The U.S. population as a whole is now finding out what it’s like to be in a cult. Every move that the new Trump administration has been taking, especially since his re-election in 2024, corresponds to what has been a cookie cutter script for the myriad authoritarian anti-science cults that exploded across the land in the late 1960s and 1970s.

It appears to me, as one who looked at the cult phenomenon from the inside for longer than I would like to admit, finally breaking clear in the mid-1980s, that this cult formula was transferred out of the bizarre haunts and practices of narrow mind-controlling cults to the general culture through the promotion of and rise of the Trump franchise.

Every aspect of the behavior and tactics that Trump has demonstrated since announcing his first run for the U.S. presidency in 2015 to the present (Spring 2025) corresponds with remarkable consistency with the major facets of what true believers experienced from their usually sociopathic leaders in almost countless cults. I will describe all of these, and their parallels with Trump, over the course of these coming pages.

Trump as a cult leader, obviously also with many key senior advisors and enablers, constitutes the reason, in my view, that no one has really fully understood and therefore not been able to stop him to this point. In important ways I think his niece, Mary Trump, has come closer to “getting it” than almost anyone else.

But even more prominent anti-cult personalities, like Steven Hassan, miss key points because they focus on the matter too narrowly and with an emphasis on deprogramming individual cult victims.

No, to understand cults properly, one must start with what we now have and work backwards. Trump is back in the White House and his minions in all major positions of power, who were appointed rather not for their competency but solely in terms of their pure loyalty.

That loyalty has had to go to extremes, shocking the intelligent world, including devotion to Trump’s obsession that he was cheated out of winning the 2020 election (he doesn’t really believe it, except on some level of his rotting brain he does) while harboring any number of bizarre beliefs, the wilder the better for sticking it to the establishment, as in the case of RFK Jr.’s appointment (and confirmation by GOP colleagues in the Senate) to head Health and Human Services.

Starting from now, and working backwards brings us to the post-World War era when the many Hitler sympathizers embedded in corridors of power in the U.S. discovered something new coming out of that war and decided to try it out.

Don’t get me wrong, sheer evil has existed long before that and it is what got us into the two great conflagrations of the 20th century, and a deadly pandemic and Great Depression in between, such that over 200 million lives that otherwise would not have been miserable and cut short can be attributed to this harrowing period of 1914 to 1945.

What made the post World War II era different, and potentially even more crippling than what was experienced before was born out of the frustration that the wrong side won that war, and more needs to be done to prepare for a better outcome the next time the opportunity arises.

 Coming out of that war, and more importantly from the Korean conflict that followed it in the early 1950s, was the discovery by American military intelligence as reported by POWs of hard core brainwashing methods that Chinese adversaries had used with a considerable amount of success.

Through the 1950s, while on the domestic front the nation was contending with residual Naziism in the form of McCarthyite “Red Scare” demagoguery, in clandestine military and intelligence community efforts, ways were being explored for mastering and applying these brainwashing methods in the general population.

It started with experimentation efforts using LSD and other disorienting drugs through operations like MK-Ultra, and evolved quickly toward what some elements disturbed by these developments made public in the form of a book and then 1961 movie titled, “The Manchurian Candidate.”

(Part One. To Be Continued)