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When Political Loyalty Becomes Idolatry

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Tampa, Florida

Cult Behavior

Anyone who has watched a Trump rally on the evening news knows the picture. Red hats packed shoulder to shoulder in the bleachers. Flags the size of bedsheets snapping off truck beds in the parking lot. T-shirts with his face printed larger than the American flag behind it.

None of that proves anything about the person wearing it. A hat is a hat. Plenty of people bought one in 2016 because they were tired of being talked down to, and some never gave it another thought. I’m not here to read minds under brims. I want to know one thing, and I’ll ask it at the end: what would it take?

But symbols tell you where a person has decided to belong. Over ten years the MAGA brand did something most party brands never manage: it stopped being a platform and became a self. People don’t say they agree with Trump on tariffs. They say they are MAGA. That is identity talk, and identity takes criticism badly, because criticism of the leader lands as criticism of you.

The rallies feed it. Same slogans, same grievances, same enemies, and the same promise that one man stands between you and ruin. Trump said it plainly at CPAC on March 4, 2023, at the Gaylord resort in National Harbor, Maryland: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Read that again. He is describing a bond between himself and the room. He didn’t promise courts or Congress would deliver justice. He promised he was the justice.

Now the fair objection. Every movement has symbols and loud crowds. If enthusiasm alone made a cult, every college football Saturday would qualify. I concede it.

So the hats and chants can’t be the test. The test is what happens when loyalty to the man collides with duty to the office. That collision has a date.

On January 6, 2021, Mike Pence had a ceremonial job: preside over the count of electoral votes. Trump and his lawyers spent weeks pressing him to reject Biden electors, a power the vice president does not have. Pence refused. At 2:24 p.m., with rioters already inside the Capitol, Trump tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.” Some in the crowd chanted for the vice president to hang. Agents on Pence’s security detail, the House committee later revealed, called their families to say goodbye. Pence later told ABC News it doesn’t take courage to break the law; it takes courage to uphold it.

I swore my oath for 23 years in the Air Force. The Constitution comes first in it. The President appears later, and the orders I owed him came bound to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Allegiance went to the document. Pence kept that order of priority under a mob’s chant, and his own party’s base made him a traitor for it.

Thirteen months later, the institutions picked a side. On February 4, 2022, at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City, the Republican National Committee censured Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the only two Republicans on the House committee investigating the attack. The resolution accused them of joining a “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” The party didn’t censure anyone for the assault on the Capitol. It censured the two members who asked questions about it. That August, Wyoming Republicans threw Cheney out in a primary for the Trump-endorsed challenger.

The pattern didn’t stop with Cheney. After CISA called the 2020 vote the most secure in American history, Trump fired its director, Chris Krebs, over Twitter. A few months into his second term, ProPublica reports, Homeland Security appointees asked CISA to secretly obtain a voting machine, hack it, and send the findings to the White House without warning the manufacturer. Staff said it couldn’t be done, and the appointees dropped it. When a contractor examining seized voting machines found no evidence for the 2020 claims, its CEO said the government stopped renewing the contract. The intelligence office says the work simply ended on schedule.

That is what I mean by idolatry. I don’t mean a religion, and I don’t mean every voter in a red hat kneels at an altar. I mean elevating a fallible man above the principles his followers say they hold: law and order, and the Constitution. You can see it in choices, not in hearts. Excusing conduct you would condemn in anyone else. Rejecting evidence because of who presented it. Punishing the person who tells the truth while protecting the person who lied.

The research draws the same line. Political scientists Benjamin Goldsmith and Lars Moen, writing in Political Psychology in 2025, separated a subset of strongly devoted Trump followers from ordinary Trump voters. That devoted core shared distinct personality traits, especially high self-discipline, and the authors tied their loyalty to Trump’s own pitch that he alone can fix it. Their study does not say every Trump voter belongs to a cult. It says devotion to the man and support for a party are measurably different things. That difference is my whole argument.

So here is the standard, and I’d apply it to any movement, including my own. Can supporters accept reliable criticism of their leader? Can they accept a legitimate defeat after Trump and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits over 2020 and won a favorable ruling in one? Can they accept consequences for his conduct, the same consequences they would demand for an opponent? A movement that clears those three bars is politics. One that fails them has handed its judgment to a single man, and democratic accountability doesn’t survive that trade.

Democracy runs on the idea that nobody is too big to lose, including the candidate on your hat.

So I’ll ask the question I promised. What would Donald Trump have to do to lose your support? Name it. Then ask whether you’d hold a Democrat to that same line, or a lower one.

If you can’t name it, the hat isn’t the problem. The allegiance is.

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