B (23:32)
So in one of the cults I was in, the leader, his name was Charles Anderson, clearly started to have neurological events while giving his sermons every morning. So he'd be in the midst of a stream of consciousness ramble, and he would suddenly break off mid sentence and his eyes would go glassy. And it was anyone's guess how long he would pause for. Usually he would snap back with a kind of sucking mouth noise and he wouldn't pick up where he left off. But he had the presence of mind, or at least the muscle memory to turn his potentially embarrassing moment into. Into a bit like, he'd say, he'd be slurring a bit, but he'd say, wow, well, Jesus almost took me out that time, right? Or something like that. He would. He would refer to some sort of mystical occurrence and Trump has some of that recovery instinct. Like, you can see it when he fucks up a word and then part of his brain catches it and he'll pretend he making a pun. Now, at the time, I thought that these mini Fugue states meant that he had paused his breath like some yogi in deep meditation, and the spit had gathered. And that's what the sucking was, right? I mean, that's the story I told myself. He also wore dentures, so that must have been a factor. But one morning, it went a lot farther, and I can't remember which side of his face it was. But we all saw his shutdown verbally coincide with a slumping of his cheek and lip and the flesh around his eyes. And that time, he was out for a long time. And I think two of the henchmen, disciples had to help him out of his chair and guide him back to his room. I think he had a foot drop as well on the same side. But then with. Here's what I want to say is that with the disciples, this very human and recognizable thing happened. Like they were helping him, but also over their shoulders, they were looking out over the gathering, giving us expressions of reassurance, like, everything's fine. He's okay. Trust in God, trust in the plan. And it's a very normal thing that happens in families, I think, in that moment of fear and crisis, especially if there are kids in the room. And you want to make sure that their distress doesn't add to your own tasks, Right? Like, this is disturbing enough. I don't want to have to comfort you as well. Right. So I consider that a form of almost empathetic strategic lying, especially because you know, you can't hide the truth forever. Like, you're going to have to tell the kids sometime. But disciples have to hide the truth forever because they not only have to maintain the fiction of the peerless leader, they have to protect their own roles in the system he set up and dominates, and that they benefit from. And so the moment holds an opportunity for the disciple who is most able to reassure the crowd. Because their ability to reassure is linked to how well it seems they know the leader and his ways. So when I watch Caroline leave it, cover herself in shit day after day after day to deny what's happening in front of our eyes, it's not just deference to Trump, I think. I think there's also the possibility that she's made a bet that showing herself to be a close confidant and nursemaid will grow her stock within a movement that's threatening to collapse. But back to this guy's fugue states. When I was witnessing them, I had the sense of that something was very wrong. But as I suggested above, I rationalized it away by believing that his spiritual Insight was, in fact, shining through in these moments of vacancy that he was like too much for this body and this world. And I was almost able to hold two things at once. That he was dying in front of our eyes, but that his spirit was also glowing brighter. That's how much of a dualist I could be in my own brain at that time. I think I was less credulous than a lot of people in that room who believed that he was getting downloads from the spirit realm, because that illusion can't last for everyone for very long. But the fact that it does last is an artifact and echo of the leader's now vanished charisma. Like, people have to adjust to the fact that he no longer has it, and it takes a while. The people in that room were trained over years to not only tolerate but celebrate an increasingly incoherent leader. And so the fugue state, it didn't come from nowhere, neither did the response to it. The fugue state was preceded by the sermons getting longer, the language more garbled, the moods getting more extreme. But because the context was that he was trying to wake us all up spiritually, the pretext was that he had to get more and more extreme in his tactics. And I think what's crucial about this related to Trump is that there's a time lag that begins to develop and extend between whatever people realize is going wrong and their willingness to intervene. And on the administrative level, the cabinet, they're definitely protecting their skins. So they're not incentivized to intervene or name what's happening. But the lower down the power ladder you go, the more you see, I believe, this time lag effect of training that comes from the charismatic feedback loop. Like, he held your attention in such a way, and so you gave it to him, him, and you made it make sense for yourself. So, years later, after that experience I had, I was doing journalism on groups like this, and I hear from Leslie Hayes, who was one of Chogyam Trungpa's seven spiritual wives in the Shambhala Buddhist community in Boulder, Colorado. But it was, you know, had a number of places throughout the country and the world. And he also would regularly vacate, just disappear, go blank. He was a terminal alcoholic. Likely he had untreated neurological conditions. And then he would come back after his fugue state and say that he'd been visiting the Rigdon kings of ancient Tibet in their celestial palace. And he pulled off shit like that for years. But as I interviewed Leslie, and then I interviewed a woman named Julie Salter, who is the personal attendant of Swami Vishnu Devananda of the Sivananda Yoga Ashram. I got the picture of what devotees in the inner circle like this end up doing. So Vishnu Devananda was also very ill. He also likely narcissistic personality disorder, had devolved into paralysis via a stroke. There are similar stories that come from the inner circles of Osho, who had a massive substance use issue and was perpetually disoriented. And then also Yogi Bhajan, who's who spent a lot of time, time in his final years, very sick. But the women disciples in attendance that I got to know had to do incredibly gross and humiliating things to keep the leader going. A lot of that was toilet related. But at the same time, they have to look good and they have to maintain the veneer. And so they work so hard at this that they wind up being the benef, the beneficent faces of the culture. Right? So it wasn't just Julie's labor, Leslie's labor, you know, other people's labor, their attention that was exploited. It was also their, like, service, their virtuousness, their faith in the ideals that, you know, the guru couldn't uphold and for all we know, never believed in himself. So it was the affect of these servants, their visible devotion. And so I keep this in mind when I consider what Leave it has to maintain. And I also think it might be a factor in the performativity of the other women caregivers around him. There's a lot going on that people are saying about the Mar a Lago cosmetic surgery look. And yes, it points to Trump's fetish for beauty pageants and his misogyny. But if I'm right about this comparison between guru devotees and Trump's inner circle, there's a good chance, I think, that Leave it. And Kristi Noem and Guilfoyle and Melania and Laura are also putting it on because they know the old man is dependent on the distractive power of their own charm. Now, last year, around the time that Trump held that town hall where he gave up on his speech altogether, and he just stood there djing opera and show tunes from his iPad. And Kristi Noem, poor Kristi, was, was on stage trying to emcee the crowd into singing along, but she has, like no talent as any kind of like choir director or anything like that. It was really kind of of awful cringe to watch. I had psychoanalyst Dan Shaw on the show to talk about what his final ego or brain implosion would look like not only for him, but for his followers. Now, Shaw is the guy who came up with a framework of traumatic narcissism to understand the cult leader. And this is a defensive identity formed when a child must attune to a caregiver's unmet emotional needs to survive. It becomes traumatizing when this identity is imposed on others, which coerces them to mirror the narcissist's fragile self and deny their separate subjectivity and their emotional reality altogether. What Shaw predicted with Trump was an escalation of defensive behaviors intended to protect a kind of unstable delusion of omnipotence. Because this delusion shields the narcissist from catastrophic feelings of being impotent. Small weakness, nothing. They will go to extreme lengths to prevent its collapse. So according to Shaw, admitting to any vulnerability would be psychologically catastrophic. They have to increase their paranoia and rage and find more malicious enemies and seek out more adoration. And it will never satisfy them. It doesn't matter how many Nobel prizes you get gifted by bootlickers. Like, every act of deference will just breed resentment and bitterness. Like he will hold you in contempt for kissing your ass. After a while, the traumatizing narcissist has to exploit existing crises as well. You know, like the price of eggs. Or he has to invent crises to maintain a sense of control and relevance and to build one on top of the other. So the stolen election goes to January 6, goes to claims of persecution, goes to the pardons, goes to hiring leaders into ice because of migrant rapists. And then all resistance, legal or moral, will just harden that position until it cracks.
