Hi Folks,
Obviously, I haven’t been blogging lately, but I started listening to Disloyal on Audibles and feel compelled to share quotes from it. Cohen’s description of his intoxication with the tRump cult sounds familiar.
He describes “obsession” and “worship,” saying the pull was “…physical, emotional, not quite spiritual but a deep longing that only tRump filled for me … around tRump I felt excited, alive, like he possessed the only urgent truth, the chance for my salvation and success in life.”
… tRump’s antic, he wrote, “seemed mystical,” calling himself, “… a junkie who needed a fix.”
At one point he described when daddy donny trotted him through a throng of adoring Apprentice fans, saying, “…the entire spectacle had been staged for my benefit… it was part of a performance meant to draw me into Trump’s centrifuge … precisely the way a con man draws a mule… into his world….”
Cohen says tRump “tRump seems to inhabit a different reality…” and was offering that reality to him, “…all I had to do was do what I was told with out question. I lept at it. “
He characterizes himself as an “acolyte … a willing participant in a fantasy that heightened my senses and my sense of self.”
Eventually … describes himself, “falling under Trump’s spell…” to the point that ” … I had not only bullied a perfect stranger … but I did it with gusto and utter lack of conscience. Filled with pride, I didn’t wonder what lay ahead or what other moral and ethical and ultimately other criminal boundaries I would cross. Nor did I consider that Trump was testing my fealty and submissiveness the way a gang leader assesses a new recruit, giving the wannabe small crimes to commit to see if he will act without question or concern for his own well being. Trump was like a mafia don. … I wanted to be his solider in the worst way and I was ready to pass any test in my path.”
When it came to birth-erism, tRump’s obsessive & racists attacks on Barack Obama, Cohen says, ” … I didn’t just passively NOT protest tRump’s transparently false accusations against Obama, I actively, rabidly, incessantly, insistently repeated the lies and innuendo, knowing in my heart that it was wrong, but unable to stop myself … THAT IS WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO LOSE CONTROL OF YOUR MIND. YOU ACTUALLY GIVE UP YOUR COMMON SENSE, SENSE of DECENCY, SENSITIVITY, even your GRIP ON REALITY. It was like HAVING a MENTAL ILLNESS …the fact that I DEPARTED REALITY in my desire to PLEASE the BOSS meant that I really and truly had TAKEN LEAVE OF MY SENSES…. I had convinced myself that I was in on the joke with the boss, in truth, the real joke was on me.”
Ouch. He also says that his wife and children begged him to stop working for tRump. “But I wouldn’t listen. I gradually gave up control of my life to tRump.”
We see that every sycophant in the tRump orbit acting the same way. If it looks like a cult and quacks like a cult, it’s a cult.