” Viewer cult will most likely shatter back into dozens of smaller organizations, many of which will simply be returning to their roots: Proud Boys, Three Percenters, anti-abortion freaks, rightwing preachers hustling their congregations, etc.

After all, as Maureen Dowd points out, Trump has now become the deep state he once decried. He’s creating the very “FEMA Camps” that had Republicans and Fox “News” Viewer cult members hysterical when Obama was president.

He’s developing a masked, anonymous, unaccountable nationwide secret police force and is compiling massive amounts of intelligence on everyday Americans. Between his spy agencies and data brokers, he has access to anybody’s social media posts, emails, and medical and travel records. He’s given ICE full and unfettered access to everybody’s Medicaid and other government records.

If rightwingers keep protesting him or demanding more information about Jeffrey Epstein, they will be next in his crosshairs and that could begin the final stage of his participation in the Fox “News” Viewer cult. He’s already called them stupid, hysterical, and told them they’re dupes for the Democrats, claiming he no longer wants their support.

Thus, we stand very close to what may be a true crossroads moment for America.

If Trump survives this politically, he’ll most likely begin a serious crackdown modeled after the June, 1934 Night of the Long Knives (albeit probably less bloody), purging his opposition within his own ranks much like Putin did a decade ago in Russia and Orbán is doing now in Hungary. It’ll further damage American democracy and make it much harder for us to recover our previous New Deal and Great Society political and economic systems.

On the other hand, if Trump goes down in flames and Vance, Johnson, Cruz, or somebody equally weak tries to step in and take over the cult, it could spell doom for the GOP for a generation.

So get out the popcorn, but maybe you should also have something a little more defensive than that. Get ready. It’s gonna be a rough ride, but in all probability we’ll make it through without the kind of damage that Germany or the people at Jonestown suffered.

Wish us all luck. We need it — and citizen activism — now more than ever before.

Louise’s Daily Song: Death Rattle of a Cult:

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink comes out soon and is now available for pre-order.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here: https://bsky.app/profile/thomhartmann.bsky.social