Professor Nez’s Post

Inside the Cult of Trump: Last January I had the opportunity to host Michael Cohen, former attorney for Donald Trump, on my Podcast where we delved into his personal experiences and insights regarding his time within the Cult of Trump. Cohen shared candidly about how he became deeply enmeshed in Trump's world, revealing the intense and often manipulative environment that demanded absolute loyalty. Cohen confessed that during his tenure, he was "knee-deep" in a culture of unwavering devotion to Trump. He admitted to lying and engaging in unethical practices to protect Trump, actions he now deeply regrets. He described how he admired Trump tremendously and was driven by a sense of duty to defend him at all costs, often violating his own moral compass in the process. Cohen’s experiences vividly illustrated the dynamics outlined in my BITE model— Behavior control was evident in the strict expectations and directives from Trump. Information was tightly regulated, ensuring that only narratives favorable to Trump were propagated. Thought control was maintained through a constant reinforcement of loyalty. Emotional control was exerted by playing on fears and admiration to keep Cohen and others in line. Cohen’s testimony underscores the broader issue of undue influence within political spheres, drawing parallels to more traditionally recognized cults. His revelations highlight the psychological manipulation and coercive tactics used to maintain control and loyalty among Trump’s inner circle! If you want to learn more about the Cult of Trump comment *TRUMP* below!

As Chris Rock said, "The thing I have a problem with is Selective Outrage." I have always been a fan of Joe Biden. His character. His priorities. His scrappiness. His use of Champ. Especially relative to Donald Trump. Plus he has a strong bench. For me, this is enough. I did not want to expose my three-year-old to Donald Trump, so we have not watched the debate yet. But there is no new information that would modify my decision because even in the worst of worst cases, the outcomes are better under a moderate Democratic platform. The fact that the entire reaction of the world is to point the finger at Joe is stunning to me. Is he fit? Do you recall all the disqualifiers we knew about Donald Trump in 2016? How the hell is the man even on the stage? If debate performance is what we care about I know a lot of people who could out-debate Trump. Is debate performance what we are solving for? (Note also the logic trap: Trumps keeps promising to make America great again even though he had his chance and we are definitely NOT great.) The fact that people like Bill Ackman are finding themselves absolved is equally confusing. The media lies! He says. My God smart man, apply the same logic to your candidate of choice. My main takeaway now is that everyone is having a tantrum for attention. And they want it, as Chris Rock says, by playing the victim. Americans are whining because Joe Biden is "too old" even though he is a man of character surrounded by people of character. When did golf start counting as evidence of sprightliness in red states? The French are whining and saying it is because Emmanuel Macron is too what...Centrist and effective? Guess too much integrity is also a problem. At this point, I am not let down by our leaders but the shallowness of the behavior of citizens. Wake up. Stop being rationalizing victims. Stop being shallow. #WakeUp #Shallow #CR II

The people behind the people This point needs to be made about age. For years, look at someone like Dianne Feinstein. She wasn’t making decisions. People under her were making them for her, including people having power of attorney. The President (and other elected officials) are essentially federal and state CEOs. They set a framework, they hire, but other people run a lot of the day-to-day. You hear the most about Biden, but I bet Biden makes — at most — 7 to 10 decisions a day, if that. He has entire teams and departments of people who are really doing stuff. What matters to a lot of discourse is the optics, and the optics of an old fuddy-duddy stumbling over names is bad. But is that same guy the one making the decisions? No. And Trump wouldn’t be either, per se. (The only difference with Trump might be that his personality seems more abrasive than Biden, and he only trusts those who have preached long-term loyalty to him.)

When Donald Trump re-claims the Presidency this November, all would be wise to realize that 2026 will be the 250th anniversary of both the United States of America (7/4/1776) and capitalism (3/9/1776), and playing the Trump card here means that this shared "coincidental" anniversary is actually the legal marriage of these two entities such that "President" is no longer the appropriate moniker for the "leader of the free world". Donald Trump is, at most, the officially licensed brand mascot of the United States of AMERICA (fully capitalized), and the mascot's job is to figurehead-or-fails the future of Earth. If Donald Trump insists on playing the Christian wildcard with the most gullible and ill-informed classes of consumer-citizens, if Donald Trump continues to use the Jesus Christ imagery and allegory to further his power as our mascot, then the world of words needs a new portmanteau to describe this merger of roles: Donald Trump will be our "christmascot". And just as Ronald McDonald is completely irrelevant to the business model of McDonalds, our orange clown #christmascot is a deliberate distraction designed to sell nouns: people, places, things, ideas, and corporations. Now that we understand Donald Trump's role as our licensed christmascot, to the extent that you object to any of this reality, we may begin to undermine Donald Trump's goals, wants, needs, and remaining sanity. Again, a new word is in order, and I suggest "anti-christmascot" as the obvious choice. The only moral-ethical way for Donald Trump to lead is as a bizarro version of example whereby those who oppose his spotlight live opposite to Trump's core characteristics. We must embrace true Christian virtue, universal love, strengthen interpersonal relationships, and re-discover communication as the means to greater unity. Yes, indeed, the #antichristmascot movement, the formal opposition to Donald Trump's function as authoritarian christmascot, must coalesce to embrace and study the most literal teachings of Jesus Christ. Donald Trump is allergic to virtue, and the cognitive dissonance generated by this new irony is likely our best chance to divorce our representative democracy from the hostile takeover by the capital-corporate form.

#YouWAntTheTruth #CAnYouHandleTheTruth #BeToldTheTruth by #RobertDeNiro #StopTheTRump #DumpTRump The following is most of the text of the #DeNiro Speech! For the Full Speech Click on the following Link!!! https://lnkd.in/dzK7NtGC Robert De Niro’s full statement on Trump. Please read and let me know your thoughts: I’ve spent a lot of time studying bad men.  I’ve examined their characteristics, their mannerisms, the utter banality of their cruelty. Yet there’s something different about Donald Trump. When I look at him, I don’t see a bad man. Truly. I see an evil one. Over the years, I’ve met gangsters here and there. This guy tries to be one, but he can’t quite pull it off. There’s such a thing as “honor among thieves.” Yes, even criminals usually have a sense of right and wrong.  Whether they do the right thing or not is a different story — but — they have a moral code, however warped. Donald Trump does not. He’s a wannabe tough guy with no morals or ethics. No sense of right or wrong. No regard for anyone but himself — not the people he was supposed to lead and protect, not the people he does business with, not the people who follow him, blindly and loyally, not even the people who consider themselves his “friends.” He has contempt for all of them. We New Yorkers got to know him over the years that he poisoned the atmosphere and littered our city with monuments to his ego.  We knew first hand that this was someone who should never be considered for leadership.  We tried to warn the world in 2016. The repercussions of his turbulent presidency divided America and rattled New York City beyond imagination.  Remember how we were jolted by crisis in early 2020, as a virus swept the world. We lived with Donald Trump’s bombastic behavior every day on the national stage, and we suffered as we saw our neighbors piling up in body bags. The man who was supposed to protect this country put it in peril, because of his recklessness and impulsiveness. It was like an abusive father ruling the family by fear and violent behavior.  That was the consequence of New York’s warning getting ignored. Next time, we know it will be worse. Make no mistake: the twice-impeached, 4-time indicted Donald Trump is still a fool. But we can’t let our fellow Americans write him off like one. Evil thrives in the shadow of dismissive mockery, which is why we must take the danger of Donald Trump very seriously. So today we issue another warning. From this place where Abraham Lincoln spoke — right here in the beating heart of New York — to the rest of America: This is our last chance. Democracy won’t survive the return of a wannabe dictator. And it won’t overcome evil if we are divided. For the Full Speech Click on thei following Link!!! https://lnkd.in/dzK7NtGC

Here's the insidious lying behind Criminal 45 and the MAGA Cult: "Cue the March 27, 2024 decision of the California State Bar that Trump's former lawyer, John Eastman, should be disbarred for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Paying consequences for actions taken on behalf of the leader, and seeing the punishments faced by their peers (indictments, mug shots all over social media, as happened to Mark Meadows, who was named a co-conspirator of Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election) does not mean the enablers will disengage from the cult. Instead, those in legal trouble share the leader's desperation for a collective return to power and redouble their efforts to make that happen so that he can issue pardons and executive orders to make their troubles vanish for good.  That’s why I conclude in my essay on Meadows: “Although there is a shade of humiliation, there is no visible remorse. Like so many others in the GOP, Meadows would likely do it all again if he knew it would succeed.” And keep in mind the power of conviction to deflate such cults. Here is an interview I did in April 2022 with Politico magazine. Conviction means the strongman is exposed as not untouchable, and his aura of invincibility and specialness is shattered as he is held to the same standards as anyone else. In the words of Judge Tanya Chutkan, Trump's status as a former president did not give him "the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens." No other politician has been able to construct such a powerful personality cult while operating in a democracy with an open media environment. Berlusconi came close, but he owned all of Italy's private television networks while he was in office, as well as the major television advertising companies, and he was able to engineer the dismissal of critics from state television. We can laugh at personality cults and the ridiculous-seeming images of macho leaders they generate, but they are key to the success of strongmen, and can be devastating aids to the weakening and destruction of democracies." RUTH BEN-GHIAT MAR 28

SMOKE AND MIRRORS AND NOISE Excerpt " - The truth of Donald Trump is very far from the myth. Yes, he is shameless. Yes, he is surrounded by a cult of personality. But neither has made him invulnerable to the blows of political combat. - Trump did not shrug off the debacle of the “Access Hollywood” tape; his campaign came as close as it ever would to total collapse. He owes his survival to the ironclad partisanship of his Republican allies; without it, he would have sunk under the many waves of anger and condemnation. In the wake of his apologetics for the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in the summer of 2017, his already low standing crashed even further as voters turned away in disgust. _ The obvious rejoinder here is that what Trump lost in support from the general public he gained in an even tighter bond with his political base, which relished its shared sense of persecution by a Sanhedrin of liberal elites and deep-state operatives. And because the loudest segments of his base tend to occupy social positions tied to notions of the heartland as well as images of popular Americana (farmers, hard hats, pickup trucks), there is a tendency to treat this base as more significant than it is — as though it stood as the only authentic representative of the American people, bestowing Trump with the essence of the nation itself." Media helped non stop, giving a microphone to any Trump supporter who had something outrageous and stupid to say while agitating the "nazis" are coming. The toxic Christians are a minority, more than ever but have been transformed into a force, a wave, a trend, a political phenomenon. https://lnkd.in/eMT7bbUG

On this the 248th Fourth of July, I want to remind you that, outside of the political process, outside of the enforced narcissism of social media, outside of the AI angst and the paranoid political discourse regarding the upcoming election, you are a human being.  Your life has value, far more value than any political party, political brand, political campaign.  Your life is important.  It has meaning. I also want to remind you that you are far more powerful than you may think.  You have the power of the word.  As Richard Weaver wrote, you will create the culture you inhabit through the communication you create.  You have the resources to do so no matter how divided and perverse communication becomes online and in politics. You are powerful.  You are invaluable. So, on this celebration of American independence, I want you to get up now.  I want all of you to get up out of your chairs.  I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, “You know what, it’s going to be okay.  Whoever is president next year, it’s going to be okay.  Joe Biden cannot end democracy as we know it.  Donald Trump cannot end democracy as we know it.  We collectively are the only people who can end democracy as we know it.  We can end it by continuing to crush each other under the weight of hateful rhetoric, name-calling, demonizing, listening to the devil within us and repeating the lies that tear and destroy.  But if we will just stop, if we will choose to treat each other with reason and civility no matter how our beliefs may differ, we can hold onto that precious democracy.  We can then realize that we are invaluable human beings . . . and so is our political opponent.  And, in this, we can make it all okay.  I choose to treat others with reason and civility.  I choose to be one who makes it all okay.  So, you know what, it’s going to be okay.”