Trump’s Town Hall DJ love-in stumped a lot of folks. From the conspirituality angle, however, there’s something familiar about this improvised ritual. Because the world we cover is strewn with the wreckage of charismatic patriarchs who bleed their followers dry in the closed-loop system of cultic dynamics.
When leaders like Trump get to the end of the line, all that’s left is pure affect. They have exhausted themselves in the efforts of self-aggrandizement. They have nothing left to say because they’ve said it a 1000 times. They’re all out of stories. They might even be bored of their own bullshit. Underslept or dysregulated by chaotic schedules, they may not be sure where they are. They’re beset by enemies, ill and in cognitive decline, but can’t admit it. And when they start to feel overwhelmed by their followers' pathetic—in their view—neediness, they will reach for any help they can get in maintaining their emotional dominance.
What October 14 showed us is that in these moments, Trump’s go-to resource is canned music, and, without his own iPad at the ready, a DJ handler who can spin the tracks and support his reverie of relief and control.
Show Notes
Trump holds town hall in Pennsylvania suburbs with focus on economy
How Media Outlets Covered Trump’s Musical Town Hall
Donald Trump is DJing weekly at Mar-a-Lago, plays Broadway songs and Celine Dion from his iPad, report says
DJ T: How Trump controls the music at Mar-a-Lago
Twitter thread
152: Tulsi Gabbard’s Krishna Consciousness (w/Nitai Joseph)
PLAYING FOR OSHO 1989 Introduction – Chinmaya Dunster
Patted Down by India’s Hugging Saint
The Soft Nationalism of Amma, India’s Hugging Saint
37: Guru Jagat Cultjacks Kundalini Yoga (w/Philip Deslippe & Stacie Stukin)
Letter to Sogyal Rinpoche from current and ex-Rigpa members details abuse allegations
Trump's bizarre music session reignites questions about his mental acuity
Brief: Trump’s Impending Ego Implosion (w/ Daniel Shaw)
Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation
Sex abuse allegations surround L.A. Buddhist teacher
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Hello, everyone.
Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
Let's not do any more questions.
Let's just listen to music.
Let's make it into our music.
Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?
Isn't that beautiful, though?
We played that in Butler, Pennsylvania.
We had a moment of silence, and then we had the bells of Notre Dame go off, and then we had a great...
Well, he doesn't want to hear any questions, actually, because questions, even from flunkies, along with medical emergencies in the crowd, interrupt his narcissistic trance state, which depends on a continuous feed of adoration from his followers.
Much better to fill the arena with music, which will keep that self-reverie going while also increasing his mystique and magnetism.
I'm Matthew Remski.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
The Brief today is Trump Temple Playlist, and it expands on a Twitter thread I published on October 14th after our candidate, thrown off by the collapse of two followers in the heat of the Oaks, Pennsylvania arena, turned his town hall event into a veneration DJ hour facilitated by his favorite songs, beginning with Ave Maria, sung by the late Luciano Pavarotti.
Pavarotti's estate has sent a cease and desist letter.
As the melody soared, Trump closed his eyes, rocked back on his heels, and raised his hands to that nipple level he usually uses to emphasize his talking points.
He appeared to be very demurely and mindfully conducting the music, but also maybe feeling it come out of his chest?
His MC, Governor Kristi Noem, seemed as paralyzed by his reverie as she was by her outfit and perma-smile.
Some followers in the VIP rows behind him on stage looked bewildered, but others figured out how to join the vibe.
Amidst an endless parade of absurd and disorienting moments in Trump's cursed political arc, this one seemed to stump the political journal class.
At the New York Times, Michael Gold called the episode odd.
Surreal, said the New Republic.
NPR and the Washington Post and the Huffington Post called it bizarre.
And Twitter users captioned clips of the event as weird and insane.
And a lot of this commentary, I think, failed to connect this moment to the typical Thursday night dinner party at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump is his own DJ, spinning Broadway tunes and Celine Dion from Spotify on an iPad patched to a sound system so loud it prevents conversation, spinning Broadway tunes and Celine Dion from Spotify on an iPad patched to a sound system so loud it In that sense, this session simply merged his stump life with his home life.
But here at Conspirituality Podcast, we see something else recognizable in this improvised ritual.
Because the world we cover is strewn with the wreckage of charismatic patriarchs who bleed their followers dry in the closed-loop system of cultic dynamics.
When leaders like Trump get to the end of the line, their world is stripped down to pure affect.
They have exhausted themselves in the efforts of self-aggrandizement, and they may have nothing left to say because they've said it a thousand times.
They're all out of stories.
They might even be bored of their own bullshit.
They might be underslept or dysregulated by chaotic schedules.
They're not sure where they are.
They feel beset by enemies.
They feel ill and in cognitive decline, but they can't admit it.
But most importantly, when they start to feel overwhelmed by their followers' pathetic, in their view, neediness, they will reach for any help they can get in maintaining their emotional dominance.
And what October 14th showed us is that in these moments, Trump's go-to resource is canned music and, without his own iPad at the ready, a DJ handler who can spin the tracks.
But we'll listen to a couple of songs if you want, and that's okay with me.
I like it.
So we'll do that.
We'll do those songs that we had mentioned, Justin.
And if Justin doesn't get it right, he gets fired.
But at this point, I think it'll take a lot for Trump to fire Justin Caporale, his event manager, not just because he's been a faithful servant since 2016 and was pivotal in organizing the January 6th riot, and he also provided some of the muscle for Trump's Arlington Cemetery stunt.
Trump has plenty of feckless goons, but by having his fingertips on the Rally Music iPad, Justin may have the keys to the last remaining inner sanctum where Trump can maintain a sense of safety and dominance, this feeling of being at home.
Justin's special skill is that he can keep the trance state of Trump's self-regard and the devotion of his followers going.
Now, obviously, this usage of music is not unique.
Music is used always and everywhere for affect conditioning to prime audiences for receptivity.
Kamala Harris rallies are wall-to-wall music as well, and so are church services.
Many of the gurus and cult leaders we study use music during their sermons and liturgies to generate contagious feelings of ecstasy and possibility.
And in the self-help world, just think of any Tony Robbins event.
Music diminishes cynicism and irony.
It tones down the reasoning brain.
It encourages right hemisphere wonder and awe.
And it gives that relief that comes from a sense of timelessness.
And maybe you've noticed that Trump often defaults to a grammar and intonation that suggests that he's always looking back on things that are yet to happen, but will, of course, turn out his way.
We're going to win.
We're going to win.
It'll be so beautiful.
He'll say things like that.
It's the sound of nostalgic prophecy.
Or consider that opening clip I played when he pinged the moment of silence during his triumphant return to Butler, Pennsylvania, where he survived that attempt on his life.
It's as if he's speaking of his own resurrection in the far distant past and how it restored the world.
The music is always at hand to facilitate his bounce into eternity.
When Trump gapped out on Monday night, all Justin Caporale had to do was to pull tracks from the existing campaign playlist that followers will hear while waiting for him to arrive at events, often hours late.
But at the town hall, in a stump context...
Trump crossed a threshold.
Usually when he drifts into the maudlin portion of his rallies, he has to catch himself and remind followers that it's not all over yet, that they still have to get out and vote, but not so much this time.
He really did simply fade to music using the playlist not just as a priming device for his speech or an outro after delivering the goods, but as a surrogate for his presence.
And in what I would argue is a sign of narcissistic exhaustion, he allowed the music to stand in for the effort of the raw emotional dominance that is his sole product.
It was like a Jesus-take-the-wheel moment for the guy who thinks he's Jesus.
So, in my journalism and research on cultic groups, I've studied a lot of charismatic leaders who step right up to this line of full musical abandonment.
Kundalini Yoga founder and serial rapist and fraudster Yogi Bhajan was a huge fan of using hypnotic music to heighten the impact of his BS teaching.
Jim Jones was a huge music guy.
He promoted the People's Temple Choir as a recruitment arm.
The Hare Krishna movement famously used chanting to generate altered states that could facilitate compliance with the demands for mindless labor.
And some breakaway sects of the Krishna movement, including the one that Tulsi Gabbard grew up in in Hawaii, which was called the Science of Identity, led by the ex-Hare Krishna adept Chris Butler, who was famous for his homophobic and Islamophobic views.
They remained faithful to the Krishna reliance on chanting.
Sogyal Lakar, formerly known as Sogyal Rinpoche, the famed author of the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, who was later found by an independent investigation to have been abusing and defrauding his students, would often close out an all-day-and-night ritual with a long and weird DJ would often close out an all-day-and-night ritual with a long and weird often with his girlfriends, singing or dancing near him, while, of course, the whole group was exhausted.
Amma, the hugging saint of India, who was alleged to abuse her inner circle while cozying up to Hindu nationalists, rakes in millions with all-night chanting festivals in airport hotels around the world.
And at Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, music was integral to generating the trance states that bonded Osho's followers to him.
A former musician for the group wrote, quote, It is impossible for me to separate playing music for Osho from being with Osho.
And that's really important because what music does in these situations is that it collapses the space between the leader and the follower in scenes that look unbearably awkward from the outside but feel altogether different from within.
That collapsed space is how we get the following testimony collected by NBC reporters who asked the Oaks Town Hall attendees what they thought of the unique evening.
I loved it, said Jay Bauer, who was in attendance from Montgomery County.
I felt like I was sitting in a room with him.
Just him.
I could have been there another hour, another two hours.
I was just great spending time with the president.
But he wasn't spending time with the president, was he?
He was spending time getting his emotional cavities filled up with Pavarotti, Sinead O'Connor, Axl Rose, Leonard Cohen, and the village people.
For Jay, Trump accomplished what all charismatics aspire to.
He created a dyadic, intimate feeling.
He became the sound, the voice in the follower's head.
Now, I've heard countless members of charismatic groups say just exactly this.
He was speaking directly and only to me.
It's a really common experience in these scenarios, and it's perfectly depicted, if you saw this film, Jane Campion's great 1999 movie, Holy Smoke, with Kate Winslet as Ruth, the young spiritual seeker, off to India.
And then Harvey Keitel as this macho cult deprogrammer that is hired by her family to get her out of the yoga group that she's been recruited into.
During the recruitment scene, you see how a moment of eye contact between Ruth and the guru sends her into a tunnel vision hallucination of rapture.
But with Jay, Trump is able to accomplish something that every exhausted charismatic would envy.
Because of the music, he doesn't even have to really be there or paying attention.
He can disappear into his own pleasure.
And he can do that because he assumes that that pleasure will make his power and soul transparent and accessible to his followers.
So this is where I'll interject just one bit of nerdy cult theory psychoanalysis from Friend of the Pod and recent guest Dan Shaw.
He's a cult survivor, like myself, and now a psychotherapist in New York State, who I just interviewed for a brief called Trump's Impending Ego Implosion, so I'll link to that in the show notes.
Dan, more than anyone else I know, has explored the inner life of the Trumpian charismatic cultic figure.
And here's a key passage from his excellent book, Traumatic Narcissism, Relational Systems of Subjugation, with apologies to longtime listeners who will know this quote quite well.
What I love about Shaw's description is that it really cuts to the heart of the fragility and ache that drives a person like Trump.
How he can never express vulnerability.
How he must maintain an image of himself as radiant and triumphant always.
And that the reason for this is not any real sense of competence or achievement, but a terrible, intolerable, narcissistic wound emanating from deep in childhood that has left him with an unstoppable need to dominate.
With this knowledge on board, the scene in the Oaks Arena could never simply be weird or bizarre or surreal.
Rather, it's part of an ongoing quest for power and relief disguised as love and magnanimity.
Shaw writes, The narcissist in real life, a myth in his own mind, is so well defended against his developmental trauma, so skillful a disavower of the dependency and inadequacy that is so shameful to him that he creates a delusional world in which he is a superior so skillful a disavower of the dependency and inadequacy that is so shameful to him that he creates a delusional But to remain persuaded of his own perfection, he uses significant others whom he can subjugate.
These spouses, siblings, children, or followers of the inflated narcissist strive anxiously to be what the narcissist wants them to be for fear of being banished from his exalted presence.
He is compelled to use those who depend on him to serve as hosts for his own disavowed and projected dependency, which for him signifies profound inadequacy and is laden with shame and humiliation.
To the extent that he succeeds in keeping inadequacy and dependency external, he can sustain in his internal world his delusions of shame-free, self-sufficient superiority.
And just to follow up on Shaw's analysis before moving on, one commenter on my thread offered this under the handle Walter Torres, and I thought that it was quite apt.
Among the last things that a narcissist tolerates is other people's suffering.
That two people fell ill and caused his rally to be interrupted was an intolerable affront to his being the only one.
He reacted to that with an extended, primitive basking in the wonder of him.
So there's Justin playing Sinead O'Connor for Trump.
And of course, Trump is imagining O'Connor singing back to him.
And of course, her surviving family has issued a cease and desist.
So we see this parasitic Trumpian music reflex in the charismatic guru sphere generally.
But in my personal experience as someone who has recovered from high demand groups, I can give you an example of what the end game can look like when the guru who relies on the musical crutch starts to collapse.
The leader of one group I was in for three years was an old door-to-door salesman named Charles Anderson who got a hold of an early copy of a book called A Course in Miracles in the late 1970s and he used it along with the Alcoholics Anonymous big book and a ton of meetings to recover from the alcoholism he developed after coming home from the war in the Pacific.
Now, his story was that he had been one of the first Marines on the ground at Nagasaki after the bomb, but he was such an outrageous liar, I don't really have any idea if that was true.
By the time I fell into his Endeavor Academy in the Wisconsin Dells, he was in his late 70s, and he was capable of incredible verbal diarrhea.
Perhaps this might remind you of somebody.
Now, to give you a sense of what that was like, I'll run just a minute and 20 seconds of Anderson from one of the hundreds of videos he produced in his final years.
Oh, did I mention he was obsessed with his self-image and whether he performed well on TV? Now, believe me, playing this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.
But I'm going to suck it up because part of my point with this episode is to empathize with those Trump followers who get sucked in by absolute gibberish.
Because I've been there.
I can help you change your mind, but I can't change it for you.
I can give you the light in the expression of my certainty that I am an occupation within our objective association, that if you will allow me through this message of your wholeness, I can show you that indeed you are perfect as God created you.
And that it is a memory.
And that the lesson that we are now concluding has offered you a meditation in a remembrance that you are perfect and whole.
What a joyful half hour this has been for us, huh?
You keep up the practice.
Never mind the world out there.
You find that security within your own heart and mind.
That's what we'll begin to share.
Our love for each other.
I love you more than anything in the universe.
I'll do anything to bring about a memory that we share together, that this time lasted but a moment in our minds, and that we are in fact back in heaven together.
I'll be seeing you in just a moment.
Remember, God goes with us wherever we go.
God bless us, everyone.
Okay.
Jesus Christ.
Okay, so first of all, he talks about the joyful half hour, but he actually says that at minute 49, which might remind you of someone.
And that schmaltzy music rising at the end, that was pirated off the internet and then pasted in by devotee and production man Mitch, who was also his event manager and sermon DJ. Every day, Mitch took up his station in a little open-air AV booth at the back of the meeting room,
and Anderson would punctuate his lessons and aphorisms with call-outs for specific tunes, and Mitch would roll them into the presentation with really skillful crossfades, and Anderson would sit back in his Lazy Boy and sip a can of Coke and close his eyes and conduct the air.
When I first got there, I didn't know what I was supposed to do during those moments, but watching everyone else's reaction clued me into how I was meant to respond.
And if you watch that row of rallygoers behind Trump on the 14th in the Oaks Arena, you can see the same mixture of uncertainty and, oh well, I guess this is what we're doing now.
And strangely, there was a lot of overlap between Anderson's lists and Trump's, especially in the Broadway zone.
Anderson favored some deeper cuts into big band, jazz, and blues.
He wasn't racist to the core like Trump is, but he was one of those dudes who was born back in the 1920s who thought that singing along with Al Jolson brought him closer to black people.
Now, for those of you who might wonder whether this comparison breaks down on the level of content, because, you know, really, what is there in common between A Course in Miracles and selling stakes or tuition at a fake university or beating the drum of fascist grievances?
I want to point out that with Charismatics, the content is never the point.
It's always about affect and emotional bonding, and any content that can provide the context or excuse for it will work.
The fact that they don't care about the content but need to fill that emotional space begins to explain why so many charismatic figures are plagiarists.
In Trump's case, that cashes out to pirating music and ripping up countless cease and desist letters from the artists he's ripping off.
Okay, so logistics.
Anderson maintained a Trump campaign-like schedule of daily two-hour sermons every morning.
In the afternoons, he would retire to his quarters and take meetings with various flunkies who, and this is very Trump-like, they never seemed to know what his instructions meant.
Over the years, he increasingly relied on Mitch to fill the room with emotional overwhelm whenever he gapped out.
By the end of my time in Anderson's sphere, he had a shrinking repertoire of melted talking points.
Most of them were just quotes from A Course in Miracles.
He also had a raft of jealous invective he'd throw out against Marianne Williamson, who he thought was a hack and very stupid and a loser.
What the hell does she know about Jesus, he would say.
She's asleep for crying out loud.
Sound familiar?
Now, because there was never any substance to his shtick, and perhaps because he was bored of it all anyway, he never really struggled to remember details that were slipping away.
He just turned to the music.
He just called on Mitch.
And then even more Mitch was needed.
Even more music was played when he started gapping out more regularly and for longer.
Looking back, I wouldn't be surprised if all those mini-catatonias were evidence of neurological trouble brewing.
But the self-justifying logic of the group was so dexterous that we were encouraged to believe that he was going into and out of mystical communion.
And I would bet that if you went back and found Jay, quoted above as loving the feeling of spending time with Trump alone, and you asked him, so what's going on when Trump seems to gap out or, you know, go into a reverie?
He might say something similar.
He's holding so much in mind.
There's so much he has to do.
It's not easy playing 5D chess.
So here we arrive at the question of what happens when the leader continues to lose his faculties.
How long will it take for true devotees to recognize what's happening?
Paradoxically, the less the leader is able to do, the more slack the group has to take up.
And you can even see this on the Trump managerial level of Kristi Noem and Justin Caporale trying to keep the train on the tracks.
But on the level of purist emotionality...
There may also be an inverse relationship between Trump's debilitation and his followers' fervor.
They will compensate as he decompensates, and that's how the energy that keeps them both safe will stay stable.
The truth about Anderson, and I suspect about Trump, is that being a charismatic is exhausting, because it flows from an eternal pit of emptiness into the insatiable bellies of followers.
On one level, the leader wants to contain and consume his followers, but in the end, his followers consume him with their intolerable needs.
I left Endeavor Academy about six years before Charles Anderson died of a stroke.
Let me hear that music, please.
Everyone, let's thank President Trump.
God bless you.
Let's send President Trump back to the White House.
In another coincidence, I do have to note that Time to Say Goodbye was actually one of Anderson's favorite Gap Out songs as well.
I'm gonna finish up here with a few loose ends about media and followers and their attachments.
The media stuff first.
It's not just songs that these guys can turn to to outsource their emotional dominance.
Leaders also use movies or television shows.
Bikram Chowdhury famously keeps students up all night watching Bollywood films and hinting that they contain esoteric messages.
Marshall Applewhite loved to watch sci-fi movies and Star Trek episodes as his Heaven's Gate folks waited for the comet.
Charles Anderson was obsessed with the Matrix movies, believing that they were written about him, and he was always expecting a call from CNN to interview him about his backstory as the real Neo.
That call, he imagined, would come from Ted Turner himself, who would also offer our group our own network to spread the message.
I think that sometimes the movie fixation carries a clue.
A lot of people have noted Trump's pinging of Hannibal Lecter.
He's kind of obsessive about it.
And they've speculated that he's confused over the word asylum.
He's mingling that into his anti-immigrant discourse.
But I'm more inclined to think that he's actually identifying with a powerful villain who can consume flesh with impunity, whose name invokes dominance.
And I say this because the affect of the music may not give him all he needs.
The leader who is hollowed out by his own excesses and disowned shame may also need to co-opt the personalities of other charismatics to absorb them and be larger than them, to have them embody power, especially when he feels collapsed.
Trump's celebrity fetish points to this generally.
Loving Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example, means wanting to devour and contain him, and probably Sarah Brightman, too.
The drive is to absorb the celebrity, but also to digest and synthesize them along with the other celebrities he consumes.
And what could be more perfect for this than Spotify?
Now, what about the followers?
The first thing we should all remember is that they're not a monolith.
And this is why, as a journalist, I use the language of cult pretty carefully.
To use the word cultist, for example, as a slur really doesn't do anything to communicate to those ensnared.
It usually backfires.
But more importantly, I think it can blind the accuser to many nuances and contradictions.
For instance, cultic dynamics are not a bug.
They're a feature and logical outcome of capitalism.
There are always precipitating conditions for recruitment.
Situational vulnerability, economic emiseration, lack of healthcare, the failures of the neoliberal state, the general trust crisis.
Cult accusations can also run cover for more normalized forms of irrationality and abuse in the dominant culture.
In other words, Trump can be useful to power...
In that he makes the conventional cruelties of the liberal center seem sane.
Now all that said, I do think that cult studies provides some good heuristics for looking at charismatic influence.
But unlike some popular experts, I don't think Trump is heading up a cult in the clinical sense because people come and go.
he doesn't really control their behavior.
My focus has been on the effects of an intense parasocial relationship.
And in that sphere, some followers walked out of that Oaks event thinking that he was just demented.
Some left feeling confused, but then others surely participated in the feedback loop of charisma.
And with regard to those devotees, it's worth keeping a few things in mind.
As I mentioned, where others see dementia, they have probably digested the non sequiturs and catatonic flashes as signs of mystical awareness that enhance their own trance states.
At a certain point, they are no longer there for the politics, if they were ever there for the politics in the first place.
And that's why you can't reason with that follower any more than an interviewer can break Trump's twisted flow.
Invoking critical thinking or social norms will not only feel smug in that circumstance, it will feel like another language or reality altogether.
But even worse, it will be felt as an assault on that cocoon of pleasure and intimacy.
So, how do you connect or reconnect with someone swept up in this wave?
Well, don't make fun of them on Twitter, for starters, because it will backfire.
Whatever road they took to get into his sphere, it wasn't a good one or a kind one, and disgust, mockery, or cruelty will not bring them out.
You can direct your ire and invective at the MAGA operatives who exist to exploit these people, but The only real answer from the high demand group recovery literature is the re-establishment of stable and secure relationships through shared activities and projects like, say, real community building.
But this takes a long time.
It depends on pre-existing relationships and resources, and it involves forgiveness, patience, and forbearance, which are all gifts of resilience and maybe even grace that may not be accessible to everyone.
You should recognize, too, that whatever has kept you safe from such entrapment may be some kind of privilege you haven't yet realized you have.
And again, I'll look in the mirror here saying, I get it.
I was there.
I'm no better than any of these people.
Okay, I'm going to wrap this up by trying to redeem the Leonard Cohen entry on Trump's playlist because Cohen's a little bit close to my heart.
Now, his estate has also sent the Trump campaign a cease and desist letter.
This is according to a post on Rufus Wainwright's Instagram.
It was Wainwright's plaintive cover of Hallelujah that Justin spun up for the event.
I mean, first of all, I think it's hilarious that Trump is fixated on Hallelujah, which is a song that could only spotlight his own decrepit kingship.
And, by the way, it also alludes to how a powerful woman that he wants to grab by the pussy or beat in an election destroys his strength by shaving his head.
In considering how to close this out, part of me wanted to go with, I've seen the future baby and its murder.
But I think there's enough stress already, and so I'll go with this from a 1995 PBS film called The United States of Poetry.
Here's Leonard Cohen reciting a verse from Democracy Is Coming to the USA. I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean.
I love the country, but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right.
I'm just staying home tonight.
Getting lost in that hopeless little scream.
And I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay.
I'm junk, but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet.
Democracy is coming to the USA. Sail on.
Sail on, O mighty ship of state.
To the shores of need, past the reefs of greed, through the squalls of hate.
Sail on.
Thanks for listening, everyone.
Keep safe.
Don't make fun of people in bad places or people who've been led astray.
