I didn’t know that the Trump family name was originally Drumpf. That’s why Phil Torres, writing on Salon, calls the new religion worshipping him “Drumpfism.”
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Torres (the author of “The End: What Science and Religion Tells Us About the Apocalypse”) lays out the similarities between the reasons religious people have faith in God or Jesus with why they flock to Trump.
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Torres explains the central reason for Trump’s appeal to his zealous and unwaveringly faithful supporters by referring to the Bible:
“Have faith in God [i.e., Trump] and don’t ask too many questions.” In a conversation with his disciple Thomas, of “doubting Thomas” fame, Jesus says: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
Trump hasn’t gone out of his way to prove his Christian bonafides. Forget his mispronouncing Second Corinthians, his joke about his own book being his second favorite book after the Bible should have provoked outrage among believers. Whether he’s an unquestioned evangelical like Cruz doesn’t matter. Nobody has responded to Cruz like he’s the Messiah. In fact, Trump doesn’t want to be seen as THE Christian Messiah, he wants people to respond to him as a new decidedly secular god who answers to no heavenly abstraction.
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Put another way, Trump does not want to be a messiah, a mere messenger from a higher power. He wants to be THE higher power. If true, then it would be impossible for him to believe in God. Short of Trump shedding his orange skin like in a horror movie, and literally morphing into the most terrifying looking Satan on live television, his believers will stand with him no matter what his true belief is.
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Torres suggests that in addition to Trump having a narcissistic personality disorder, he also has a Messiah Complex. This isn’t a recognized psychiatric disorder, but is sometimes seen in delusional paranoid schizophrenics. In fact, when I was college one of my professors wrote The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, a study of three patients at a state hospital in Michigan. Trump is hardly a delusional paranoid.
Trump is a calculating but impulsive narcissist…. He doesn’t moderate what he says because he is seeminglly addicted to the crack-like rush he gets from the momentary adoration he gets from his crowds when they scream out their cheers than the effects his over-the-top rhetoric will have in the general election.
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Back in July, News Corpse on Daily Kos in The Immaculate Birther also referred to Trump as having a Messiah complex:
“If there's one thing that has been made clear, it's that The Donald doesn't need the forgiveness of God or anyone else. That's because he is his own deity with omnipotent powers to solve every problem bigger and better than any mere mortals. And just as he remains certain that he will win the votes of the Latinos he has insulted, and the veterans he has demeaned, he is equally certain that evangelicals and other faith-based voters will flock to his holiness despite his heresy, profanity, and obvious Messiah complex. By the way, these are the same people who have been calling President Obama the Anti-Christ for seven years.” News Corpse, Daily Kos, “The Immaculate Birther.”
Cropped image from Daily Kos article “The Immaculate Birther.”
He knows he can tell a bald-faced lie and it won’t matter because so many of supporters think he is infallible.
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When called out by apolitical websites like PoliticFacts, Snopes, or even Time Magazine for his story about General Pershing and bullets dipped in pigs blood, it doesn’t matter to him because knows his supporters don’t care, and also knows they are not critical thinkers.
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It’s too late for Cruz to put get a message from his God warning about the Biblical warning that the Apocalypse will be preceded by false prophets. He may not come out and say that Trump is the Anti-Christ, but as a desperate “Hail Mary” play, he could try it.
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As has been written from various similar points of view, Trump appeals to the need in so many people to have faith in an authoritative leader who promises to solve not only their problems, but problems they didn’t even know were their problems.
