Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Fareed Zakaria: Nothing changes peoples' views on Trump" video.

  1. "I have a chapter in the book on malignant narcissism as a characteristic of destructive cult leaders. These are people who have a deep need for grandiosity, to be the center of attention, who need to control others, and who lack empathy and lie without hesitation. These are psychological traits perfectly attuned to manipulation and projection. But the malignant part is about sociopathic tendencies. Almost every cult leader thinks he’s above the law, which is why he’s allowed to persecute and harass or harm anyone he wants. When someone really believes this, they can rationalize all kinds of destructive behavior. I began this book with the assumption that Trump is a malignant narcissist. Actually, watching him and listening to him reminded me of Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the cult I joined in college, in that both have a kind of God complex where they’re the only one with the answers, the only one who can fix things. Moon was going to create a theocracy and Trump was going to “drain the swamp.” But the way they carry themselves is similar. But what really made me think of Trump as a cult was the way the groups who supported him were behaving, especially religious groups who believed that God had chosen Trump or was using Trump. There are actual pro-Trump religious groups, like the New Apostolic Reformation, whose leaders were saying, “We’re of God. The rest of the world is of Satan, and we need to follow our chosen leaders who are connected to God.” There was this blind-faith aspect to the whole thing and an unwillingness to look at any inconvenient facts. That’s all very cult-like. The bottom line is that I see very sophisticated mind-control techniques being used through the media, through religious broadcasters and radio talk-show hosts. It’s a black-and-white, all-or-nothing, good-versus-evil, authoritarian view of reality that is mostly fear-based. And there’s a deliberate focus on denying facts in order to protect the image of the leader." --Steven Hassan, The Cult of Trump
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  2. A cult of personality, or a cult leader like Trump, arises when an individual uses the media, propaganda, the big lie, spectacle, counterfeit patriotism, demonstrations and rallies, to create an idealized, heroic, and worshipful image of a leader, often through unquestioning flattery, praise. The term came to prominence in 1956, in Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, given on the final day of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the speech, Khrushchev criticized the lionization and idealization of Stalin, and by implication, his Communist sidekick Mao Zedong. Mao's cult of personality, like Stalin’s, portrayed him as larger-than-life and endowed with unrivaled wisdom. Cults of personality fell out of favor in the 1950s after Khrushchev's speech, but Trump's handler Putin, has revived the practice, guiding a wave of nostalgia for Stalin as he advocates for Russian nationalism and anti-West sentiment. A main feature of Stalinism was its cult of personality. Whereas Lenin had claimed that the workers suffered from false consciousness and therefore needed a vanguard party to guide them, Stalin maintained that the Communist Party itself suffered from false consciousness and therefore needed an all-wise leader—Stalin himself—to guide it. The resulting cult of personality portrayed Stalin as a universal genius in every subject, from linguistics to genetics. The best modern-day example of a cult of personality comes to us from North Korea and its leader Kim Jong-un, the despotic dictator that Trump admires so much. Kim Jong-un's cult of personality paints him as a man who can do anything. According to this propaganda, he can climb tall mountains, even though like Trump, he is horrendously obese, and in terrible physical shape. Like Trump, Kim Jong Un brags about being able to make strong and intelligent military decisions, despite neither one of them having a military background. And when architects design new apartments and shops, he is given credit for doing so. "This man is a genius at every level! Why can't we all be like him? He must be something special, and we are clearly not. Ergo, let's listen to him since he knows best." -- Trump supporters
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