If MAGA Is a Cult, What Happens When It Crumbles?

Donald Trump’s supporters have been nothing if not loyal to their leader. For the past decade, MAGA has stood by their man through 34 felony convictions, endless hate-filled rhetoric, the killings of innocent Americans, and potential war crimes, all while blatantly disregarding the Constitution and constantly lying.

MAGA’s fanatical devotion to the president has prompted some experts to suggest that it constitutes a cult. Daniella Mestyanek Young, author of The Culting of America, is one of them. “We’re not being hyperbolic when we call [MAGA] a cult,” she says.

More specifically, MAGA is a cult of personality, says Steven Hassan, PhD, author of The Cult of Trump and founder of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, a consulting and educational organization that helps people leave destructive cults and authoritarian groups and heal.

A cult of personality is the “godlike glorification” of a charismatic leader whose followers perceive as superhuman and infallible, like the Jim Jones-led Peoples Temple — which ended in the massacre of more than 900 people at Jonestown in 1978 — and the Children of God, a Christian apocalyptic cult founded by David Berg in 1968.

Political parties can also operate as cults of personality, Mestyanek Young tells Rolling Stone. “Beyond Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, there are clear examples of political movements, including Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, and the hereditary leadership system in North Korea,” she says. In this case, it’s the MAGA arm of the Republican Party’s devotion to Trump — especially those who subscribe to the QAnon conspiracy theory.

In addition to the requisite charismatic leader, MAGA also shares other key characteristics with cults, like black-and-white thinking, and viewing politics as a fight of good versus evil. Like other cults, MAGA has adopted their own version of reality and history — most notably, claiming the 2020 election was stolen. Along the same lines, Trump has managed to get his MAGA followers to reject rational analysis and critical thinking, and support his interests and positions no matter what.

Trump appealed to those who had lost faith in the government and were looking for something (or someone) to believe in. His campaign rhetoric promising to “drain the swamp” — or rid America of corrupt politicians, lobbyists, and unnecessary governmental bureaucracy and oversight — resonated with those who felt disenfranchised and abandoned by traditional political parties.

But there are signs that Trump’s grip on his followers is starting to crumble. A few weeks ago, after he threatened to wipe out a civilization, verbally attacked the Pope, and posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, which he later claimed was him as a doctor, several prominent MAGA and Trump supporters — including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Candance Owens, and Megyn Kelly — broke with the president. And things have only escalated from there.

Declining approval ratings suggest rank-and-file MAGA members have begun to jump ship, including some of Trump’s most ardent conservative Christian supporters. Does this spell the beginning of the end of the MAGA cult? If so, what happens next? And is now the time to reach out to family members and friends who may be rethinking their position?

The birth of MAGA

When the Tea Party formed in 2009, one month after President Barack Obama was inaugurated, the members were an odd mix of right-wing populists and free market extremists, says Lawrence Rosenthal, PhD, the chair and lead researcher of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies and author of Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism. “The Tea Party’s fundamental ideological point was aligned with free market fundamentalists, so there was ferocious organization against expanding health benefits under what came to be known as Obamacare,” he tells Rolling Stone.

In 2015, the Tea Party’s focus shifted toward the question of immigration and the fear that white Americans were deliberately being replaced by immigrants in society — also known as replacement theory. “There are two characters in replacement theory,” Rosenthal says. “One is the immigrants, who Trump often calls ‘an invasion force,’ and the second is the elite who are conspiring to bring that immigrant population into America.”

Trump, who was then running for president, tapped into Republicans’ feelings of resentment toward immigrants and anyone else who wasn’t white. By that point, he had already spent four years falsely claiming that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, launching a conspiracy theory known as birtherism.

“It’s almost like how when you’re going to market a new product, you find a way of test marketing it to the public — that’s what Trump did with birtherism,” Rosenthal says. “He became the most prominent spokesperson for birtherism, and that is his initial toe in the water of national politics.”

Trump also took advantage of the fact that many white Americans no longer understood their position in a country that had twice elected a Black president. Replacement thinking galvanized right-wing populists on an unprecedented mass level, taking advantage of existing national traditions of racism.

“Donald Trump emerged to make explicit what had for 40 years been dog-whistle, wink-wink Republican appeals that had turned right populists into the party’s most important electoral base,” Rosenthal explains. “Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign put this base, and most of the rest of Republican regulars, into a coalition that includes white nationalists and neo-Nazis, groups that previously had not had a role in national politics since the 1930s.”

Trump’s cult of personality expands

After Trump won in 2016, MAGA quickly became less about ideology and more about its leader — who, it turned out, was quite comfortable with the adulation.

Trump’s cult of personality began before he ever held political power, Hassan says, taking shape in the 1970s and 1980s, when he gained attention cosplaying as a successful businessman while taking bailouts from his father. “People did what he told them to do and didn’t ever say ‘bad idea,’” Hassan tells Rolling Stone. “They would give him ideas so he could claim credit for them.” Trump’s reach expanded even further in the early 2000s when people welcomed him into their homes as a reality TV host. By the time he announced his presidential run in 2015, Trump had established himself as one of America’s leading businessmen — even if his record didn’t actually back that up.

Trump’s message also happened to appeal to religious voters. His calls to “Make America Great Again” not only attracted white evangelicals, but many members of other conservative religions, like Mormons and Catholics, as well. “Trump shows up and pulls all of these groups into his cult of personality,” Mestyanek Young says. “He went way bigger than just the evangelical church.”

MAGA also attracted people who had previously gotten out of insular religious groups, Hassan says. “They left the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Moonies, Scientology, but they never learned about brainwashing and mind control,” he explains. “So when something new came around that resonated familiarity and certainty, they went for it.”

Trump gained even more devotees by way of QAnon: a far-right political conspiracy theory and cult that emerged in 2017 and posits that he’s the only one who can save the country from an elite cabal of Satanic, pedophilic Democrats. Though it was initially viewed as a fringe group, by 2020, Republican politicians who actively embraced QAnon, like Greene, were winning elections — indicating that, at least in some parts of the country, people were buying into it.

MAGA starts to crack

Mestyanek Young first recognized signs of weakness in the MAGA cult when Trump refused to release FBI documents investigating convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “People join a cult for the mission,” she explains. “And Trump’s mission for the last decade has been ‘We’re going to drain the swamp. We’re going to perp walk the Obamas and the Clintons. We’re going to pull thousands of little white children out of cages where they’ve been trafficked, and I’m going to give you a new America.’ And then he just slashed his mission.”

This is something Mestyanek Young saw play out firsthand. She was born into the Christian religious cult Children of God and escaped at age 15. The group promoted sex as a way to get closer to God, and was under investigation throughout the 1980s and 1990s for abducting and abusing children.

Their mission was to be prepared for Jesus, who they believed was coming back any day. “And so 10,000 people, for 50 years, lived in these commune armies around the globe and devoted their entire lives to this,” Mestyanek Young says. Everything changed in 2009, when there was a dramatic shift in the cult’s beliefs and structure known as “The Reboot.” “Their new leadership was like, ‘You know what? Jesus told us he’s not coming back in our lifetime anymore,’” she says. “And that was it: the mission was gone.” At that point, many members lost faith and left the cult.

In cults, shifts like these happen when there’s a “crack in the brainwashing,” Mestyanek Young says. For Greene — a vocal supporter of QAnon — this was Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files. “It was shortly thereafter that she started speaking out against him,” she says. “I really do feel like MAGA has been bleeding out ever since then. They’ve been trying to come up with a new mission.”

Breaking a cult of personality

As more people leave, MAGA is gradually disintegrating. “I’m hearing from people who have become disillusioned and are leaving,” Hassan says. “People leaving MAGA are messaging [me] online, citing my book or saying they realize it is a cult.”

Trump’s attacks on his former allies who are now critical of him also aren’t doing him any favors, Hassan says. “That is bringing a lot of people out of the commitment to believing that Trump is the savior and deserves to be the president,” he explains. “So the connection now is, if people are losing faith in Trump, can we make them lose faith in their senators and congressmen for blindly supporting and making allegiance to Trump? Connecting the dots is what’s missing for a lot of people leaving the GOP.”

Still, Trump still has immense power within the Republican Party, and is endorsing MAGA politicians in the spring primaries, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is running for Senate. Ultimately, November’s midterm elections will determine how the Trump-backed candidates perform against Democratic opponents — especially if he continues to alienate some of his own party. In the meantime, Trump is attempting to buy the loyalty of those involved in Jan. 6 and other “victims of lawfare and weaponization” by the Biden administration using a nearly $1.8 billion slush fund of taxpayer money.

Though Trump may end up losing his base, that doesn’t mean he’ll be replaced with another leader — at least not with his cooperation. “This is characteristic of leaders like Trump — they don’t cultivate a successor,” Rosenthal says. “It’s going to be a free-for-all when he’s gone. He can’t hand it off.”

Plus, as Mestyanek Young points out, when it comes to cults of personality, leaders aren’t interchangeable, so his followers will prop him up in whatever way they need to. “In this case, specifically, if Trump is gone, J.D. Vance is going to be the president — and nobody loves J.D. Vance,” she says. “You have to have a personality to take over a cult of personality.”

But there are still plenty of MAGA supporters who truly believe that Trump will save us all — and their views may never change. “They’re what we’ve termed ‘never-lefters,’” Mestyanek Young says. “These [are] people that still want to be in an extreme form of belief because it does something for them, and so they will find another thing to be extremists about. And that is what is very concerning.”

Meanwhile, both Hassan and Mestyanek Young stress that now is the time to reach out to MAGA family members, friends, and coworkers — especially if you suspect that they might be receptive — and ask open-ended questions. “Ask them to explain why they liked Trump in the first place, and what they think right now, because cracks are really good at letting light in,” Mestyanek Young says.

And just as importantly, listen to them. “[Cult members] get themselves out when they have access to nonmembers who are treating them with dignity, respect, and genuine curiosity,” Hassan says.