The Real Reason We Want to See MAGA as a Cult

Despite having been told for so long that they were wrong—uneducated, impolite, fanatical, gullible, racist, backward—MAGA supporters ascended to the highest ranks of American politics. From inside the Oval Office, they hear their own rageful, incoherent sputtering at the injustices of the Deep State and The System issuing from the mouth of the most powerful man in world. It’s heady, it’s fortifying, it’s vindicating. This is the part of the cult narrative where the tearful pleas of loved ones to come home bounce back “Return to Sender.” This is also the part that devotees of cult media and Trump opponents struggle to come to terms with: People don’t want to leave what has given them such psychic and social gratification, especially to return to what didn’t serve them in the first place.

So we wait, with unconcealed anticipation, for the MAGA faithful to suffer the same fate as the brainwashed devotees of Mother God, who were arrested for carting their leader’s mummified body through the desert in hopes of finding the salvation she promised, or of Charles Manson, whose “family” followed him all the way to prison for life. Meanwhile, Trump supporters seem to remain impervious to the lessons they were supposed to have found out. And indeed, the more they refuse to repudiate the president and their own beliefs, or admit the causal connection between his policies and their tribulations, the more the left fantasizes their misfortune. We crave their reckoning as the satisfying (and promised) final act in the real-life docuseries we’ve been mainlining since before the pandemic. But what if the arc of history doesn’t bend toward justice so much as turn back in on itself? What if the story of cults that so tidily predicts the end of Trump is as anesthetizing and deluding as the ideology it claims to oppose? It’s gripping entertainment, but cult media’s promises of guaranteed closure are not so much real as a compensation for what we already know.

After the cameras stop rolling, after scenes of comforting closure are edited together, the story of a cult goes on. It continues in the courtroom, as undaunted adherents of Warren Jeffs crowd the spectator box. It continues as millions of Americans keep flocking to Rajneesh’s Indian ashram. People continue to believe. Cults don’t just die, they shift so that they can meet new social and psychic needs. Cult documentaries can’t tell us what happens next because their power lies in their endings—the fiery siege, the tearful confession, the moment of brutal awakening—endings that are designed to produce social repression.