The impulse to understand MAGA this way is owing in part to the efflorescence of stories about cults across pop culture. From Wild Wild Country’s account of the rise and fall of the self-styled free-sex guru Rajneesh for a generation of wealth-seeking believers in Reaganomics to The Vow’s portrayal of NXIVM’s transformation from corporate management seminar to sex-trafficking ring; from Warren Jeffs’s polygamous Latter-day Saints–offshoot commune in Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey to the charismatic hold of spiritual influencer Teal Swan in The Deep End, thirst for tales of charismatic leaders, secret rituals, and salacious scandals seems unquenchable. Between the major streaming platforms, Netflix, Hulu, Max, Disney+, and Prime, more than five dozen cult documentaries are currently available in a panoply of flavors: sex, UFO, meditation, doomsday, and on and on. We are in a billion-dollar cult culture boom.
This, in fact, is the real satisfaction of the cult narrative: the reinforcement of the fantasy that we who watch are different—better, smarter, and more equipped to hold power and influence—than those who believe. Having spent hours engrossed in the details of being in a cult, we imagine ourselves to have understood a dangerous phenomenon without ever having been subject to that danger. Not only might we glimpse that elusive Secret, we see the invisible wires and sleights of hand and, maybe most importantly, the way it all turns out. We already know that it is doomed. We are the new prophets, gifted with future sight.
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.
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.
Crafted to impress upon everyone who tunes in precisely what the price of straying outside the bounds of decorum and constraint is, cult media has inadvertently written a new coda. That final episode is the beginning of the story’s second life: the memes, the merch, the folklore, the obsession. Jonestown didn’t end with the Kool-Aid; it became a metaphor for not heeding caution. Manson went to prison but became a cultural icon. Stalin was embalmed, but his political blueprint persists—in India, in Turkey, in America. The cult documentary’s finale is just the opening act of its cultural immortality. Our hunger for the collapse of Trump’s movement isn’t just about justice—it’s about the thrill of witnessing a story we know how to consume. But history doesn’t follow scripts. Faith and loyalty are not so easily shaken. What appears to be the end of the story is, in fact, often a lesson against the calculus of consequences. Cults don’t disappear; they go viral. And the reckoning we’re waiting for? It might just be the prologue to something we don’t yet know how to fear. After all, 30 years after the fiery siege in Waco, the scene of the inferno out of which abandoned followers of David Koresh staggered blinkingly into federal custody, Donald Trump held the first official rally of his second presidential campaign there. One end, another beginning.
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