The Messianic Madness of Donald J. Trump

Messiahs I Have Known (Chapter 2, Verse 1) turns from the cult wars of the 1970s to the culture wars of the 2020s and the only-I-can-save-you president of the United States.

Donald Trump has long given me flashbacks, troubling echoes from the 1970s and 1980s, when I was a young reporter covering the “cult wars” of that era, from the controversies surrounding the Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon to the ill-fated saga of the Rev. Jim Jones.

These ominous echoes came up when Trump first surfaced as a serious presidential contender, and they only got louder in his second presidential campaign. That’s when Trump offered his “I was indicted for you" defense to his MAGA base. “In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

That reminded me of the most notorious cult leader of the 1970s, the Rev. Jim Jones of San Francisco’s Peoples Temple, who fled the city to a remote South American jungle compound he named Jonestown. In November of 1978 he led more than 900 followers in a horrifying ritual of murder and suicide. A friend and colleague, San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, was among the victims — gunned down on an airstrip trying to flee Guyana with Bay Area Congressman Leo Ryan, who was also murdered.

Many people forget that Jones, an ordained Disciples of Christ minister, was for a time seen as a respected — albeit feared — progressive political force in San Francisco. He was appointed chairman of the city’s Housing Authority in 1976 by Mayor George Moscone, who was himself murdered by a political opponent the same month the Jonestown horror erupted in Guyana.

Like Donald Trump, the Peoples Temple leader had undeniable messianic tendencies. Jones often compared himself to God or Jesus Christ. He preached a left-wing message of “apostolic socialism.” Only he could save his followers from the CIA and the cruelties of a corrupt capitalist regime.

To my ears, that paranoid, grandiose message sounds like the political flip side of Trump’s constant boasts that the only he can rescue his aggrieved right-wing base from the oppressions of the “deep state” and its corrupt left-wing politicians.

Trump posted this photo of himself on his social media website

Jonestown researcher Fielding McGehee told me he got lots of calls and emails from former People Temple members back in 2016 when Trump famously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

“The message that they repeated over and again was, ‘I just heard the voice of Jim Jones,’ ” said McGehee, a founder of The Jonestown Institute.

Anti-cult activist Steve Hassan, a former member of the Unification Church, also has Trump-induced flashbacks to his time as a “Moonie,” a follower of the late Sun Myung Moon, the controversial Korean evangelist and fervent anti-Communist.

Hassan, founder of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, recalls an infamous moment early in Trump’s first presidency, when television cameras recorded his cabinet members heaping slavish praise upon the great leader. “We thank you for the opportunity and the blessing to serve your agenda,” said chief of staff Reince Priebus.

The scene — replayed in the current Trump cabinet — reminds Hassan of private meetings with Moon back in the 1970s. “All of us in the room understood how blessed we were to be in Moon’s presence,” he writes in his book The Cult of Trump. “We adored him as the greatest man who ever lived. If we had doubts or criticisms, we were taught to block, or ‘thought stop,’ them. If we dared disagree or point out inconsistencies, we would be kicked out.”

In Trump 2.0, presidential cabinet meetings have sunk to new lows. Last month, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer invited Trump to come see his how his “big, beautiful face” has been plastered on the side of her department’s Washington, D.C. headquarters. Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture, thanked Trump for leading a third American revolution. “We are saving America,” she said.

This was followed by global envoy Steve Witkoff, who has failed to fulfill Trumpian prophecies about ending the Russia/Ukraine war “on day one.” But this is Trump World and, in Witkoff’s mind, the Nobel Committee and the rest of the world must “wake up” and realize that Trump’ is the “single finest candidate” ever for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Last week, the fear, fealty and rising fascism was once again on display when Trump summoned tech leaders to a White House dinner to watch them bow down. With Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg seated at the right hand of the messiah and Microsoft’s Bill Gates on the other side of Melania, Open AI CEO Sam Altman profusely thanked Trump for being “such a pro-business, pro-innovation president.”

The chorus of brown-nosers have devolved into such a sickening symphony of sycophancy that it now envelopes what now passes for “journalism” in the expanded White House press pool. At last month’s cabinet meeting, the first person other than Trump to speak out was an actual cultist posing as a reporter, planted there by Trump. “I heard you were savagely mugged in the city,” the president asked the representative from the Epoch Times, a right-wing news outlet tied to a Chinese political cult. "Thank you for now making D.C. safer,” replied Iris Tao, obediently.

Rev. Moon, who claimed to be the new Christian messiah brought to Earth to fulfill Jesus’ unfinished mission, must be posthumously jealous.

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This longing for a messiah, for an enlightened being to save us from our persecutors, is an ancient impulse. “Messiah” is a Hebrew word meaning “anointed with oil” and “Christ” is the Greek word for the same. The ancient Jews used the word to refer to anyone who was anointed for a holy purpose, including prophets and kings — and the coming messiah was seen as fulfilling both roles.

The Jews seemed to have picked up the idea from the Zoroastrian faith when they were exiled to Babylon. Messianism is hard baked into Christianity. What separated the early Jesus movement from the Jewish culture from which it emerged was the Christian belief that the carpenter from Nazareth was indeed the Messiah foretold in the Hebrew Bible.

Trump’s solid support among conservative evangelicals puzzles some who point to his playboy tendencies, his mean-spiritedness, his lack of church attendance, his narcissism, and the absence of empathy for the poor and the oppressed.

Few Christians or Jews would go so far as to claim — like followers of the reverends Moon or Jones — that Donald Trump is the Jewish messiah or the Second Coming of Christ. But some have compared him to King Cyrus, a Biblical figure that some ancient Jews viewed as a kind of “messiah.”

This connection was explicitly made in 2018 by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who lavished praise on President Trump for declaring that in the eyes of the United States Jerusalem is now the true capital of Israel.

“I want to tell you,” Netanyahu told Trump, “that the Jewish people have a long memory, so we remember the proclamation of the great king, Cyrus the Great, the Persian king 2,500 years ago. He proclaimed that the Jews exiled in Babylon could come back and rebuild our temple in Jerusalem…Mr. Trump, this will be remembered by our people through the ages.”

According to the Book of Isiah (45: 1), God “anointed” King Cyrus and grasped his right hand “to subdue nations before him and strip kings of their robes.” This imagery, says the Rev. John Mabry, a retired Bay Area pastor in the liberal United Church of Christ, has inspired some conservative evangelical Christians he knows “to get behind Trump because he is like Cyrus.”

“In the evangelical imagination, this is the way they can justify Trump, with all his sin,” said Mabry, who runs a small publishing outfit that (full disclosure) put out my last book, God on Psychedelics — Tripping Across the Rubble of Old-time Religion.

“God is using this pagan ruler to do God’s work, just like Cyrus,” Mabry told me. “God has anointed Trump to enact all these policies that are going to benefit God’s kingdom. So, in that sense, he is their messiah.”

(Next week we will continue our discussion of the great messianic pretender in his newly gilded temple on Pennsylvania Avenue. If you are not a subscriber to Messiahs I Have Known, please sign up for a free or (even better) paid Substack membership to read past episodes and get future updates.)