This article, by the author of The Family. The people he is writing about are not ever going to be in the real world, and they are going to be a trouble to our country and our world as long as they live. I have to hope that not all of DT’s base are not like these. In fact, the ones I know are not. These people have enough money to be able to travel the country, attending his “rallies.” Oh, so scary. Not sane. But surely a small percentage of Americans. Surely?

“He’s the Chosen One to Run America”: Inside the Cult of Trump, His Rallies are Church and He is the Gospel, Vanity Fair.

The gospel of Thomas—the doubting one—does not, of course, reside with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in your King James. But then, Trump doesn’t read the Bible. He doesn’t need to. Rule books are for losers. Reading is for losers. The gospel of Trump, like that of Thomas—noncanonical, antiestablishment—is gnostic, a form of secret knowledge reserved for the faithful, a “truth” you must have the eyes to see in order to believe.

Gnosticism, which dates at least to the second century A.D., is the path Christianity did not take, its texts destroyed as heretical, its ideas mostly forgotten until the 1945 discovery in Egypt of 13 ancient books in a sealed clay jar. Or maybe not so much forgotten as woven over the centuries into countless conspiracy theories, the deep-seated belief that there exist truths they—there is always a they in gnosticism, from the bishops and bureaucrats of the early church, coastal elites of the ancient world, to the modern media peddling fake news—do not want us, the people, to perceive.

There’s something almost democratic about gnosticism, in its American distortion. “Recognize what is before your eyes,” the gospel of Thomas advises, “and that which is hidden will be revealed.” One needs no diplomas to know truth, no “data” contrived by “experts.” Knowledge lies not in scholarship or information but within, “the gut,” as Trump has long maintained, or “right here,” as he said more recently at one of his coronavirus briefings, tapping his temple to show us “the metric” by which he would know when it was safe for us to go outside, when we could gather again by the thousands to adore him.
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Every tweet, every misspelling, every typo, every strange capitalization—especially the capitalizations, says Dave—has meaning. “The truth is right there in what the media think are his mistakes. He doesn’t make mistakes.” The message of the shirt to Dave is: Study the layers. “Trump is known as a five-dimension chess player,” Dave says later. And he’s sending us clues. About the Democrats and Ukraine and his plans. “There are major operations going on,” Dave tells me months later, suggesting that Trump is using COVID-19 field hospitals as “a cover” to rescue children from sex trafficking.