Everyone who worships Trump ends up becoming an inferior copy of Trump. Trump from Wish.com, Trump from Temu, discount Trump. Kristi Noem, Karoline Leavitt, JD Vance – all of them are poor imitations of Trump. Trump’s sycophantic fans are a pathetic echo chamber of mediocre versions of their idol. It’s an epidemic of badness.
If you become part of MAGA, you are assimilated into the mass Trumpian mind. You no longer have an IDENTITY because it’s ALL ABOUT TRUMP! You are canceled out and overridden. This is a defining feature of cults. Everyone in a cult must surrender their identity and merge it into the group.
Funny thing for a felon supporter to say.
This weirdo is literally Trump. He’s bursting with admiration for his cult leader. He even finishes his bio with “THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER” just like Trump often finishes his posts. What a lowlife.
In MAGA, no one is their own person. You have to conform to the ideals and standards of Trump. You become a REFLECTION. The crazier thing is, many of these losers WANT to be just like Trump – they love him! He is a GOD to them!
Oh, not to mention this guy Gunther has a retired ex-cop brother who imitates HIM! Heaven forbid anyone be original or have their own thoughts in MAGA Land! Retired and yet he acts like a 16-year-old with a social media addiction. What a role model.
What does MAGA value? Anything that glorifies Trump, promotes the cult. And in the end, all that praise just looks the same. It comes from the same place, using the same formula.
Trump, who is mentally an infant, has INFANTILIZED MAGA. It really goes to show how shallow people’s “maturity” often is. They haven’t matured at all – they’re still idiot children.
H. L. Mencken wrote, “What does the mob think? It thinks, obviously, what its individual members think. And what is that? It is, in brief, what somewhat sharp-nosed and unpleasant children think. The mob, being composed, in the overwhelming main, of men and women who have not got beyond the ideas and emotions of childhood, hovers, in mental age, around the time of puberty, and chiefly below it. If we would get at its thoughts and feelings we must look for light to the thoughts and feelings of adolescents.”
MAGA is perpetual puberty. These angsty, humorless people love Trump because he’s just like them – petulant, pathetic, insecure, and infantile. They think he’s awesome because he gives them what they secretly want. He validates them as CHILDREN.
One key idea childhood has is that there is always a parent figure who is right, the one that looks after you and makes all the rules, whose approval you must earn and who you must never disrespect. These adults become parented by MAGA. Their big daddy is Trump. He parents them. Just like children, MAGA doesn’t know any better than its parent figure taught it.
The perfectly natural dynamic of parent and child plays out unnaturally between Trump and his supporters. Is that why the MAGA Cult is so effective – because everyone already has the blueprint for it in their heads?
What would a parent want for their kids? For their children to surpass them, right? No way! The bad parent is like the bad cult leader. He doesn’t want his children to become better than him. Children are SUBORDINATES, LACKEYS. He doesn’t want them to have their own identities or leave the nest. He doesn’t want them to best him – he wants them to WORSHIP HIM!! This is what the MAGA Cult is all about.
H. L. Mencken wrote, “But it must be obvious that this emotion of fear is immensely deep-seated—that it is instinctive if anything is instinctive. And all the evidence indicates that every other emotion is subordinate to it. None other shows itself so soon, and none other enters so powerfully into the first functioning of the infant mind. And to the primeval and yet profoundly rational fears that it brings into the world it quickly adds others that depart farther and farther from rationality. It begins to fear ideas as well as things, strange men as well as hostile nature. It picks up dreads and trepidations from its mother, from its nurse, from other children. At the age of three years, as Dr. Watson shows, its mental baggage is often little more than a vast mass of such things. It has anxieties, horrors, even superstitions. And as it increases in years it adds constantly to the stock.”
MAGA is a fear cult. MAGA loons are frightened of liberals, socialists, communists, feminists, BLM, LGBT, Muslims, foreigners, immigrants, government, and every other boogeyman under the bed. Instinctual fears are reasonable, but MAGA loons have learned to irrationally fear IMAGINARY IDEAS. Their parent, Trump, scares them with all kinds of stuff he just MADE UP. And MAGA, being the hapless children they are, fall for it all and are driven into a frenzy of hate.
Trump always seems to invent enemies where there are none. The “Radical Left,” immigrants, the Democrat Deep State, and so on. He must keep them terrified in order to stay in power.
H. L. Mencken went on, “The process of education is largely a process of getting rid of such fears. It rehearses, after a fashion, the upward struggle of man. The ideal educated man is simply one who has put away as foolish the immemorial fears of the race—of strange men and strange ideas, of the powers and principalities of the air. He is sure of himself in the world; no dread of the dark rides him; he is serene. To produce such men is the central aim of every rational system of education; even under democracy it is one of the aims, though perhaps only a subordinate one. What brings it to futility is simply the fact that the vast majority of men are congenitally incapable of any such intellectual progress. They cannot take in new ideas, and they cannot get rid of old fears. They lack the logical sense; they are unable to reason from a set of facts before them, free from emotional distraction. But they also lack something more fundamental: they are incompetent to take in the bald facts themselves. … Words, save the most elemental, convey nothing to them. Their minds cannot grasp even the simplest abstractions; all their thinking is done on the level of a few primitive appetites and emotions. It is thus a sheer impossibility to educate them, as much so as it would be if they were devoid of the five senses. The school-marm who has at them wastes her time shouting up a rain-spout. They are imitative, as many of the lower animals are imitative, and so they sometimes deceive her into believing that her expositions and exhortations have gone home, but a scientific examination quickly reveals that they have taken in almost nothing.”
The difference Mencken highlights here – between imitation and learning – is very key in the Trumpian Cult. MAGA are imitators. They are not learners. Imitators are entirely dependent on the people they imitate. They are not autonomous or empowered. They cannot make decisions for themselves or form original opinions. Their thoughts come from someone else.
This is a CRUCIAL point that modern education is going to have to grasp if it hopes to produce truly educated people. Imitators, who copy people in a way that makes them feel good on a primitive level, haven’t learned anything. Learned people are capable of originality and of their own reasoning; imitators are not. Imitators require the guidance of the crowd, or of an authority figure.
Mencken says, “Thus ideas leave them unscathed; they are responsive only to emotions, and their emotions are all elemental—the emotions, indeed, of tabby-cats rather than of men.”
Trump evokes the right emotions. His ideas are questionable at best and absolute shit at worst – but that doesn’t matter to MAGA because they’re imitators looking for emotional appeal; they’re not learners looking for material to derive their own opinions from.
What Mencken says next is the ABSOLUTE KEY: “Fear remains the chiefest of them. The demagogues, i. e., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the corner-stone of their exact and puissant science. Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting ‘Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum!’ It has been so in the United States since the earliest days. The whole history of the country has been a history of melodramatic pursuits of horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary: the red-coats, the Hessians, the monocrats, again the red-coats, the Bank, the Catholics, Simon Legree, the Slave Power, Jeff Davis, Mormonism, Wall Street, the rum demon, John Bull, the hell hounds of plutocracy, the trusts, General Weyler, Pancho Villa, German spies, hyphenates, the Kaiser, Bolshevism.”
Trump is the latest and possibly most effective of all America’s historical demagogues, as previously mentioned, always inventing monsters and boogeymen to manipulate fear to get what he wants. MAGA, meanwhile, is composed of a bunch of grown children who have not been educated properly in how to think, which is why they can do nothing but imitate Trump.
We all know that there is something deeply wrong with America. But all it takes is another moronic politician to come along and say, “Look – THIS is the problem!” This strategy is STAGGERINGLY effective! MAGA believes him because it is made up of IMITATORS, NOT LEARNERS.
Everyone should read Mencken’s Notes on democracy. He’s right on the money here, and his diagnosis of America perfectly fits the current situation.
Isn’t it astonishing that all you need to do to control infantile people is essentially play to their primitive emotions and create scary bogeymen for them? Real adults – learners who have brought into peace their primitive emotions – are NEVER fooled by people like Trump. But the imitator crowds fall for them every time. All they want to do is FEEL good. They don’t want good ideas.
“Government under democracy is thus government by orgy, almost by orgasm.” – Mencken
What is MAGA, if not a mass orgy of infantile pleasure? They’re always waiting for Trump to deliver the next orgasm, the next supposed “big win” to feel good about.
Mencken: “It was long ago observed that the plain people, under democracy, never vote for anything, but always against something. The fact explains, in large measure, the tendency of democratic states to pass over statesmen of genuine imagination and sound ability in favour of colourless mediocrities. The former are shining marks, and so it is easy for demagogues to bring them down; the latter are preferred because it is impossible to fear them. The demagogue himself, when he grows ambitious and tries to posture as a statesman, usually comes ignominiously to grief, as the cases of Bryan, Roosevelt and Wilson dramatically demonstrate. If Bryan had confined himself, in 1896, to the chase of the bugaboo of plutocracy, it is very probable that he would have been elected. But he committed the incredible folly of throwing most of his energies into advocating a so-called constructive program, and it was thus easy for his opponents to alarm the mob against him. That program had the capital defect of being highly technical, and hence almost wholly unintelligible to all save a small minority; so it took on a sinister look, and caused a shiver to go down the democratic spine.”
This example shows us a particularly relevant pattern. When Kamala Harris ran against Trump, she tried so hard to foster a positive, constructive message, which is precisely why she LOST. Trump’s relentless assault on her, his endless accusations of Marxism, is what won people over in the end. Trump understands how to manipulate FEAR. Harris doesn’t. Not to mention that the details of her economic plan were often seen as sketchy and unreliable.
What happens to MAGA is that their negative energy, their FEAR, is constantly directed outward at non-MAGA people. They are perpetually afraid, and that is exactly why they are so devoted. They’re driven by primitive emotions, not a rational and logical agreement. Same as all other cults.
Fear and orgasm: the key forces that dominate the MAGA imitators of Trump. There’s no point reasoning with them because they’re incapable of learning. They only know how to imitate. Either provide something WAY more alluring than Trump for them to imitate instead or don’t bother.
Alternate Titles
Fear and Lust: The MAGA Cult
Orgy with Orange