The Cult of Trump

Psychologically speaking, there is a fundamental difference between someone getting excited about an idea or philosophy (regardless of whether the idea/philosophy is rational or not, and whether it is moral or not), and getting excited about an individual "leader" who is seeking power.

Either one, or both combined, can result in tyranny, when authoritarian power is involved. For example, all the good Nazis were proclaiming, "Heil, Hitler!" and not "Heil this particular philosophical/political set of beliefs!" Likewise with Mao in China, and with the control freaks who have ruled in North Korea: the people were taught to adore and worship the individuals at the top of the power structure, in addition to the communist political theory they espoused.

And, while a bad idea can certainly be the basis of a tyrannical regime, a bad person is usually even more significant. It is a distinctly submissive, weak mindset that is attracted to the idea of a certain person getting their hands on power, in order to (supposedly) "save the day" for his loyal and obedient subjects. Such a mindset is necessarily authoritarian, and necessarily "beta": to be excited about someone having power over you, as well as over everyone else--to have some "strongman" to save and protect you from whatever dangers or injustices you fear.

That is what makes it so ironic that so many Trump supporters pretend to be "alpha," talk as if they are tough and independent, all while playing right into the "cult of personality" game, and trying to appoint an authoritarian master over everyone, including themselves. And in this case, because Trump has no consistent or coherent political philosophy, his followers can't even pretend that it's really an idea they like, aside from whatever particular messenger is delivering it at the moment.

No, the Trump-worship is not philosophical at all, as the guy has nothing even vaguely resembling a philosophy (unless you call delusional self-worship a "philosophy"), and has already flip-flopped on all sorts of ideas, positions, promises and agendas. As such, those who are still zealously cheering for Big Daddy Trump to fix everything are very much demonstrating their own insecurities, fears, mental dependency, and intellectual and moral weakness, while desperately looking to some outside "authority" to take care of them and protect them--precisely the mindset that every tyranny feeds off of.

(P.S. This was also true, to a large degree, about the people who blindly cheered for Obama, but even then their enthusiasm--however misguided--was less about Obama as a person having power, and more about the ideas that he was trying to sell to his followers. In other words, many Trump supporters manage to be even more blindly sycophantic than Obama supporters.)