The most surprising Trump news from this weekend wasn't, surprisingly, his abject failure to show up to any of the solemn memorials (like every other living former President save the Carters), choosing instead to pay a Reality Celebrity appearance at the police and fire units near his apartment. Nor was it, drunken Rudy Giuliani's rabid ramblings at a memorial dinner that evening (though these were a sure sign of Rudy's falling into a sad Joe McCarthy-like final decline).
No, Trump managed to upstage himself by making a paid video appearance in promotional materials for the Unification Church of (the now deceased) Sun Myung Moon.
The Church - now led by Moon's wife and sons - has long been staunchly right wing in America. Among other things, they own The Washington Times. Still, Trump's taped remarks were, at the very least, disconcerting, and raised long simmering questions about the Church's malign influence.
Also, Donald Trump is a financially desperate hack who'd take money from anyone who will prop up his fragile ego and fan his delusions of self importance.
In my youth, the notion of "Moonies" - those who had surrendered their independence of thought and finance to the Unification Church - was part of a general concern about cults and the danger they posed. In the sixties, these concerns had started with the Helter Skelter killings of the "Manson kids", followers of Charles Manson. In the seventies, cut concerns took on added urgency partly because of the odd behaviors of Unification church members, Hare Krishnas, and ultimately, with the tragedy of Jim Jones and his followers in Guyana, after they'd fled the San Francisco Bay Area claiming persecution.
Like so many things that have become weirdly politicized, it's hard to know where cult acceptance bifurcated on party lines. Probably, one could point to David Koresh and conservatives trying to suggest "live and let live" libertarianism about a doomsday cult with odd notions about Christianity and some clear implications of underage sexual abuse of children. Whether it's of a piece with a blind spot about authoritarianism combined with "anything goes" notions of religious freedom (especially for anything nominally claiming to be Christian)... who can say. But the failure of conservatives to get tough and stay tough on religious cults does seemed to have moved form merely curious to oddly problematic.
Liberals, being the more comfortable home for religious skepticism, have a somewhat different problem: there's a decidedly passive, impotent approach to tackling cults once they are found out, also having to do with a confusion over choice versus coercion. Cults are marked by the work they do to brainwash adherents (well documented, clearly identifiable tactics like "love bombing", isolation, and deprivation), but often, cult involvement is treated as more of a personal weakness than a dangerous exploitation... until, well after the fact, the exploitation is all too clear. Most recently, that trajectory seems to explain how the NXIVM cult quietly destroyed many young women until its tactics were brought out into the open.
And what does this have to do with the Unification Church? Well, for one thing, like Scientology, the Moon family has worked hard to shroud the cult like aspects of the organization in order to put a more benign, quasi-religious face on its operations to avoid deep scrutiny. That includes using its Wash Times mouthpiece to whitewash potential allegations, courting conservative political cover, and most recently, going full MAGA to gain trust from Trump. Trump's paid appearance is, apparently, something of the culmination of those efforts.
Trump's Moon Unit this weekend, might have played badly in conservative circles at one time; but at this point, the cult-like atmosphere of conservatism itself, never mind the more specific contours of MAGA support, probably slough this off as some liberal conspiracy to trash Trump by calling the speech benign, at best. Everyone else's views of Trump are so low at this point, one more round of him trolling for a check is hardly a blip.
Still, I wouldn't lose sight entirely of this momentary weirdness and the ways it could, and probably should, blow back on Trump and the right. Despite its own efforts to camouflage its cult aspects, conservatism generally likes to keep its Unification Church connections at arms length - plausibly deniable, while happily pocketing (some might say laundering) the Church's lavish cash. And while this moment, like so many isn't in itself enough to derail Trump's weak if noisy plotting for a political comeback... I wouldn't be too surprised if, should he really try to come back, that a lot of Moon-related questions suddenly appear. While Trump's sleazy business of talking to anyone with a dollar and a scheme worked once... this time, all those sleazy associations could be his, never mind the GOP generally, undoing.
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