An Authoritarian Cult: The GOP and the Next Stage of Democratic Destruction
We're watching things devolve in real time. And it's more than just a spectacle.
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“I’m speaking with you outside because [laughs] the court won’t allow us to speak inside the building…that’s just one of the many things that are wrong here.”
That was how the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson began his remarks on Tuesday May 15th. Johnson had spent his day in a Manhattan courthouse watching Donald Trump’s hush money trial and hearing damning testimony that linked the Republican Presidential Nominee to an orchestrated conspiracy. And, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, he stood in front of cameras and did his part to lie on behalf of his party’s standard bearer.
Johnson went on to call it a “sham of a trial” and said, explicitly, “they are doing this intentionally to keep him here, and keep him off the campaign trail.” This was a coordinated effort by the Republican Party, on Trump’s behalf, to downplay a trial meant to hold Trump accountable for his crimes.
Now, I am on record as believing “Trump trial watching” is largely a cathartic distraction from worsening political conditions in order to commodify our decline and install false faith that our institutions are healthy or working in any way, shape, or form. I don’t care about breathless daily updates regarding Trump’s bodily functions or sexual activities, and I certainly don’t believe that our institutions are going to save us from what is happening. After all, those institutions are programmed and designed to aid white, wealthy, powerful men and they created our situation. But the recent strategy by the Republican Party to close ranks around the disgraced and embattled former president is notable and ripe for analysis.
In recent days that courthouse has featured a steady stream of GOP luminaries, including senators J.D. Vance, Rick Scott, Tommy Tuberville, representatives Cory Mills, Nicole Malliotakis, and Byron Donalds, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, multiple state attorneys general, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, to name a few. They’ve done it for a variety of reasons, including currying favor with Trump in the hopes of being chosen as his running-mate, supplementing Trump’s criticisms following his gag order, and bolstering their own bona-fides with the MAGA base.
With all of the comments and screeds, including Johnson’s, there’s a very specific purpose: performing fealty for Trump and continuing to fortify a worldview in which America’s institutions are not only corrupted (and they are) but require authoritarian solutions.
Here, they are communicating a cult mentality necessary for the institutionalization of outright neo-fascism.
The performance element - standing behind Trump as he faces prosecution, even bizarrely dressing like him, and then aggressively calling it all a witch hunt - recalls cultish performances like Charles Manson’s family continually appearing at his trial and creating a spectacle on his behalf. This is meant to please the leader, showing him, even as consequences mount, their faith and dedication remains unshakeable. Within the GOP, Trump’s takeover since 2016 has been complete, creating a cult of personality around a “strongman” leader, the elements purely religious even as the appeal is grounded in desire for power over “salvation.” This helps form the twin systems of ideology within the Republican Party and MAGA that intersect: a desire for control and a dark faith borne out of religious extremism and apocalyptic terror. Depending on the individual and the association, the acolytes either explicitly believe Trump is a savior facing down a satanic plot, see him as a clown useful for enacting their own agendas, or, for some, a rationalization that changes day-to-day, minute-to-minute.
For example, the billionaires and their array of think-tanks and institutes, know full and well that Trump is a joke, but see utility in continuing to harness his support in completing their systematic destruction of liberal democracy. The GOP, which functions as a public-facing front, synthesizes the secular mission of their donors into an easily-digestible message to that base in order to fortify the wants and needs of the wealthy and powerful through the usage of conspiracy theories, religious narrative, and fear-based ideology (racism, misogyny, nationalist hatred, homophobia, xenophobia, etc.). And Trump’s trial - a very real prosecution for very real crimes - is an incredibly useful platform for communicating those messages.
For more on how this strategy works, and has worked before, please refer to my book THE MIDNIGHT KINGDOM: A HISTORY OF POWER, PARANOIA, AND THE COMING CRISIS
If Trump were to face this trial alone, without party support, there would be an inherent message for anyone willing to hear. While it may be unsavory or uncomfortable, devotees could see that their exalted leader is facing the consequences of his actions. But for the Speaker of the House to put himself on the line, for senators to stand in support, for all of these individuals and the whole universe of Right Wing influencers and personalities to coalesce behind a narrative that this is a Deep State plot to not only persecute Trump but also steal another election, it is a counter-message with a very specific goal: communicate that America’s systems are so poisoned that only a Right Wing dictator or authoritarian movement could put it to rights.
And, in case you haven’t already caught the subtext here, I’ll make it explicit. Cult leaders and cults, particularly when they face legal ramifications, are quick to seize Christian messianic martyrdom as a weapon. The rise of Christian Nationalism as an ideological backbone of this movement isn’t an accident, just as past authoritarian/Fascist/Nazi movements used those same narratives in their takeovers and assaults on democracy. What is being communicated, what is being inferred, is that an Evil State is persecuting a righteous figure and, if an apocalyptic end is to be avoided, then the followers must be prepared for any action to prevent it.