The Daily Beast Podcast - I Was in a Cult. This Is How I Know Trump is One

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

Dr. Steven Hassan, world-renowned cult expert and author of The Cult of Trump, joins the Beast’s Hugh Dougherty to unravel how Trump’s movement mirrors the classic architecture of a political cult, from manufactured grievances to the online ecosystems that keep followers locked in. Then, with recent Epstein materials resurfacing, they explore the contradictions, alliances, and unexplored vulnerabilities that continue to haunt Trump and his inner circle. Together, they connect the domestic chaos to the global actors who have spent decades studying and exploiting Trump’s psychology. As the crises converge, Hugh asks the question hanging over 2025: how long can Trumpism survive when the truth keeps breaking through? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

That's why Trump doesn't want the Epstein files to be discharged, because the reality is the lie was he was going to drain the swamp and reveal all these trafficking pedophiles. We should say that Trump has denied any wrongdoing at all, but what is impossible for him to deny is that he and Jeffrey Epstein were closely associated by colleague Michael Wolfe has detailed. and revealed tapes of Jeffrey Epstein saying that Donald Trump was his best friend. Welcome to the Daily Beast podcast. I'm Hugh Docherty. I'm executive editor of The Daily Beast. I'm delighted to be guest hosting. Don't worry, Joanna Coles will be back on the next episode of the Daily Beast podcast. If you need your Joanna Fix and who doesn't, you can go back and binge every episode of our brilliant podcast inside Trump's head, where she and the incomparable Michael Wolf venture into that dark place and extract everything. you need to know. We have been working hard on getting more brilliant guests for our podcast.

I want to thank everyone who supports us, especially those who've become members. It lets the Daily Beast do the independent journalism we all need now. To become a member, just click the join button on the YouTube page and you will get amazing access to even more features. It's because of all of you that have joined that we are able to bring you today's guest, Dr. Stephen Hassan. Dr. Hassan is a mental health professional. He's got a PhD in organizational development, and he is one of the world's greatest experts on cults. He's the author of four books about cults. It's one of those books that we've got so much to talk about.

It is very simply called The Cult of Trump. Dr. Hassan, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me here. The book came out in 2019. Many books fade in relevance, but this one just seems even more relevant if that's possible, and there's so much to talk about.

But I just want to start with your journey, because the reason that you are on here, and if it's a decades-long career as a cult expert, is frankly, because you were in one. I was a 19-year-old at Queens College back in 1974. Actually, the same month, Patty Hearst was physically abducted by a left-wing cult called the Symbionese Liberation Army,

and she had a personality change to become Tanya and became a bank robber. I got recruited into the Mooney's cult and became a right-wing fascist, believing Moon was the Messiah, and was told to drop out of college, quit my job, cut off from my family, and believe he was the greatest man in human history. And it was in 74 that they selected me, because they were redoing the leadership in America,

they had selected me to become a leader that I was groomed to help rule the world when the Moonies took over. And it was back in 74 that Moon said that we're going to infiltrate the U.S. government, that God hates democracy, he wants a theocracy to rule the world, and that when we take power in America, we'll amend the Constitution and make it a capital offense for people who don't follow the rules of the Moonies. And back then they were famous for mass weddings. Everybody remembers pictures of those mass weddings, right?

Yeah, people you know. didn't even know they you didn't even speak their language but you believe that god was choosing your perfect mate and you'd have sinless children so i was in the room hearing this and when i got deprogrammed after a near fatal van crash due to sleep deprivation and agreed to meet with former members to prove to my family i wasn't in a cult and i wasn't brainwashed it was there i learned about Chinese communist brainwashing, and my brain started questioning whether Moon really was the Messiah. And at the point I had my awakening moment when I realized Moon was a liar, and therefore he couldn't be the Messiah or a man of God or a trustworthy leader. I was like, how could I have

believed all this and recruited people into this? And so I started reading books on brainwashing by former military intelligence people who had studied Mao's thought reform programs and actually started contacting them because their books were helpful but my experience was so much more extreme than what they wrote about. Many people with your experience might just want to walk away from it and never engage in it or think about it again but you've actually made it a lifelong study. It wasn't my plan. I can tell you but I did feel really guilty for all the people I hurt, all the people I recruited in that I helped the Mooneys get a stronghold in the United States. So I felt responsible and I wanted to help people to get out. And because I had knowledge that most members didn't have access to the top leadership, I felt the responsibility.

And I was approached by a congressional subcommittee investigation that was, going on at that time looking into Korean CIA activities in the U.S. So I became a whistleblower and gave them all of Moon's private internal speeches about taking over the world. But it wasn't until Jonestown that it really shocked me because I knew I would have done what they did, giving cyanide lace flavor aid to children and such. when I saw so many dead people, dead Americans and an assassinated congressman, I was like, this is far bigger than the monies. I mean, one of the simplest questions I think that everybody has looking at this is, okay, what's a cult? And it's actually a really complicated series of conditions that you've broken down into four very distinct areas.

And that's where I wanted to get into the whole Donald Trump issue, because, A lot of people might look at this and say, well, hold on, 70-odd million people voted for Donald Trump. How can that be a cult? But as people now say in Gen Z, you've got the receipts, right? Where I've arrived after all these decades is to say there are cults that are ethical and benign and even productive, where you're really into someone or some ideology or some do-good group. I laugh and say I'm in the TEDx cult because I've done four, and I love to. I was struck reading your book that you said that it's technically Bruce Springsteen may be running a cult.

Yeah, or Taylor Swift. I mean, you can have fandoms right now, you know, as we're recording this, the World Series is happening. And people are like glued to the screen. But there's nothing, no one's been deceived, nobody's getting threatened, et cetera. I'm really just concerned about authoritarian mind control cults, which is considered a dissociative disorder or a disruption of identity. And the four areas are behavior control, information control, thought, and emotional control. And you can go to freedom of mind.com and download the list. When you ask me about 70 million Americans voting for Trump, I say China has a billion and a half. and I call them an authoritarian mind control cult because they control people's behavior,

information, thoughts, and emotions to make them dependent and obedient on the regime. So let's just break down. As you say, there's four elements, your bite model. Behavioral control, information control, thought control, emotional control. Clearly, everybody knows who Donald Trump is, right? And he does everything pretty much in public.

So can you just take us through behavior control Is Donald Trump capable of controlling people's behavior? How does that match onto your model? Because people say, I'm free, and it's all about freedom. The model shifted when the internet got created, and there was search engine optimization. Because if you're being fed a stream of influences on your cell phone, social media texts, or in regular media, it's going to shape your thinking, your beliefs, it's going to change you emotionally,

and those two things are going to influence how you behave. But critically, I would like to state categorically, human beings were not evolved to be online 10 hours a day. We are social beings to be in real life and the pandemic supercharged the mind control isolation piece. But people should be sleeping seven to nine hours a night. And people are on their screens before they go to sleep. I tell people stop looking at the screens an hour to two hours before you go to sleep.

Listen to music. Do something to get out your brain off the dope. dopamine addiction and attention addiction of the social media platforms. But coming back to the need for human beings to be open to learning, to be open to changing your mind, and to learn how to discern what's an ethical source of information and what is propaganda or disinformation. And one of the the theses of the cult of Trump is that there are bad actors. They want to destroy democracy.

They want to destroy faith in experts, faith in science, faith in democratic institution, create such polarization and alienation and estrangement that will make it easy for a takeover. What is it about Donald J. Trump that makes him a cult leader? Why is he the person that has been able to reach this status? So I wrote in my book that the origins for Trump was he was raised in a cult of Norman Vincent Peel, the power of positive thinking. And in that mindset, it mirrors these new epitholic reformation and prosperity ministers. Because Peel would say, if you believe it, 100% God.

God's going to manifest it, and therefore doubt is a sin. So never doubt your vision and your faith. You're writing the book that Trump was essentially taken there every week by his father to the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. But weirdly, subsequently, Trump actually mischaracterized the religion there, didn't he? He said that he was a Presbyterian, and they had to point out that, in fact, it's not a Presbyterian church. Yeah, not at all. Not at all.

But the thing is that he had a very unhappy childhood authoritarian parents who were racist and with a Nazi leaning. Roy Cohen was a major influence over him as well. He was groomed for years. I mean, and if you listen to people who did business with him who were stiff because he didn't pay the bills after they did work for him, one could say he had a culture.

of personality. He walked around with certainty and arrogance, and they literally created an image that Donald Trump was a successful businessman when he wasn't. He had bankruptcy after bankruptcy, and he got bailed out by the Russian mafia largely from his failures. He had managed never to become personally bankrupt, but corporately had a number of massive bankruptes. into the hundreds of millions. But the point is, is image control, information control, and people can get deceived. And how do they get deceived?

I was deceived by women flirting with me, giving me the impression they wanted to be my girlfriend and lying and saying they were students at Queens College, which they weren't, lying saying they weren't part of any religious group at all. So the point is you can be tricked step by step by step until you get hypnotized and indoctrinated into a belief system. And part of the indoctrination is they want to alienate you from family and friends. And what we're facing right now is this massive estrangement where almost everyone I talk to says, I have a family member or a friend who's become MAGA.

I don't recognize them. They've completely changed their value systems. And I try to argue with them, and they won't listen. And I say, don't do that. Thanksgiving is not far away. Christmas is coming up. There's a lot of people spending time with a lot of family members in the next few weeks. How do you deal with your MAGA uncle?

How do you deal with your MAGA cousin-in-law who's sitting on the other side of the turkey and doesn't seem to live in the same country as you do? The answer is that people need to take the time to learn about mind control cults. And when I was first asked my book, Agen, to write the book, The Cult of Trump, I said no, because it will alienate everybody who is believing in Trump. And he argued they won't read the book anyway, write the book for everyone else. and I thought long and hard, so I did that. But what people need to do now is they need to think about people they were close to, especially family and friends.

And most people that I talk to have blocked these people or not invited them for Thanksgiving, et cetera. One thing you mentioned was blocking on social media. And I think everyone of us knows some friend or relative or, relative of a friend or whatever who said, oh God, I just couldn't take uncle whatever, an aunt, whatever, I just blocked them. I just muted them. So then they're confronted in real life. What do you do? And we will be right back after these messages from our sponsors. And we are back talking about the cult of Trump. We need to make a massive effort to reach out to these people say I miss you I want you back in my life expect them to be angry at you you blocked me you

didn't invite me for the last three years to Thanksgiving and you apologize to the best of your ability be as sincere as possible and say I want a redo or I want to reboot and I'm sorry for things said and done but we're family and let's be together. Let's be in each other's life. And if it means not talking about politics, let's agree not to bring it up, but let's talk about our children, our grandchildren, our pets, our travel, vacations, et cetera. And if it does come up and we want to talk about it, let's agree on ground rules to talk respectfully, to not interrupt, to ask questions and be a good listener. and not try to persuade anybody. And the truth will out.

You know, it's like if something's legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny. And I'm open to reconsidering things. So I just broke one of your rules by trying to interrupt there. But I just, I just, I wanted to. We're human beings. Nobody's perfect. I interrupt too.

I catch myself and I apologize. Right? But the point is that I want the public to understand when you're brainwashed. Your real identity is still in your neurons in your brain. The real Steve was still there. I just had a Mooney brain that took over and wouldn't allow the real me to talk. The minute the real me could talk and I could think about what I was feeling and experiencing, the whole thing fell apart. And I woke up and I realized Moon was a liar and a cheat and a bad person. So people will leave, but we want them to leave with their face saving, not with I told you so, why didn't you listen to me, finger wagging. Just like we're in a crisis, we're family.

There are some 40 million people that are going to not have food benefits come November. how do you feel about that, that there are children not going to get food? So one of the things that you talk about is compartmentalizing information, and you describe it as insider versus outsider doctrines. But many of the things that obviously we are an intensely politicized society right now. And you mentioned people not getting SNAP, what's known as food stamps, but the supplementary nutritional assistance program, there are people on the MAGA side who would say that's Democrats' fault.

How do you deal with that when you're confronted with it? And I don't just mean that specifically, but that's often, you know, it's that, well, you talked about X. It's all the Democrats' fault. It's all the fault of Obama. It's the fault of Clinton. I mean, this kind of goes back a long way. But how do you get past that when you're the person trying to bring the temperature down?

What I've learned is what you never do if you want to help someone who's been brainwashed. You never want to attack the leader, the doctrine, or the policy head on. Why? Because it activates the cult identity to defend and think you're persecuting them and that you're evil. What works is talking about other groups that they would agree or bad. With MAGA people, it's talking about Chinese communist brainwashing. And what the criteria, like Robert Lifton's eight criteria of brainwashed. brainwashing in his 1961 book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, and asking what people

think of those eight criteria or pimps and traffickers and how they recruit and indoctrinate people to be sex slaves or labor slaves. And that opens the door to the person realizing there is such a thing as brainwashing. I think you're brainwashed by the Democrats. I'm not. But let's look at the models and use those to reality test. And the most effective technique is asking a good question to somebody who's in MAGA or somebody who's in an authoritarian group. Being patient, waiting for a response.

When the person gives the response, I recommend active listening, which means repeating back. So if I want to make sure I understood you, you said this and this and this, did I get it right? So the person really feels like you're paying attention to them. And then you ask a follow-up question and a follow-up question because what's going to help the person exit is themselves starting to reality test? How does this compare with lies told by pimps that they love you? And that's why they're making you sleep with 18 guys a day and get venereal diseases. Or the Chinese communists that they believe that the cause is more important than individual, you know, rights, etc. So, but if you know the person before they got into MAGA, you'll know what kinds of values they had.

So you want to always show photos, recall family trips, videos, to get the person reaccessing who they were before, and ask them, I'm curious, if you can go back in time to that period, what you would think if you were now supporting someone who is like giving billions of dollars to Argentina and moving an aircraft carrier. That's why Trump doesn't want the Epstein files to be discharged. That's why Mike Johnson isn't swearing in the 218th vote to discharge the Epstein files.

Because the reality is the lie was he was going to drain the swamp and reveal all of these trafficking pedophiles. pedophiles. We should say that Trump has denied any wrongdoing at all, but what is impossible for him to deny is that he and Jeffrey Epstein were closely associated. They hung out together, they danced together. Exactly. My colleague Michael Wolfe has detailed and revealed tapes of Jeffrey Epstein saying that Donald Trump was his best friend. He had 100 hours with Jeffrey Epstein, and Jeffrey's brother came out and said, of course, they were best friends. They were neighbors. And Galane Maxwell was a trafficker too, and they've already

started to make a deal with her moving her out of the high security prison she should be in as a destructive evil trafficker. There's two big events or two things I think it's kind of hard to work out. How does this, how does Trump manage to survive this cult thing, right? He's leading this cult, and as you say, he made use of the drain the swamp narrative and going, after pedophiles, and yet he has this ticking time bomb of the Epstein files. Right. How is it that he's able to not prevent these two things colliding? And why is it that lots of people outside go, well, this is going to be the end for him,

but it's now October and it's still not the end for him. Right. So the key is information control. If people, when I was a mooney, if people understood how to talk to me and ask questions, of me. I would have gotten out and I wouldn't have been in and helping the cult get a foot halt. But the key thing is information. And if you are in a silo and what's happening now online are profiles of us and we are getting barraged to reinforce our worldview and move and nudge our worldview to extremes through emotional manipulation.

I tell people, turn off the phone, learn about, like watch the documentary, the social dilemma, learn about how our attention is being manipulated and don't trust any one thing and be prepared to change your minds. And for me, I learned my lesson in 1976. you don't trust a pathological liar. You just don't because they'll lie. And Trump is told lie and lie. So asking a person who's a MAGA person, just to finish the thought, would you marry someone who you knew was a pathological liar? Would you enter into a business relationship?

If you ask a MAGA person, they'll say, of course not. And you say, I'm glad to hear you say that. But can I ask you a question? They'll be like, yeah. I'm really curious. How do you make sense of thinking it's okay to trust Donald Trump? Let's just talk about the people around him for a moment. And your own experience in this is fascinating because you were groomed to be a leader in the Moonies. Yes. Let's just take some examples. You named Pete Higgis. There's Stephen Miller, there's Susie Wiles.

There's Caroline Levitt. You know, there's a whole cast of characters around Trump. Are they consciously aware of what they are doing? Are they, are they, are they, in the cult? Are they aware of the cult? How do you position that? Well, they're definitely in the cult because they've sworn allegiance to Donald Trump over facts. And I can tell you as a Mooney leader, I was sleeping three to four hours a night. I was constantly kept busy. I was never on vacation. I never had a day off. I was isolated from family and friends. I didn't watch, read newspapers, magazines or watch TV. So I was in a bubble. And these days, people are walking around with a supercomputer that is mind controlling them because they're choosing which platforms to listen to,

which influencers to listen to. And so that's what's happening right now. And then there's a part of our brain as human beings. People need to understand we're social beings. We are not an island. And we're not rational. We're emotional beings who rationalize. And so if everybody is saying that a three-inch line is the same size as a four-inch line as Solomon Ash proved in his conformity experiments to fit in with what everyone else is saying, just so there's no dissonance in terms of approval. the heroic resistors are the ones that are like, no, that's not the same size. And then they're treated as an outcast.

There's something wrong with them. And truth will stand up to scrutiny if you are open to realizing you might have to change your mind about something. Can you raise a good question, right? Are the Democrats doing it all wrong? Yes. They're doing it all wrong. And I'm frustrated because I've been on endless. television shows, doing endless seminars, webinars, et cetera.

And I've yet to get to anyone in power that has manifested what I'm teaching. The closest I got was Jamie Raskin sat down with me for two hours. He said he read three of my books and my doctoral dissertation. And I said to him, Jamie, convene a congressional hearing. on Q&ON and conspiracy theories, we can have a panel and we can explain to the public. He tried to talk to his caucus and the Democrats and they weren't interested. So if you were giving Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer one bit of advice, what would you tell them to do right now, to do different? What should they do the next time they're in the Oval Office? Next time they're in the Oval Office. Well,

my thesis right now is that when Biden was in power I was saying we should declare a public health emergency we're under psychological warfare attack by enemies of democracy we should be doing inoculation programs to explain we should be teaching mental health professionals politicians media people

educators about brainwashing and mind control using my models based on military intelligence stuff. We should destigmatize bringing people out of the MAGA cult. And we have tens of millions of former cult members who have left. And there are many documentaries and podcasts. We should be amplifying their voices to say, it happened to me. I'm smart. I have two masters and a PhD, but they got me because I was arrogant and I didn't think I could be brainwashed, but there's life after cult. And we need to be having a vision of survival, of planetary survival. And I don't think having a black and white, us versus them, good versus evil, counter

is the way to go. What we want to do is have a positive vision that young people can get really invested in. And everyone should be learning how to talk to people who are in the MAGA group. Stop calling them names. I've been doing videos saying what ICE is doing is reprehensible. It's terrible. But we don't know who's behind the mask. Maybe they're ICE because they just need the job.

Or maybe they are a criminal. but instead of just yelling at them calling them fascists, you should be asking questions. How would you feel if that's your mother that's on the floor and someone has their knee on her? You know, I think what you're doing is something you're going to come to regret. I think would have a lot more long-term positive benefit.

I've been telling people talk to your family and friends who are in the military and ask them if you're asked to shoot, peaceful protesters on the streets of Chicago or Los Angeles, will you follow orders or will you say no, I'm sworn to follow the Constitution, and this is evil. Dr. Hassan, I just want to hold you there

because we have some messages from our sponsors. And we are back with Dr. Stephen Hassan, author of The Cult of Trump. You earlier raised the point that eventually these things end. every cult leader is time limited by death, frankly. But putting that aside, clearly Donald Trump cannot legally run for a third term. And whether he is time limited by old father time, or whether he's time limited by the Constitution, or whatever happens, there is an end point, right, at which there is no Donald Trump.

Yeah, I think he's ill. I don't think he's going to last that many years. And the question is, will people follow Vance? Teal put Vance in with Musk. etc. Will people follow Vance? And unfortunately when there's threat that we're going to track you

and if you say anything negative you're going to be thrown into detainment and no one will know where you are a lot of people start self-censoring. Final question, if you were in the Oval Office one-on-one with Donald Trump, what would you say to him?

Is he somebody that can be can be can his brain be cleansed or can he be brought out of this or is he beyond hope? What would you do? That's an interesting thought experiment. And I appreciate that it's very much a thought experiment. I'm assuming that although he may be watching, and if he is, we will put you in touch. But it seems unlikely he's going to invite you, I'm guessing. Of course. Well, I grew up 1.3 miles from Donald Trump in Flushing Queens. I grew up knowing he was a charlatan. He

was a womanizer. So it was a no-brainer that he was a malignant narcissist from the beginning. But I honestly can't imagine what I would say to him other than he would think that I was evil and would want me to make a public statement that I renounce my book. And he's a great guy and doing God's will. And I would say, fuck you over my dead body. that's it's an intriguing thought experiment

I wasn't expecting that ending there no I mean seriously what would I say to Sun Myung Moon when I was out I'd be like fuck you you're a charlatan you're a rapist you're evil

I'm out of here go fuck yourself that's what I would say because that's how that's my feelings and it's my intellectual belief. And then he would kill me.

And I'd be like happy. I'd say the shama and know that I've done my work. Well, Stephen, thank you for sharing your expertise, your experience with us. It's been a fascinating conversation. I suspect some people are going to be having fascinating conversations around the Thanksgiving table

and not the not too distant future. I hope that they are able to take some lessons from what you've said. And we might have you back to see how people have done. Yeah, thank you. I'd be interested to hear people's experience. Thank you, Q. I'm sorry, I interrupted you.

See, I interrupted you. You've broken your own rules. Bad boy. No, I just want to say, we really need to create a 20, 30 year, 50 year plan for how we're going to, how we want the world to be. and I believe in peace and love. I'm a love guy.

So we need each other. There's no doubt that we need more peace and love. And thank you for joining us and look forward to speaking again. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Well, that was an amazing journey around the mind of Trump, the world of Trump, and indeed the Thanksgiving table. I just want to remind everyone that Dr. Hassan's book,

The Cult of Trump, is available at all good bookstores and online. And you can find them online himself at freedom of mind.com. Joanna will be back for the next episode. Thank you to everyone who has been listening and watching and being very tolerant of my accent, even when you don't understand it fully. Every time I sit in for Joanna, I always mention that I am Scottish, proudly so,

and I do want to thank everyone who has commented on it and apologies to those who still don't quite understand it. I am doing my best. Thank you to everyone who comments. Thank you to everyone who supports our independent journalism. You can keep up with every twist and turn of these crazy times at DailyBeast.com. Joanna will be back with the next edition of the Daily Beast podcast.

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