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Speier didn’t arrive at her conclusions lightly. Two years ago, on a book tour to promote her memoir, https://www.amazon.com/Undaunted-Surviving-Jonestown-Summoning-Fighting/dp/1503903605 (Undaunted: Surviving Jonestown, Summoning Courage, and Fighting Back), she was stunned when people asked her to compare Trump to what happened at Jonestown. “I recoiled from the question. I wasn’t prepared to think this was a parallel. Now, four years into this nightmare of melodrama and manipulation, the parallels are pretty clear,” she says.
For Republican senators unwilling to acknowledge Biden won the election, it’s about self-preservation in a party dominated by Trump. Angering Trump can bring retribution in the form of a primary challenge.
It’s not that different from the Peoples Temple, where adherents feared they would be ostracized from the community if they challenged Jones. “Community had become their family,” says Speier. “And like the 70 percent of Republicans today who think the election was filled with fraud, those that had some sense of independence couldn’t express it. Once you get deep into something like this, even if you know it’s not right, you stay there, you’re transfixed.”
In the Peoples Temple investigation, Speier researched aspects of mind control, more colloquially known as brainwashing, where the human mind can be controlled by certain psychological techniques, “and the president in a twisted way was doing the same thing,” she says.
Jones said he was creating a utopia for his followers, a community of mixed race and mixed ethnicities, and he was well-connected to the political elite in San Francisco. He helped elect George Moscone, “the people’s mayor,” in 1975 and was rewarded with appointments to the Human Rights Commission and eventually to the Housing Commission.
But his strongarm tactics were coming under scrutiny. Senior citizens gave him their Social Security checks. Followers turned over their assets to him, creating pressure on others to do the same. “If you’re a true believer, you will show your allegiance, your faith, by providing your world possessions to the family,” Speier explains.
The ability of Trump to raise over $200 million since losing the election for dubious legal costs should raise alarm bells, says Speier. “He’s created a cult of personality—and as hard as it is for me to say, he exudes charisma and people want to follow him,” she says. “When you see the Proud Boys on the street knifing people and inciting violence, it’s a little chilling. This is a political cult. The other is a religious cult.”
Harold Goldstein is a clinical psychologist whose interest in cults began after the Jonestown massacre when he worked with the National Institutes of Mental Health to pull together luminaries in the field on the nature of cults. There are those that are considered benign—he cites fans of Judy Garland or The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And he offers this definition of a cult: “a group that has an unassailable devotion to a person, an object, or an ideology... You can see that the key word is unassailable,” he adds. “The devotion is not altered by fact or evidence.”
For a cult leader, whether it is Jim Jones or Donald Trump, power depends on controlling the information. Jones had people living together in an isolated environment. Trump has shown that in the age of social media platforms and right-wing media outlets, he can control their flow of information. “The whole idea of fake news is that the only information that is true comes from the cult leader,” says Goldstein.
“Alternate facts,” the phrase first introduced by Kellyanne Conway, “is a sophisticated way of saying I adhere to whatever he says, and I explain away whatever doesn’t fit,” says Goldstein. Something that conflicts is dismissed out of hand. “The evidence is irrelevant, it doesn’t matter what the evidence shows,” he says.
Dozens of lawsuits rejected and two dismissals by the U.S. Supreme Court haven’t dissuaded Trump’s followers who believe he won the election and Democrats are stealing it from him. “When you’re a member of a cult, your knowledge of what goes on is very low,” says Goldstein. “As members move up in the group and learn more about what’s going on, they get disillusioned.” That’s what happened in Jonestown—people were getting disillusioned and they wanted to go home. Other cult members turned on them, carrying out the killings at the airport.
To maintain his grip on his base, Trump has to continually reinforce the belief that “only I can fix it,” and that the consequence of not adhering to the truth as he presents it will result in disaster, i.e. the suburbs will be destroyed. “When he throws out red meat, he knows exactly what he’s doing. When he’s having these rallies, he’s keeping his followers connected. It’s called group adherence. It serves the purpose of keeping people aligned with him.”
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