Magician, Guru, Demagogue?
- garylachman8
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
The following is an excerpt from my book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump (2018). It's taken from the chapter "Gurus and Demagogues," in which I look at some similarities shared among magicians, gurus, and demagoues. We can say that while the magician casts a spell on one person, and a guru over a cult, it is the demagogue whose smoke and mirrors captivate an entire nation. Current events suggest that I may have been more prescient than I would have liked to have been. But then, nobody listens to Casssandras.
Looking at these various characters, where does Trump fit in? Is he a guru, a demagogue, or both? Much that has been written about Trump suggests that he is a Right Man. He is not known to admit to being wrong and has said that he never apologizes. As he told the talk show host Jimmy Fallon, “I will apologize in the distant future if I am ever wrong.”[i] His reaction to criticism is generally aggressive. As a colleague remarked, “Trump’s style was to lash out when things weren’t going well.”[ii] Much of his ire is directed at the press. In the 1980s, Spy magazine took aim at Trump and put him in their pillory several times, calling him among other things one of the “Most Embarrassing New Yorkers.” Their worst insult was that he was a “short-fingered vulgarian.” When Trump’s The Art of the Deal appeared, he sent Spy a copy, with his fingers circled in gold on the cover. Inside was a note: “If you hit me, I will hit you back a hundred times harder,” a philosophy he learned from his lawyer and role model Roy Cohn. Cohn himself had cut his teeth in the 1950s as a protégé of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Communist conspiracy paranoia that gripped America then.[iii]
This is a common theme with Trump: he knew how to hold a grudge. This came out during a series of motivational lectures he gave at seminars hosted by the self-help guru Anthony Robbins. He told the crowd that paranoia was crucial to success. “You have to realize that people are very vicious,” he said. “When a person screws you, screw them back fifteen times harder.”[iv]
It was advice he took himself. When Fortune magazine’s assessment of Trump’s wealth disagreed with his own, he inundated their office with dozens of telephone complaints. When New York magazine criticized one of his buildings, he wrote to the critic, calling him a loser and bad dresser, an insult he used on more than one occasion. A New York Times columnist received a copy of her criticism with her face circled and annotated “The Face of a Dog,” a rebuke that would have pleased Crowley.[v] When the Daily News ran a story about Trump cutting ahead of the line at an Aspen ski lift, Trump said whoever told them was a “motherfucking liar” and that he would “beat the fucking shit out of” him.[vi]
Journalists were not the only ones to witness Trump’s wrath. Colleagues were on the receiving end too, and were often humiliated in public because of some perceived fault, much as Ayn Rand did with backsliding Collectivists. When he fired his first wife Ivana from running one of his casinos, he added to the insult by berating her before the staff for crying[vii]. When a contractor told him they’d be behind schedule on some building, Trump kicked a chair across the room. During divorce proceedings with Ivana, Trump was so outraged at a proposed settlement that he told the judge he was “full of shit” and stormed out.[viii]
Trump’s “Rightness” came out in his treatment of his ex-wives. He forced Marla Maples to quash a book she had written about their relationship and prevented Ivana from giving any “revealing” interviews.[ix] Like many who want to create reality, Trump needed to control the story and he was determined to “break” those who didn’t bend to his will.[x] “My general attitude, all my life,” he says, “has been to fight back hard.”[xi]
His tendency to rage started early. He was known as a bully in school and had little regard for others. On one occasion, builder and bully appeared together. Ignoring his protestations, Trump once glued his younger brother’s building blocks together, because he liked what he had made with them.[xii] As he liked to say years later, he built to last. Apropos of this, we might mention that with Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, Trump seems to revel in gigantomania, “the creation of abnormally large works,” something associated with totalitarian societies. Trump, we know, likes to think big, and so did Hitler, who told his architect Albert Speer that he would erect buildings for him that had not been made for millennia.[xiii] Trump once said that what he created was the closest thing in modern times to anything like the palace of Versailles. Trump Tower, symbol of his success, has an almost religious significance for him. “Through some blend of design, materials, location, promotion, luck and timing, Trump Tower took on a mystical aura.” Walking through the atrium, he said, “is a transporting experience.”[xiv] “Look up, look up,” he says in Crippled America, “and you’ll see the Trump building rising skyward. I’ve done things nobody else has done!”[xv]
Like most charismatic leaders, Trump the showman prefers addressing crowds to individuals and he has no talent for small talk. He is at his best before an audience where his talent for creating reality or, as he calls it, “truthful hyperbole,” can shine. This came through during his years promoting pro wrestling, itself a very profitable kind of unreality. As one of his co-promoters said, “he knew how to read a crowd and manipulate them.”[xvi] Yet like other demagogues and gurus, Trump’s love of an audience and his effect on them—his obsessions with television ratings is well known—leaves him stuck at Maslow’s “self-esteem” level, perpetually needing the esteem of others. At the end of Crippled America, his plan for making America great again, where most authors have a paragraph about themselves, Trump has fourteen pages. In them, like a tyrant of old, he trumpets his many accomplishments. One can’t help but wonder: is he trying to convince others that “there’s nobody like me,” or himself?[xvii]
Like chaos magicians and postmodernists, Trump is playful with reality, a characteristic that others label more straightforwardly as “bullshitting.” As his biographer Wayne Barrett wrote, Trump “was born with bullshit capacities beyond what you and I could possibly imagine.”
This has even been confirmed academically. The Princeton University professor of moral philosophy, Harry G. Frankfurt, is a bullshit expert, having written On Bullshit, a philosophical analysis of the part it plays in modern life. In Time magazine, Frankfurt wrote that Trump’s eyebrow-raising tweets and other public statements, which are “neither well-informed nor especially intelligent,” are not examples of his lying but of his bullshitting. The difference between a liar and a bullshitter, Frankfurt writes, is that “the liar asserts something which he himself believes to be false,” and thereby “misrepresents what he takes to be the truth.” The bullshitter “is not constrained by any consideration of what may or may not be true.” He is indifferent to that. “His goal is not to report facts” but to “shape the beliefs and attitudes of his listeners in a certain way.”[xviii] Where the liar knows the truth and respects it—he does not want to get caught in his lie—the bullshitter couldn’t care less about it. He isn’t interested in the truth, which for him is in the eye of the beholder, as beauty was for Keats. He is interested in the effect his bullshit has on his audience. In other words, like positive thinking and chaos magick, in what works.
If we remember Norman Vincent Peale’s belief that “attitudes are more important than facts,” and chaos magick’s aim to escape our existing “cognitive habits”—not to mention Hitler’s power to release his followers from the “limitations of all conventional restraint”—we can, I think, see a connection between Trump’s “bullshit” and much of what we have been considering so far. If we bring in postmodernism’s rejection of any notion of an “objective” truth—all truth for it being strictly relative—we can see why Trump is the “post-truth alternate fact” patron saint par excellence. For chaos magick and postmodernism, whether something is true or false simply no longer matters. Truth or falsehood are beliefs which we can take on or put off as need be. This is why confronting Trump or his followers with proof of his mistakes, inaccuracies, and downright lies has so far had little effect. Pointing out that Trump is bullshitting makes no difference. He knows he is. He is doing it on purpose and has done so throughout his career. For him it is “truthful hyperbole,” what he calls “an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.”[xix]
Sometimes Trump’s hyperboles slide into magic, or at least illusion, or, as chaos magick has it, “glamour,” a show. When the board of directors of Holiday Inn asked to see what work was being done on a project that had stalled, Trump arranged for his construction team to pretend to work, with a digger clawing up tons of earth and dumping it on the other side of the site.[xx] The board saw what they wanted to see and were duly impressed; Trump got their approval. Like all good illusionists, confidence tricksters, and demagogues, Trump knows how to read his audience. It is a trait indispensable for his success and gave him a leg up on his competition. “My leverage,” he writes, “came from confirming an impression they were already predisposed to believe,” something demagogues make much use of. [xxi] Hitler, Mussolini, and other charismatic leaders were successful because they convinced their listeners that what they already felt about the state of things was right; they only confirmed this. Illusionists do much the same.
It may be difficult to see Trump as a guru, yet his many self-help books aim at showing readers how they too can be winners like Trump. His philosophy of success is not that far distant from advice one can find in other positive thinking tracts of the “prosperity gospel” stamp. Fundamental is a clear idea of what you want and persistence in pursuing it. “One of the keys to thinking big,” he tells his readers, is “total focus.” He calls it “controlled neurosis,” a quality he found in other successful men. “They’re obsessive, driven, single-minded . . . almost maniacal,” but it all goes into the work. It is “great when it comes to getting what you want.”[xxii] It is also important to present a powerful image, to conjure a “glamour” of success. “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,” and Trump’s job is to tell them it is. They will do the rest. He conveys this message by surrounding himself with symbols of the fantasy life he is selling.
In doing this he has had some help from two personalities or identities that at different times in his career Trump has adopted. Posing as “John Baron” or “John Mills,” Trump would call gossip columnists and society journalists, telling them about the beautiful women who were dying to sleep with Trump, or had slept with him, or whom he could get into bed if he wanted to. These ranged from Madonna to Princess Diana, and the stories were invariably untrue. Aleister Crowley adopted different identities when the mood struck him—and, like Trump, did his best to keep his name in the newspapers—and chaos magick asserts that one’s identity is malleable, that one should “reinvent” oneself often, play different roles. [xxiii] We should pretend to be someone else, to envision a “magical self” possessing all the qualities that we desire, something that some New Thought advocates also suggest.[xxiv] Chaos magick also promotes the idea of using “shock tactics,” saying something “outrageous” in order to “enhance personal power,” something that, as with much else about chaos magick, seems to come to Trump naturally.
And guru or not, Trump could dole out “crazy wisdom” with the best. Once, spying a soda can outside Trump Tower, Trump called the project manager at two a.m. and demanded she come and remove it. She did, but he called again at six a.m. just to make sure.[xxv] And as in the case of some of the other gurus we’ve looked at, as Trump’s power increased, so did his paranoia, as he surrounded himself with yes-men who applauded his every decision rather than questioning his logic. “The show,” as he said, “was Trump and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”[xxvi]
[i] Donald J. Trump, Crippled America (New York: Threshold Editions, 2015), p. 131.
[ii] Kranish and Fisher, Trump Revealed, p. 150.
[iii] Ibid., p. 114.
[iv] Ibid., p. 260.
[v] Ibid., p. 112.
[vi] Ibid., p. 108.
[vii] Ibid., p. 137.
[viii] Ibid., p. 157.
[ix] Ibid., p. 170.
[x] Ibid., p. 40.
[xi] Trump and Schwartz, Art of the Deal, p. 41.
[xii] Kranish and Fisher, Trump Revealed, p. 33.
[xiii] Rees, Dark Charisma, p. 175. Another example of Trump’s gigantomania was the “Mother of all bombs” (MOAB)—the largest nonnuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal—that he ordered dropped against ISIS in Afghanistan on April 13, 2017. www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-drops-the-mother-of-all-bombs-on-afghanistan.
[xiv] Trump and Schwartz, Art of the Deal, pp. 119–20.
[xv] Trump, Crippled America, p. 174.
[xvi] Kranish and Fisher, Trump Revealed, p. 262.
[xvii] Trump, Crippled America, p. 74.
[xviii] http://time.com/4321036/donald-trump-bs. Some have gone beyond Frankfurt’s “bullshit” and see Trump’s loose concept of truth as what in hip-hop lingo is called “fuckery.” www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fuckery-donald-trump-lies_us_588126a8e4b096b4a230a23f.
[xix] Trump and Schwartz, Art of the Deal, p. 41.
[xx] Ibid., pp. 142–43.
[xxi] Ibid., p. 38.
[xxii] Ibid., p. 34.
[xxiii] Lachman, Secret Teachers of the Western World, p. 69; Hine, Prime Chaos, pp. 21–22.
[xxiv] Hine, Prime Chaos, pp. 21–22.
[xxv] Kranish and Fisher, Trump Revealed, p. 100.
[xxvi] Ibid., p. 101.