American Hitler: Trump and His Cult of Followers

Book excerpt: This book is not about Donald Trump. It’s about his diehard followers. How could they so zealously and single-mindedly revere someone whom we see as monumentally unfit for his job? How is it that so many people were beguiled by a vision of hate and discord, of intolerance and violence, of authoritarianism and lawlessness, of coarseness and mendacity, and of simple basic meanness? In light of all Trump’s transgressions, listed in Chapter One from “a” to “z,” how is it that people remained so devoted to this man, that they would professedly “die for him”? That is the subject of this book. Several years ago, I published Violence and Religious Commitment: Implications of Jim Jones’s People’s Temple Movement. Contributors to that book include leading experts in the field of extremist cults. Now, I bring their expertise to bear in a demographical, sociological, and psychological analysis of what I term the “American Hitler” and his bewildering cult of followers.