The psychology of political cults

The comments to this morning’s post about how Acting Attorney General wants to kiss Donald Trump all over brought up something I have a certain morbid curiosity about:

To what extent do Trump’s abject sycophants fall into the following categories:

(1) 100% pure performative shamming. People in this group see him for what he is, despise him as a consequence of that clarity, and pretend to worship him in a fashion that is 180 degrees removed from their actual opinion of him, for some combination of reasons running from simple personal ambition to genuine ideological commitment to some cause or the other that can be advanced by Trumpism. (The latter mental state is what the Jesuits refer to as the doctrine of mental reservation).

(2) True believers in Trump personally. These people are like the 15% of top Nazi military officers who committed suicide at the end of the war, a few of which may have done so out of fear of what the Russians would do to them (head of the Gestapo Heinrich Muller, the highest-ranking Nazi whose fate has never been definitively established, most likely fell into this category), but most of whom seem to have done so because they couldn’t face the idea of life without the man who gave it meaning. This is pure cult psychology.

(3) People in a complex mental state in which they may have started out in group (1), but the very act of pretending has over time has corroded their psychological identity/sense of personal integrity, to the point where their mental state is now closer to (2), although in a at least somewhat ambiguous or ambivalent way, that’s distinguishable from the mental state of the genuine true believers in Trump as a pseudo-Messiah. This is the we become what we pretend to be group.

This being LGM I’m sure there are other ways of slicing up this particular proto-Nazi strudel, and I’m curious to read your thoughts.

. . . commenter Turkle adds a fourth group, that I agree on reflection is pretty much its own thing:

I think you left out a critical component of the MAGA base: the chaos monkeys. These are people that are completely disaffected and isolated from society at large and they voted for the guy just because they were bored and wanted to fuck something up. Like, I think a lot of people voted for him because they thought he would be fun to see on their smartphones.

There is a fundamental level of unseriousness about these people, and it is enabled by, and enables, the chaos monkey part of their base.

These are the creatures of reality TV/4chan/the incel cesspool etc. They don’t have any careerist goals or actual ideology, so not #1, they don’t fit into #2 because they don’t believe in anything or anyone, and therefore #3 isn’t relevant to them by definition. They are the cyber-detritus of an increasingly decadent age.