If you want to defeat the Trump cult, leave the Democrat cult.
I’ve been waiting for the American electorate to undergo two ideological shifts: the right will drop Donald Trump, and the left will drop the trans shit. Yet, we seem no closer to either of these than we were five years ago. If anything, we’re further away.
To understand my perspective on this, you’ll have to temporarily suspend your disbelief and imagine, for just a few minutes, that either Donald Trump may not have been personally sent by God to save America, or that perhaps girls cannot have dicks.
It’s recently occurred to me that, counter-intuitively, the logical breaches in both platforms might actually increase party loyalty.
I’m voting for Kamala Harris, but I will readily admit that the Democratic Party has become a cult. They punish any deviation from their dogma, they react with confusion and rage when challenged, and their end goal is total ideological conformity. While your average Trump supporter does not require his neighbor to also be a Trump supporter, progressives can’t psychologically tolerate disagreement, perhaps because they project onto others their terror of being outed as infidels.
The Republican Party is also a cult, but a cult of personality rather than ideology. So while Kamala Harris painfully spasms through basic questions about abortion, gender, and illegal immigration, Donald Trump is always at ease in front of his supporters, even when he should be embarrassed.
If the Democrats are a cult of shame, the Republicans are a cult of shamelessness. (Ironically, as the overwhelming majority of Republicans are God-fearing Christians, whereas Democrats annually run around naked and brag about pride.)
Because the members of each cult can’t think outside of their respective frameworks, they are unable to mount effective criticisms against the other. When Democrats focus on Trump’s narcissism and bigotry, they’re attacking his moral bankruptcy and incapacity for loyalty. For a Democratic candidate, these flaws would be campaign-destroying, but to Trump’s base, his irreverence is a refreshing display of strength and confidence. His willingness to say the wrong thing shows that the Democrats have failed to make him ashamed of being a straight white man.
Michael Keaton recently told supporters of Trump and Elon Musk:
They don’t really respect you. They laugh at you behind your backs, they think you’re stupid… When Trump, years ago I guess, said, ‘I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and they’d still vote for me,’ basically what he’s saying, in parentheses, is, ‘These people are so stupid, they’re so dumb, they’d still vote for me.’ They have no respect for you, trust me.
Here are the top replies:
You can see why his arguments don’t land—Trump supporters don’t consider themselves cultists who fantasize about hanging out with Trump and Elon. To any non-supporter, sure, it’s obvious that they’ve been sucked into Trump’s delusion that he’s the greatest man to ever live. (If they merely thought he was a good leader, they would not be liking kimberleigh123’s comment: “nothing could change my mind.”)
Because Michael Keaton is a member of the Democratic cult, he’s unable to see why Trump’s selfishness is actually central to his appeal—it’s a shield against the guilt, shame, and gaslighting from progressives.
For a political argument to be genuinely considered, it needs to be based on a premise shared by the speaker and the listener. Because Trump supporters don’t agree that they’re motivated by wanting Trump to be their “buddy,“ they reject Keaton’s message.
In 2024, nearly all political arguments are instantly dismissed, because between the two political cults dominating our country, there are no shared premises.
Trump supporters are similarly unable to form effective arguments against the Democratic platform. When Joe Biden ended his candidacy, Republicans seized the opportunity to call his replacement with Kamala a “coup,” apparently hoping to stoke some outrage towards Democratic leadership.
Look at the tone here—as if a grand conspiracy has been uncovered. “Media still silent.” The implication is that Democrats would revolt if they knew their beloved Joe Biden had been ousted by his supposedly loyal underlings.
But the Democrats aren’t a cult of personality, so they don’t really care who the candidate is. Moreover, because they’re an ideological cult, candidates are supposed to look feeble and disposable before the grand altar of progressivism. The Republican criticism here is especially misguided if you consider that Democrats mostly cheered Biden’s withdrawal from the race—there wasn’t any discontent to exploit in the first place. It’s as if Trump supporters can’t remember what it’s like to have normal thoughts and feelings about a political candidate.
The worldviews of Democrats and Republicans have drifted so far apart that we no longer have the shared vocabulary to even describe our differences. The question famously asked by Matt Walsh and others, “What is a woman?”, highlights the growing linguistic chasm.
Both groups have also drifted a considerable distance away from any internally logical reality, which is why I’m calling them cults. So why can’t Americans snap out of their delusions?
When we receive conflicting information, we experience cognitive dissonance. Ideally, we resolve this by rejecting the information that is less consistent with reality. Sometimes, we fail to reject nonsense, or even choose to accept it.
“Jesus Christ is the son of God.” This statement makes no logical sense, but we know that most people are willing to accept an idea like this (and spread it to others) if they are indoctrinated at an early age and receive sufficient social pressure. In order to accept that Jesus is the son of God, you have to reject things like death, evolutionary biology, and astrophysics. Those are all disturbing things anyway, so they are happily discarded.
Nonsensical beliefs are so common that we don’t define religiosity as crazy—on the contrary, to critically challenge a religious belief is considered rude and intolerant.
Even though religions are very much like cults, they are so large and mainstream that we don’t call them cults. But a so-called “religious cult,” usually an offshoot of a larger group, really only differs from a religion in scale.
Analogously, small political interest groups like Project 2025 or Antifa are easily labeled as cults, but what about dominant parties with tens of millions of members?
I believe the label fits, at least today, because both parties resolve cognitive dissonance by breaking with reality.
“Donald Trump is a great businessman” is believed instead of “Donald Trump is in a heap of self-inflicted financial and legal trouble.”
“Trans women are women” is accepted, while “trans women are mentally ill males” is heresy.
We all discard logic from time to time. When we say our wedding vows, we’re choosing to step into a fantasy in which our relationship is somehow invincible. When we get cancer and bravely announce on Facebook that we’re going to “fight” it, we’re choosing to pretend we aren’t terrified. These illogical sentiments are so common they aren’t even considered illogical.
But when the motivation for abandoning logic is not sympathetic to outsiders, we are perceived as insane. The most loyal cultists wear the abandonment of logic as a badge of honor, like our friend kimberleigh123: “nothing can change my mind.”
She appears to get some gleeful pleasure from saying it, too. And look how many likes her comment got. We all know how good it feels to be heaped with praise.
Here’s Elliot Page’s trans identity announcement, which received 3.5 million likes. :
“I can’t begin to express how remarkable it feels to finally love who I am enough to pursue my authentic self,” a woman says just before she cuts off her breasts.
To an outsider, it’s crazy talk. To the cultist, she’s crossing a bridge to a fantasy world in which she is supported, loved, and powerful. She’s free from her body and its recorded traumas, from logic and the doom that logic always foretells, and from her very self.
Those bad feelings have been replaced by the bliss of love-bombing, in-group praise, and denial. “I feel overwhelming gratitude for the incredible people who have supported me along this journey.”
Hatred and ridicule from outsiders only reinforce the decision to join the cult. If Page would rather be a fake man than a successful actress, she’s very unlikely to detransition if the new option is “mocked mentally ill woman who has mutilated herself.”
Trump supporters have made equally devastating logical sacrifices. While their sex organs may be intact, their sanity is not. And, just like Ellen Page, they have spent nearly a decade rehearsing talking points and counterarguments designed to avoid acknowledging Trump’s horrible flaws. They stormed the Capitol, planted flags in Trump’s name, chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” and then pretended the event was a peaceful protest against a stolen election, which in reality they themselves were trying to steal.
Whether it’s out of fear, greed, or a delusion of practical necessity, Republicans and Democrats have deeply burrowed themselves in the comfort of their respective lunacies. Cruelty, violence, and even good faith debate will only drive them deeper.
Since I’m left-leaning, I’m mostly addressing fellow progressives and independents who wish to defeat Trump in next week’s election. They’re not going to leave their cult until you leave yours.
Practically, this means questioning your own political beliefs, particularly the ones you get the most emotional about. Dig deep and find common ground with the other side, and root the premises of your overtures and arguments in a shared reality. And, most important of all, do not pretend to believe things you do not in exchange for the acceptance of your party.
We need to show Trump supporters that we’re not all fucking insane.
The framing around shame helped me better understand Trump supporters. I'm personally quite sensitive to feelings of shame, so I can see how a brazenly shameless candidate can be quite compelling.
Jesus, Max, get off that trans thing already. Those people are perfectly fine, you really don't have anything to add to this discourse. And it should not even be a discourse. Let those people be and leave it at that.
If anyone looks insane, it's the people who just cannot accept transgender people and always come up with some stupid excuses to demonize them and mischaracterise them. That fixation isn't healthy. Find something else.