Cult Expert Compares Trump’s Hold On Supporters to ‘Chinese Communist Brainwashing and To Pimps’

Steven Hassan, a mental health counselor for cult victims and the author of Combatting Cult Mind Control and The Cult of Trump, compared former President Donald Trump’s hold on his supporters to “Chinese communist brainwashing and to pimps and traffickers” on MSNBC, Monday.

Reacting to a poll showing Trump supporters trust Trump more than their friends, family, conservative media, and religious leaders, Hassan told MSNBC host Joy Reid he was not surprised by the results.

“From my point of view, as a former cult member myself who’s been working for 47 years helping people to get out of cults, I think we could change our messaging dramatically and actually maybe get a third away from Trump if we’re smart with the messaging that we do,” Hassan claimed, adding:

When you’re dealing with an authoritarian, pyramid-structured cult that uses deception and mind control, one has to assume that people had a life before they ever heard of Trump. So the idea is to reconnect with who they were before they ever got converted and radicalized, and it’s family members, friends, members in the community, if they’re coached to be respectful, curious, ask questions in a way that has weight and get them back to thinking about what did they think they were doing when they first chose Trump.

Hassan argued, however, that it was important to ask questions “not in an accusatory way and not calling them names, morons and stupid as I hear some people in the media, because honestly, a lot of smart people get deceived and mind controlled into destructive cults like myself, for example.”

He continued, “But facts are not gonna deprogram people. Asking questions, making parallels to Chinese communist brainwashing and to pimps and traffickers, and explaining behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotional control. There are ways to message, but it’s got to be more indirect but respectful.”

Watch above via MSNBC.