That’s because they [Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan] read polls, including an astonishing one that SurveyMonkey just did for Axios. It revealed that 79 percent of Republicans approved of Trump’s sycophantic performance at the news conference with Vladimir Putin, while 85 percent deem the investigation of Russian intrusion into our elections a distraction. They bear less and less resemblance to the followers of a coherent ideology and more and more to the members of a cult. That word is gaining currency in our political discourse for excellent reason.
Yep — and I’ve been talking about this since before the inauguration.
When a congregation learns that Pastor Bubba is raping its children, the all-but-invariable response is to rally around the pastor and re-victimize his victims, to double-down on loyalty and obedience to Big Daddy — to the strongman; that certainly fits the description of ‘authoritarians.’ Now recall this: The Japanese believed before World War II that the emperor was a god — and when Douglas MacArthur was appointed military governor of Japan following Japan’s defeat, they simply transferred their loyalty and obedience to the new Big Daddy, the new strongman; the Japanese lined the streets and cried unashamedly when MacArthur left.
Cult is not too strong a word. I imagine psychologists have a name for it, but the simple account of what has happened is this: The unreasoning, uncritical loyalty that usually is reserved for religion has been transferred to The Donald. When you hear clowns like Robert Jeffress and Jerry Falwell et. al. speaking of Trump as a Savior, the Big Daddy figure who is going to save them … they believe it.