How to break MAGA's emotional bonds

We consult a psychologist about how Trumpism works on people, how to protect yourself from it, and how to break its grip

Morning, everyone! Anand here.

You know, traditional political analysis is only so useful in understanding Trumpism — and furnishing tools to protect against it. That is because what we are living through is a phenomenon as much psychological as political. The insights about how to make sense of it and thwart it and transcend it sometimes come from unexpected places, therefore.

If what we’re living through is an abusive relationship with a narcissist-in-chief, ideas about how to survive might come from people who study such things at the intimate scale. If the MAGA movement that upholds Trump is more of a cult than a typical movement, we may need to learn from people who study cults.

That’s why we have been bringing you some non-traditional sources of analysis in recent months and weeks, and we do so again today. You’re not going to want to miss this insightful, lesson-packed, and, we hope, useful conversation with Alexandra Stein, a social psychologist, about how the MAGA cult works, what its vulnerabilities are, and six very practical things you can do right now to survive and resist.—AG

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How to break a cult in six easy steps

Senator Chris Murphy has identified something about today’s Republican Party that few have been able to name so clearly:

Republicans are rubber-stamping every nominee because they are in a cult. Trump is testing them, and to a person, they are all falling in line. Every one of them has made the choice to let everything proceed as normal. In a cult, you do whatever the leader tells you to do — even when it’s ridiculous, dangerous or risks harm to your own family.

Even if we haven’t joined the cult, we’re the family that now has to suffer the harms of this administration’s rampaging policies.

Psychologist Daniel Shaw talked to us just last week about how Trump has used the same tactics as narcissists do in abusive relationships to build power, and in the past psychiatrists like Robert Jay Lifton and philosophers and political theorists such as Erich Fromm and Hannah Arendt have pointed out the similarities between cult behavior, abusive relationships with narcissists, and life under totalitarianism.

How to survive the abuser-in-chief

Cult leaders and totalitarian rulers — with the answers, charming and ruthless — not only create chaos and fear but also cause dissociation in their followers, breaking their grip on reality and creating a world where only they have the answers, further bonding their followers to them — even entire societies. As Arendt wrote:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Social psychologist Alexandra Stein, the author of Terror, Love, and Brainwashing, which examines the way attachment theory — the study of how people build emotional bonds — can illuminate how cults and authoritarian societies work, has spent decades studying how charismatic leaders have manipulated the deep-seated ways people build emotional attachments to control and exploit them — and how their victims have been able to break free.

Stein, who like Shaw was herself a cult member (she detailed the experience in her first book, Inside Out), has worked since on techniques to resist cult recruitment and indoctrination. She has even addressed the issue of MAGA as a cult before, and gave written testimony to the House January 6th Committee, detailing the cultic tactics of the Trump movement and associated groups such as the Proud Boys.

Nastaran Tavakoli-Far talked to Stein to get her insight into the techniques being used by Trump and Musk to consolidate power, and to get some practical advice on how to approach this moment, how to talk to family and friends who have embraced MAGA, and what we can do, now, to protect ourselves and to combat the Trump administration’s chaotic transformation of American life.

Among the ideas in the interview below the fold:

• Fight, fight, fight. Do not negotiate with them

• Gather in real life

• Stay connected to yourself

• Stay connected to each other, preferably in real life

• Stay connected to MAGA people you know

• Speak up, make a stand, inspire others, and repeat

Stein’s message echoes Daniel Shaw’s and recalls the advice political strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio shared with us — and it all has to do with getting back to the very basics of building community: working against the alienation and isolation of capitalist culture, making connections, and learning to speak up — and to one another.

WATCH: An *actual* plan to beat fascism

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Fight, gather, connect

And other lessons from social psychologist Alexandra Stein (in conversation with Nastaran Tavakoli-Far)

Lesson 1: Fight fight fight. Do not negotiate with them

What are you thinking about regarding what’s going on right now?

I have these intellectual political friends, and they always want to ask me questions like “Why is he going after USAID?” It's not about logic. They’re living on a different planet. Usually, even if we come from different political views there’s a kind of shared understanding of the world, and these guys don't live with that understanding.

Trump’s Gaza plan, for example, sounds like an abusive person who's just trying to rile people up. I don't know if there's a coherent ideology at all.

They want total power, total control, and part of the mechanism of how you do that — all of this is explained by Hannah Arendt if you read part three of The Origins of Totalitarianism, and I highly recommend it — is just to create movement.

Then the other thing people don't understand is you can't negotiate with them, because they don't have an end goal other than total control. There's nothing you can negotiate on because all they're doing is creating this kind of giant engine that’s chewing through, keeping people engaged with movement. That's the essence of what's going on.

I don’t want to assume that everything that happens in a cult is what's happening right now, but some of the behaviors look similar, like constantly causing chaos, continuously putting people off guard so they can’t think clearly, that sort of thing. Now what strikes me is that you know when you look at things like cults, ultimately you need to leave, right?

You can’t reform them.

But you can't leave society, so what can we learn from the cult experience?

You have to fight. As Trump says: fight, fight, fight. Because we have to stand up. You can't negotiate and they don't have a finite goal, so what else are you going to do? They are looking for complete subjection. So do we want to be subjected? No, and we have lots of history to look at to understand why not.

As someone who's been in a cult and has expertise on this, can you describe the parallels you're seeing with a cult and what's going on right now?

Trump clearly fits the profile of a cult leader. He's charismatic and has a set of followers. He's a bully, he's authoritarian.

Last go-round he had a strong inner circle of his family, and then the way he bounced people up and down the hierarchy. So he had the structural elements: the inner circle, the lieutenants who got bounced up and down, the loyal followers. He had the absolutist ideology, “I know everything, I can do everything, I have the answers to everything.” His way of talking, it's word salad. It's repetitive. If you actually try to understand it you can't because there's nothing there. Its purpose is to dissociate. And the brainwashing stuff of alternating between the nice guy, and the horrible guy, he does that all the time. He's a liar. If people question him they're out, and then he just destroys them if he can. That’s very cultic. There's no room for anything we might consider open democratic discussion or disagreement.

When we think about cults we often think about a kind of discrete group but around the edges of these discrete groups are often front groups. Hannah Arendt talks about totalitarianism as being shaped like the rings of an onion. In the outer layers, there’s lot of these conspiracy theories. So when we say MAGA, what does that mean? That’s a very big term, it can mean someone who's just gotten into the conspiracy theories online, or someone higher up, a Mike Flynn. A lot of the people who appeared at the Capitol on January 6 were randoms, sucked in from the edges of the structure.

Lesson 2: Gather in real life

When you look at society right now, we’re in a sort of cult-like dynamic without officially being members. Then when we look at the sorts of reasons why people can be vulnerable to cults, it's often due to a big life upheaval, it's not about being “messed up.”

It’s what we call a situational vulnerability rather than a personality vulnerability.

This is changing a bit, but initially a lot of journalists and political scientists and activists were dismayed by the lack of resistance to Trump. What do you make of the lack of reaction from the public to the chaos that’s happening?

Capitalism has isolated people and that makes us vulnerable as societies. The unions have been broken down over a long time, youth clubs, any of these things where people gather and get together, we have much, much less of them.

Where people gather physically?

Yes.

Can you say a little bit about that, because especially the tech people in charge, they talk about community, and yet these online communities have been part of what’s led us to this moment in terms of misinformation and the like.

Yes because you haven't got a physical relationship that's looking at the same sky that's blue where you can say “No, it's not green.” Here in this community (gestures to the café) we can all experience the same reality briefly, and that's a big thing.

Resistance is about what is true, what is reality. There's been such a loss, misinformation has been so successful in delegitimizing people's reality, and that is a total cultic thing right there, that you can say anything.

We've lost that link to reality. It's terribly dangerous, as we are seeing, so I think efforts that hang on to that reality are very important, which is where good journalism comes in, by the way, and there's a lot of bad journalism out there, it’s frightening. It's like in the Soviet Union, they had samizdat and we're getting to that.

Lesson 3: Stay connected to yourself

You’ve talked about how cults and similar systems in terms of attachment theory — the way we create emotional bonds and relationships. How would you describe what's been happening politically on that level?

I think the environment in which we're living is very frightening, especially for young people, and that's largely related to climate change. So you have all this uncertainty and fear. All the big questions people ask, like, “Should I have children,” are hard to answer. It seems to me that a lot of people, the way they cope with that is to dissociate because it's too big. We dissociate when we're in a situation of trauma that we can't get out of. In attachment theory that’s called “fright without solution”.

So people dissociate, it's too difficult otherwise. They maybe make the world a bit smaller, or they do denial — none of this is to judge their response, these are just human responses to terrifying situations. Some people have the resources, whether internal or external, to fight — which is very difficult — so you have people who are dissociating and people who are fighting. From society, you can't really flee, which is the other response.

In terms of the trauma responses of fight, flight, or flee you mean?

Where are you going to flee to, unless you’re Musk? Elon Musk is trying to flee to Mars, and I wish he’d hurry up!

I remember about 10 years ago interviewing a bunch of these Mars entrepreneurs and thinking this sounds great — they could all go away and leave us alone! But you were talking about fight or flight.

People dissociate because they don't know a way to act, there's no way out for them. But not everyone dissociates because some people have resources.

They either have inner resources which they are able to tap into. So for instance, I have the inner resource of a family that did bring into my world a lot of amazing anti-apartheid activists, so I have all these models of fighting back. Not that my parents were at the vanguard of any of it, but they were in the mix and had values that one should fight back. Now, I couldn't do that when I was in the cult because I thought I was fighting back in the cult (laughs), but that's why I became an activist — because after I got out the social justice part of myself was asking, “What do I do with this mess?” Well, I can do something positive.

I also had some external resources: I had a bit of money because the cult actually got me to be a computer programmer and I earned some money, whereas a lot of people coming out of these things don't have any money, so I was able to go and get my Ph.D. and various things.

When you talk about dissociation, I think sometimes this is hard for people who haven't experienced it or don't understand it, because the criticism is, for example, “Oh, people just don't want to deal with climate change.” There can be some judgment towards dissociation. Can you explain it a little more so people can understand it?

You’re not consciously choosing it. The simplest way I can talk about dissociation is you're not thinking about what you're feeling or experiencing. So right now I'm in this café. I've got quite a lot of metacognition going on. I'm thinking about whether I’m talking too loud to bother my neighbors, is my tea warm enough, am I giving you the right answers. I'm also feeling cold, I'm looking after the dog. There's a lot going on that I'm connected to, I'm thinking about my experience and my feelings.

Dissociation is when that link has broken so you’re feeling stuff but you're not able to make any sense of it, and you in fact give up on making sense of it. You're not able to take that feeling and then think about it in the higher part of your brain. If you're just feeling terrified about what's happening in this crazy world, you're not necessarily thinking “I think I'll dissociate now.” You're just like, “Can’t cope, overload, can’t cope, I'll go and eat more doughnuts”.

Now, some of my friends in America are saying to me, “This is all terrible, I can't read the newspaper right now.” They’re distancing themselves but they're not dissociating because they're making that decision. They’re like, “My mental health is at risk.”

Dissociation is more like, “uuuuggggh” (cowers with her head under her arms).

But I wonder as well…smartphones are partly leading to us tuning out our surroundings and yet the internet is also where we're fleeing to to sort of block things out.

It's the lack of connection again, it's the isolation. We're doing all the internet stuff because we're not hanging out with people because that's the way society has gone. Pubs have closed down, we live in tiny little flats where it's not that easy to socialize, and our loved ones live far away from us because we live in a very mobile society. Isolation is the key.

So going back to disorganized attachment, this is related to the four attachment styles that psychologists use to describe how we bond with each other. These tend to start in childhood and our relationships with caregivers. Can you describe disorganized attachment more?

Disorganized attachment is when the supposed source of safety or comfort is at the same time the source of fear. If the person is isolated they can bond to that source of comfort and fear, seeking relief from the fear, and because there isn't any relief from the fear because they're going towards the fear, it's dissociating because it's a failed attempt to seek relief from the fear. And so you have an emotional effect, the bonding, and you have a cognitive effect, the dissociation.

I wanted to ask a little bit about disorganized attachment within the cult system and specifically if there's a way to link that to Trump and MAGA and to describe what's happening on an attachment level once one has got their foot in the door.

Modern society is isolating and America is probably more isolated than most. Then you have this propaganda of hatred against others and fear of others. You know, the rapist immigrants and the murderers and the thieves. So you have this propaganda channeling what Hannah Arendt would call people’s loneliness. And then you've got the great savior, Trump, with the simple narrative. And for people who are disconnected from each other and any reality checking and reality validation by others, people just jump onto these fear narratives and the great strongman narrative. The strongman in this context is the one who's going to save you and he's going to lower the egg prices, isn't he? And you're not connected to any reality validation because you're alone and disconnected from others.

Before Trump’s re-election, we were sort of in what you might call the recruitment stage, with these promises and lie upon lie about how all these problems were going to be solved. And now he's been elected it seems to me that the trap has been sprung. So now you've got the indoctrination phase where the fear is very clear. If you don't behave, you're going to lose your job, you're going to be thrown out of the country. There's fear, everyone must be feeling it. Even the people who are MAGAs.

Could you talk about the concept of “fright without solution” and the dynamic happening now in Trump’s second term?

Fright without solution is when you're in a traumatic situation that you have no way out of. You can think of it as if you've been in an earthquake and you're trapped under the rubble. That's fright without solution, and you're going to dissociate in that situation. You're going to play dead because that's all you can do, you have to conserve your resources. That's a survival strategy.

But the difference in a cult or in totalitarianism is that it's ongoing. It's an ongoing relational trauma where there's nothing you can usefully do to get out of the situation and so you go into that dissociated state because you're just trying to conserve your resources so you can put one foot in front of the other hoping to get through without punishment. That's the whole flooding the zone thing, it’s another dissociating method. There's so much going on, that none of us can really think about it properly.

Is there a parallel to what happens in an abusive relationship, where Person A is controlling Person B and through the abuse makes Person B more dependent on them? Does that sort of cycle work here?

Well, if you're a federal worker who doesn't want to lose your job, the only way to do that is to be loyal to Trump. And even that's not going to work, but that's going to be your attempt. And if you aren't in the union... You know, this is where the loneliness and the isolation comes in. If you've got a group of resistors, you do have some other ways to operate, you can be in the resistance. But if people are isolated, you don't have that option. The only source that you can turn to is the great leader. So you're going to be very loyal and you're going to keep saying, “Okay egg prices are going up and he said they weren't going up, but he's still right, he still understands, he's cleverer than me, what he's doing is going to eventually work out,” even as that person is being targeted by all this crazy stuff that's going on.

Lesson 4: Stay connected to each other, preferably IRL

For people who are in the know and aren't dissociated and are still in reality and want to do something, what are practical things that they can do to fight?

Be connected to each other and build those connections and build channels of communication with each other.

You talk about the resources that help us get out of these situations. Can you describe some of the external ones and also what we can do to build these?

First, there are different ways people get out of cults. For me, it was that someone in the cult broke the silence and confided in me — and you see this in all kinds of literature, in 1984, in all these works about fascist regimes where someone quietly confides in somebody else at risk of death. We formed what I call an island of resistance when we finally confided in each other.

In a cult, and this is really important, you're not only isolated from the outside world, but you're actually also isolated from the other cult members, you're really alone so breaking that is critical and sometimes people break that by forming a relationship outside of the cult with someone who they can confide in. These things are very much illegal as far as the cult is concerned and you can be punished severely.

Sometimes people get out — and I think this is less often the case — because cognitively the contradictions have become too extreme, what was promised is so obviously not what's on offer.

This is in your book, you say cults promise utopia but the everyday reality is really disappointing.

Dystopia. It's boring, it's unhappy, but you're supposed to be okay, we're all supposed to be happy and fulfilled.

I found that quite striking as with the reporting I’ve done on alleged cults I’ve been told it was a lot of arguing about chores yet people thinking, “I keep being told this is meant to be close to nirvana, but it’s not”!

Right! They are horrible. Cults are not nice places to be, but you are constantly told this is the place to be, and because of the dissociation you go along with it because everyone else is going along, but at a certain point some people get pushed past what they can manage and then they say, “Wait, this is all messed up” and then they find some way out.

Some people get out because the cult collapses. Some people get out because they're thrown out, which is not the best way because they can carry a lot of unresolved guilt and stuff.

What we learn from that is the best thing to do is create good relationships and good communities and trusting relationships and to keep the heat on. Tim Snyder says some of this in his On Tyrrany: keep talking about the realities, look after each other, look after each other's mental health, because it is terrible. And as Snyder says, be in physical relationships with other people, which is difficult these days (laughs).

Lesson 5: Stay connected to MAGA people you know

Can you tell us more about recruitment versus indoctrination?

In recruitment, you're dealing with propaganda. Now, propaganda has to have one foot in reality because you're talking to people who are still in reality. Once they’re recruited, then we were talking about indoctrination. Indoctrination starts to really decouple from reality, so this is where you can just start talking any kind of nonsense you want. But you can't do that right away. So you don't hear about the aliens coming out of the volcano and embedding themselves in your body until you’re far enough in, you've been well recruited and you've gone up a few layers. Then you get the nonsense. But when you're on the outer edges, you get, “We’re good for your personal development, we can help with your depression.”

An example of that might be the anti-vax discourse. I mean, I was scared with my first COVID vaccination. I wanted it, I completely believe in vaccinations, but I was nervous, you know, what is this strange new thing?

But that was a very good thing for them to alight on, and some people have a reaction so you're getting a lot of people involved in that recruitment propaganda stuff. Some of them will fall by the wayside, and they'll go, “No, I really do want the vaccination” or they won't carry on (with the indoctrination) for whatever reason. Not because they're better people. They might get good information from someone or a loved one might say, “Watch out for this cult,” or they might just find something more interesting to do.

But the ones who carry on down the pathway are then going to start getting more and more crazy messages and get more and more busy and watch more and more videos and maybe get involved in some organization. In America maybe they go find a militia to join and then the discourse gets more and more fictionalized and more and more decoupled from reality.

Are there things people from the outside can do to disrupt the retention part of this cycle?

The best time to prevent this is before someone's experienced a recruitment attempt and this is what our societies have horribly failed at. Then the next best time is early in the recruitment when they're not yet isolated and their brains are still somewhat functioning in the real world.

It is difficult once people are consolidated because first of all, you may not be able to access them because they've become isolated. They are frightened, they're in this fright without solution, so when you talk to them and say, “I think you're in something bad,” you're sort of making them think about the fear and that just makes them double down on pushing you away. That's why it's such a subtle process, helping someone out.

Weekly I get people asking me how to help them get somebody out of a cult and really the thing you can do is to try to keep some kind of contact. Now that's very difficult because people who are in cults are very annoying and they are trying to shun you and get away from you.

Someone who voted for Trump, maybe you don't want to talk to them, you want to smack them in their face! But if you're looking at it from a cult point of view you should try to keep contact because you want to be there for them when they get out, because if people don't feel they have a place to land then it's even harder for them to get out. So, “Dear loved one, whenever you're ready, I'll be here for you.” It helps them to know there's a landing place.

So, things like cults provide community—

No, they do the opposite of community.

People think they’re in a community though don't they? It's like an illusion.

It depends what you mean by community. They have people around them but the most important thing is they've been pulled out of everything else, so they have nothing else. And for many people with families, if they leave they're leaving everyone behind they know and they've gotten rid of all the other people. I just really hesitate to use the word “community” because that's the stereotype, they're in a group. But they have nothing else because everything else has been stripped from them.

Now this is where I talk about the different kinds of fear you have when you're trying to get out. The main fear is what I call existential or nameless fear, which is that you really don't think there's a life outside. You know, I'm a really intelligent person and I had some family outside and, well, I got rid of all my friends.

For me when I got out, and I did get out, it was like walking off the edge of the planet (walks her fingers off the edge of the table). That's how it felt, you can't even put words to it. You don't know if you're going to land or where you're going to land, and I was in the world, I mean I had a regular job. But that is the cult experience, and I'm sure that some of the people you’ve talked to have said you have to re-land in the world and realize that, there is a world and I can survive. It's an extraordinary feeling, actually. So that's how this physiological anxiety is constant, you don't have any break from it.

If you think of someone who's a big MAGA person, as in a passionate follower, the world is a very frightening place for them as well, and if they're isolated and all their friends are MAGA, you can't say anything, so the key is trying to help people see that the outside world is in fact benign, more benign. It's the best thing we can do for consolidated people, which is very difficult because they make me so angry. So it takes a great deal of maturity.

Lesson 6: Speak up, make a stand, inspire others, and repeat.

If we build these sorts of communities that are showing resistance and they're showing that there are good connections between people, can that help the people who are in the cult, who are wavering or struggling?

I think you've got to look at it as layers, it's not binary. You have the hardcore and there's not a lot you can do with the hardcore. I would say you've got to start with the outer layers, providing real information to people to counter propaganda and trying to connect that to their real lives. So, you know, “This is an actual explanation of why the egg prices are what they are," so that those people in the outer layers who are not really in yet but maybe just interested, you're giving a counternarrative and you're giving also counter spaces where people can come and be heard.

Then for the next layer, creating a landing place for when they come out is the best you can do, and letting them know that there is a landing place. So this is why we’re trying not to overly polarize, which is really difficult because one hates these people (laughs). And some of them have to be hated, the inner core, I’m not big into forgiveness of the inner core. But the sort of rank and file and fellow travelers, I think we have to try to keep a sense of what our shared values are, that there is another world outside that closed world because the cult is trying to close them off and make them hate you but you're trying to not have them close off and hate you. But it's not easy.

The other thing is to do with the bystander effect, standing up and making yourself visible and saying, “No, this is wrong,” to show the other people who are just going along but who know it's wrong but who are too frightened to stand up. What we know from the wonderful Asch lines experiments is that if there's a unanimous majority who agree with something obviously false, if one person stands up and breaks that unanimous majority, even if it's to say something also but differently false, that allows the other people to think their own thoughts.

Breaking the unanimity, even if you're not sure if you're right or not, is very important and that takes bravery because it's frightening to do that even if you're not physically threatened. So be loud, stand up in a crowd. There are all kinds of ways one does that. If you see someone being harassed, step in. If you hear people discussing something that you disagree with, speak up.

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Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images; Alexandra Stein courtesy Alexandra Stein.