The Flag Drapes the Lie: Inside the Cult America Didn’t See Coming

Introduction: When the Cult Takes Power

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise... To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it... Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that unless one were detached from the whole process... one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.”
— Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (1966, p. 166)

History rarely repeats, but it often rhymes in the minor key of complacency. Mayer’s chilling reflections on ordinary Germans living through the rise of the Third Reich speak with eerie clarity to America’s present condition. The story of Trump’s second term is not simply one of policy shifts or electoral backlash, it is the slow, methodical reordering of reality under the weight of cultic power.

This is no longer a political movement with populist appeal. MAGA has metastasized into a fully realized authoritarian cult, driven by identity fusion, fueled by grievance, and guided by a leader whose moral infallibility is accepted as axiomatic truth. What we are witnessing is not just political transformation; it is epistemic capture. The truth must now submit to the tribe. Morality is not what is just, but what is useful to the in-group. Dissent is not disagreement, but heresy. And governance is not service to the public, it is loyalty enforced through myth, muscle, and media.

In this article, we will walk through what happens when a cult gains power. We begin with the psychological architecture that defines cult behavior in politics. We then explore the moral collapse, the rewriting of history and truth, the propaganda masquerading as patriotism, and the use of force to maintain an illusion of order. Every section draws parallels to both past authoritarian regimes and the disturbing new normal being forged, right now, in the United States.

This isn’t a warning. It’s a reckoning.

What Defines a Cult in Power

When a cult gains control of the state, loyalty ceases to be a virtue, it becomes a requirement. The defining feature of MAGA under Trump’s second term is not just ideological conformity, but the complete fusion of identity with the leader and the cause. Once that fusion occurs, reality itself is subordinated to narrative, and morality becomes a team sport.

Political psychologists call this identity fusion, a visceral sense that one's personal identity is indistinguishable from the group’s identity (Swann et al., 2009). In this mindset, truth is no longer discovered, it is declared by the leader. Those who dissent are not opponents; they are traitors to the tribe.

This is also where collective narcissism emerges, an inflated belief in the in-group’s greatness, paired with hypersensitivity to criticism. Studies show that collective narcissism is a strong predictor of support for authoritarianism, especially when people feel their group is under threat (Golec de Zavala et al., 2009). For MAGA, perceived threats to whiteness, Christianity, or “real America” trigger this exact psychological reflex.

As John Dean and Bob Altemeyer showed in Authoritarian Nightmare, authoritarian followers submit not to facts or law, but to the emotional authority of their leader, often excusing hypocrisy, criminality, or cruelty so long as it serves the in-group. And as Duckitt (2010) explained, this loyalty is maintained through two psychological routes: submission to perceived authority and aggression toward out-groups.

Milton Mayer’s interviews with ordinary Germans in They Thought They Were Free bring this psychology to life. One interviewee described how it “all happened so gradually” that he never realized how deeply he had internalized the regime’s worldview until it was too late. Another admitted he never stopped to ask whether what he believed was true, only whether it made sense within the group’s evolving frame of meaning. The problem wasn’t the lack of intelligence, it was a surrender of independent judgment in favor of belonging.

The MAGA movement, like past cultic regimes, is sustained by emotional submission, not intellectual rigor. It does not need to prove itself right. It only needs to keep its members afraid, bonded, and certain.

The Moral Collapse: Truth Becomes Tribal

The moment a political movement becomes a cult, morality is no longer a universal compass, it becomes tribal currency. Truth ceases to be evaluated on its own merit and is instead filtered through loyalty. What is “right” becomes what is useful to the group; what is “wrong” becomes whatever threatens the group’s cohesion, regardless of fact. In MAGA’s second term, this collapse of shared moral grounding is no longer a side effect, it is the strategy.

Motivated reasoning plays a central role. Decades of research show that individuals often shape their reasoning to fit pre-existing beliefs, especially when those beliefs are tied to identity (Kunda, 1990). In the MAGA ecosystem, this is taken to the extreme. Facts are not simply reinterpreted, they are inverted. Actions that would have been called out as authoritarian under another leader are celebrated as necessary purification. This isn’t hypocrisy; it’s the logic of moral inversion.

Research by Osborne and colleagues (2023) found that support for punitive policies increases when they’re framed as protecting one’s group, even if those policies contradict supposed principles like free speech or due process. This explains how Trump’s base can demand censorship of “woke culture” while claiming to defend the First Amendment, or support deporting longtime residents while chanting about “freedom.”

Wahlström et al. (2020) examined far-right rhetoric online and observed a consistent pattern: extreme moral claims are used to justify cruelty. Once MAGA supporters internalize the idea that they are morally at war, even dehumanization becomes a righteous act.

These findings echo the psychological transformations described in They Thought They Were Free. Mayer interviewed ordinary Germans who lived through the Nazi regime, and found that “gradually, without noticing,” they adapted their moral frameworks to align with group loyalty. What mattered was not whether something was ethical or legal, but whether it served the “national revival.” One man recalled that after a while, “you no longer ask whether something is true. You ask whether it’s right for us.” (Mayer, 1966)

William Sheridan Allen’s account of Northeim, Germany, shows how even mundane community life can be swept into collective justification. In the early Nazi years, townspeople who had once lived peacefully with their Jewish neighbors began supporting boycotts, surveillance, and exclusion, not because they were coerced, but because propaganda had made them believe those actions were moral necessities for Germany’s survival (Allen, 1984).

This is not historical trivia. The same dynamics are now visible in Trump’s second term. The reclassification of dissenters as “domestic threats,” the firing of watchdogs who challenge the narrative, the exclusion of the press, these moves are not seen as overreaches. They are reframed as acts of moral hygiene. The MAGA base cheers because they are no longer measuring actions against principles. They are measuring them against the group’s moral mythology.

From Patriotism to Propaganda

The language of patriotism is often the velvet glove of authoritarianism. In the early months of Trump’s second term, the administration launched a series of executive orders cloaked in moral and nationalistic terms, such as “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” and “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism.” These directives were marketed as acts of cultural preservation or national security. But the underlying pattern reveals a darker mechanism: the use of patriotic language to mask authoritarian control over education, civil liberties, and dissent.

This is not new. As Stein Ringen details in The Perfect Dictatorship (2016), China’s one-party rule survives not only through surveillance and censorship, but by engineering consent. The CCP frames its legitimacy through constant appeals to national unity and prosperity, turning patriotism into propaganda. What makes it “perfect” is that the system ensures obedience not by demanding love for the party, but by fusing love of country with it (Ringen, 2016, p. 44–46).

The Trump White House mirrored this dynamic in both substance and style. Through Department of Education directives and funding threats, school curricula were pressured to adopt ideologically sanitized versions of U.S. history, downplaying slavery and systemic racism in favor of “heroic tradition.” The Smithsonian, PBS, and even the National Archives were placed under new administrative constraints, compelled to align with Trump’s “1776 Commission” values. These were not debates over interpretation, they were power plays over what Americans are allowed to remember.

Paul Lendvai’s study of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary shows a parallel tactic: the capture of public institutions under the guise of “illiberal democracy.” Orbán declared his intention to build a state based on “Christian and national values,” yet used that language to justify purging civil servants, packing the courts, and converting media outlets into tools of state messaging (Lendvai, 2017, p. 93–96). Similarly, Trump’s consolidation of communication, from Truth Social to restricting the Associated Press from briefings, created a media landscape where loyalty to the message mattered more than fidelity to fact.

Trump’s executive orders use rhetoric like “restoring freedom” and “protecting American values,” but in practice they centralize power, restrict pluralism, and punish ideological nonconformity. It’s a patriotism of exclusion: one where only those who submit to the leader’s vision are “true Americans.”

In this new political theology, freedom is no longer freedom from tyranny, it is freedom to obey the group. History is not a lesson in progress and struggle, it is a curated myth. Education, journalism, and even science are restructured not to inform, but to affirm.

This is the paradox of propaganda under a nationalist regime: it claims to defend liberty by weakening the very institutions that protect it.

When Reality Isn’t Useful, Replace It

Every authoritarian movement reaches a point where reality is no longer functional. The facts become inconvenient. Evidence becomes treason. And so the only way forward is to create a parallel universe where only the group’s truth exists. MAGA’s information ecosystem has now fully embraced this epistemic closure: everything outside of its self-reinforcing loop is dismissed as a lie, a hoax, or a plot against the group.

In Trump’s second term, this epistemic quarantine intensified. From media access crackdowns to loyalty tests for government scientists and historians, the administration increasingly defined legitimacy as alignment with the Trump worldview. The executive orders that restructured educational and cultural institutions were not simply ideological pushes; they were mechanisms to create a self-contained reality. The Department of Homeland Security reclassified dissenting educators as purveyors of "cultural subversion." Public libraries and federal archives faced funding threats if they promoted "anti-American narratives."

This type of information control mimics patterns observed in both populist and authoritarian regimes. In their analysis of the 2016 election aftermath, Nyhan and Reifler (2010) demonstrated how factual corrections often backfire among partisan voters. The more MAGA adherents are shown contradictory evidence, the more tightly they cling to their beliefs. This is not ignorance; it is identity protection.

Allcott and Gentzkow (2017) further confirmed that politically motivated reasoning exacerbates exposure to fake news, particularly among right-wing users. Social media platforms like Truth Social and Gab became echo chambers not just by design, but by function: they shield their users from cognitive dissonance. Reality is edited down to only that which flatters the group.

But perhaps the most disturbing development is how truth itself has been recast as a partisan tool. Under the executive order “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies,” Trump gained sweeping authority to dictate agency priorities, override regulatory independence, and install White House liaisons to monitor output. While it never names science directly, the order places political appointees in a position to approve or block agency reports, from environmental data to public health briefings, effectively politicizing what had once been apolitical facts.

What we are witnessing is not the erosion of truth, but its substitution. Not the silencing of dissent, but the absorption of all dialogue into a single script. To exist outside the MAGA reality is to invite suspicion. To question it is to betray the nation.

This is how cult regimes sustain power: not just through force, but through narrative monopoly. If the truth can be replaced, then anything can be justified.

The Weaponization of Victimhood

No authoritarian regime can sustain its power without mythologizing itself as the victim. MAGA has mastered this inversion. Despite holding immense cultural, political, and economic power, the movement portrays itself as the silenced majority, under siege by shadowy elites, immigrants, the media, academia, and anyone who questions their leader. This weaponized victimhood is not incidental, it is central.

Victimhood justifies retaliation. If the group is perpetually attacked, then any response, no matter how extreme, can be recast as self-defense. This is the foundation of ressentiment, a psychological term describing the moral reversal that occurs when resentment is reframed as righteousness. The MAGA movement no longer merely claims to speak for forgotten Americans, it claims to be under assault by them. As a result, cruelty becomes moral, and domination becomes justice.

Kelly’s work on ressentiment explains how groups experiencing perceived status loss convert grievance into a moral crusade. This plays out vividly in MAGA rhetoric, where perceived threats to white, Christian, or male identity are recoded as existential crises. According to the PRRI (2016) American Values Survey, majorities of Trump supporters in 2016 believed that American culture was “under attack,” that discrimination against whites had become more severe than against people of color, and that immigrants threatened their way of life. These perceptions only calcified after Trump returned to power.

The "Politicizing Status Loss" study showed that status threat, not economic anxiety, was the strongest predictor of support for Trump. It found that white Americans who believed they were losing influence or cultural relevance were significantly more likely to adopt authoritarian attitudes, support anti-democratic policies, and endorse political violence. This is not a fringe phenomenon, it is the psychological engine of the movement.

Historical parallels are abundant. In They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer describes how many ordinary Germans supported authoritarianism because they saw themselves as aggrieved victims of the Versailles Treaty, cultural decline, or communist plots. Similarly, in William Sheridan Allen’s The Nazi Seizure of Power, townspeople in Northeim framed Nazi repression as necessary to protect the German way of life from external degradation. The emotional structure is identical: status loss, imagined persecution, and reactionary salvation.

Today’s MAGA base draws from that same well. Their belief that America has been “stolen,” whether by immigrants, Black activists, feminists, or Democrats, feeds a collective narrative of persecution. They are not the aggressors, but the last line of defense.

This self-pity is not benign. It enables cruelty. When you convince people they are victims of a vast plot, they will not hesitate to become executioners in the name of justice.

Normalizing Hate and Dehumanization

Hate speech is no longer a scandal in MAGA’s America, it’s a strategy. What would have once been universally condemned as extremist is now mainstream political rhetoric. The right no longer whispers its prejudices; it bellows them from podiums, campaign ads, and presidential executive orders. And as always, the most dangerous words are not shouted in chaos, but spoken with a calm sense of moral purpose.

Under Trump’s second term, dehumanization became a political tool rather than a rhetorical excess. In campaign rallies and official addresses, Trump referred to immigrants as "poisoning the blood of our country," a chilling echo of racial hygiene theories from 20th-century fascist regimes. His January 6 speech drew a bright line between MAGA loyalists, "the real people who built this nation,” and everyone else. This wasn’t dog-whistle racism. It was a foghorn.

Minority success was rewritten as fraud. DEI programs were targeted not as debatable policy, but as evidence of systemic injustice against whites. When Trump described federal workers as “DEI hires” who needed to be purged, he wasn’t debating affirmative action, he was preparing the ground for racialized scapegoating. This is how movements strip minority groups of their legitimacy: not through overt bans, but by undermining their right to exist in public as equals. In one example, Trump attempted to blame a high-profile infrastructure accident on a “DEI hire,” despite the fact that the investigation was still underway and no evidence supported his claim (Associated Press, 2024).

This isn’t new. In The Changing Norms of Racial Political Rhetoric, scholars documented how open racial appeals, once taboo after the civil rights era, have become normalized in modern Republican discourse. Trump didn’t invent this trend, but he made it acceptable again, loudly and without apology. Wahlström et al. (2020) found that far-right social media operates on a steady feed of dehumanizing metaphors, from vermin to invasion narratives, encouraging users to see ideological opponents not as wrong, but as threats to be eliminated.

It is no coincidence that Trump’s inner circle, in private and public, have echoed calls to use military force on left-wing protestors or suggest mass deportations as patriotic duty. This isn’t just rhetorical overreach. It is a performative cruelty that reaffirms the group’s unity through shared disgust.

In authoritarian systems, hate functions as a sorting mechanism. As detailed in They Thought They Were Free, the normalization of hate began not with mass arrests but with jokes, slurs, and rhetorical categories that placed whole segments of the population outside the moral circle. Allen’s The Nazi Seizure of Power shows how the Nazis first dehumanized their enemies before legally disenfranchising them. MAGA follows the same arc: create disgust, then policy.

This is why it matters when Trump speaks of “liberals” as vermin to be rooted out. Or why it matters when he frames his followers as “real Americans.” It is the first step toward designating everyone else as unreal, and therefore disposable.

MAGA’s Double Standard for Morality

For authoritarian movements, morality is not measured by principle but by proximity to power. In MAGA’s America, the very definitions of right and wrong are inverted to serve the leader and his tribe. What would be tyrannical if done by the left becomes righteous when done by Trump. This is not hypocrisy, it’s a feature of cult logic.

Projection and inversion are core mechanisms in this process. As described in Authoritarian Nightmare, Trump and his followers often accuse their opponents of the very things they themselves are doing. If the former president uses the Department of Justice as a bludgeon against his enemies, he claims Biden is weaponizing the DOJ. If he calls for protesters to be shot, he says the left is violent. In this rhetorical world, the first to accuse is the first to control the narrative, no matter how groundless the claim (Dean & Altemeyer, 2020).

This isn’t simply strategic dishonesty. It stems from the psychological traits of authoritarian followers. As MacWilliams (2016) found, those high in authoritarian predispositions are more likely to support strongman tactics if they believe the out-group deserves it. The punishment isn’t immoral, it’s moral because it reaffirms the values of the in-group. The logic is simple: “When we do it, it’s justice. When they do it, it’s tyranny.”

This double standard is reinforced by group loyalty mechanisms like identity fusion and collective narcissism. Golec de Zavala’s work shows that individuals who fuse their identity with a political leader or nation justify any action, no matter how cruel—so long as it serves the glorified image of the group. In this psychological environment, betrayal of democratic norms becomes an act of patriotism, and questioning the leader becomes treason (Golec de Zavala, 2020).

Historical parallels are abundant. In They Thought They Were Free, Mayer recounts how ordinary Germans rationalized increasingly brutal actions not because they hated democracy, but because they believed their leader embodied the nation’s true spirit. The same pattern holds today: Trump does not need to justify his actions through law or fact; his followers believe he is the law, and he feels right. That feeling, unmoored from principle, becomes the moral compass of the movement.

The result is a political culture where MAGA supporters can demand due process for Kyle Rittenhouse while cheering the extrajudicial treatment of BLM protestors. Where they claim censorship when fact-checked, but advocate banning books, speech, and education that challenge their worldview. And where they cry tyranny when indicted, but applaud government overreach when it targets their perceived enemies.

This moral inversion is not a bug of MAGA, it’s the engine of its righteousness. It doesn’t just tolerate contradictions. It requires them to survive.

What the Country Looks Like

When a cult gains power, it doesn't just shift policies, it reorders reality. In Trump's second term, the transformation of the American landscape has accelerated in ways that were once dismissed as dystopian fiction. What we see now is a country restructured around obedience, where institutions once tasked with oversight are either gutted, intimidated, or bent toward the will of the executive. The levers of government are pulled not for governance, but for vengeance.

Education is one of the first casualties. Trump's executive orders have reimagined civics through the lens of nationalist myth, mandating schools and museums present a sanitized, triumphalist version of American history. The “Restoring Truth and Sanity” directive has already forced the Smithsonian and National Archives to remove content critical of America’s founding contradictions. Curricula are being rewritten to prioritize patriotism over inquiry, echoing strategies from Hungary under Orbán and China under Xi, where education is deployed as a loyalty test rather than a developmental tool (Ringen, 2016; Lendvai, 2017).

Dissent is no longer merely discouraged, it is policed. The White House has revoked press credentials from entire outlets, denied access to federal briefings, and forced pooled reporters to pass through new ideological filters (Reuters, 2025a; 2025b). Legal challenges remain in flux, but the chilling effect is unmistakable. In authoritarian regimes, the truth is not censored outright, it is drowned in noise, buried under suspicion, or preemptively silenced.

And now, the most visible symbol of America’s internal transformation: troops in the streets. As of late June 2025, National Guard troops remain stationed in Los Angeles, despite protests having largely subsided weeks earlier. The deployment began after anti-ICE protests turned tense, but the justification has evolved. Trump’s administration federalized over 4,000 Guard members and several hundred Marines, invoking a June 7 Presidential Memorandum authorizing military protection of Homeland Security functions. An appeals court recently ruled in his favor, allowing him to retain control over California's National Guard (Axios, 2025; AP, 2025).

Critics have raised alarms over the violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal military involvement in domestic law enforcement. Yet the presence persists, normalizing a military footprint in civilian spaces. The troops are now a message: protest at your own risk. Like in the early stages of other authoritarian consolidations, the spectacle of force becomes part of the political environment, quiet, constant, and unquestioned.

This is no longer hypothetical. It’s not a warning of what could happen. It’s a statement of what is happening.

How to Resist a Cult in Power

America has not stumbled into this moment by accident. It was ushered here, step by step, by a movement that fused its identity to a man, its morality to a grievance, and its future to a fiction. MAGA is not just a political phenomenon. It is a psychological ecosystem, a cult of personality hardened into a cult of power.

And when a cult gains power, the danger is not just the lies it tells, but the truths it erodes. The value of human dignity is replaced by usefulness to the group. Laws become tools of retribution, and justice a stage for loyalty tests. History is no longer a record, it is a battleground. Reality itself becomes partisan.

No authoritarian regime rises overnight. Nor does it arrive dressed in foreign costumes. It comes in familiar colors, wrapped in patriotic language, quoting scripture, pledging liberty while criminalizing dissent. It does not always shout. Sometimes it whispers, normalizes, waits. It counts on the population doing nothing, on critics exhausting themselves in private outrage while the public tunes out.

But the antidote to cultic power is not just facts, it is clarity. It is the naming of things, without euphemism or hesitation. It is calling cruelty what it is, recognizing propaganda for what it intends, and refusing to let fear write the next chapter.

The path forward will not come from appealing to the good faith of those who’ve surrendered theirs. It must come from those still willing to defend democracy not as a brand, but as a practice, a fragile, exhausting, vital habit of vigilance.

Cults do not collapse under evidence. But they weaken in the light. And there is still time to flood the room with it.

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