How to Build a Cult of Personality

Lessons from dictators and despots on the eve of Trump's military birthday parade.

A golden statue of the dictator in Turkmenistan.

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Just over two decades ago, in the opulent white marble city of Ashgabat, the people of Turkmenistan needed to update their calendars.

Gone were references to January, renamed instead after the dictator—Turkmenbashi—the father of the Turkmen people. Forget about April, too. That became Gurbansoltan, the name of the dictator’s mother.¹

When the spring sunshine shone brightly in mid-Gurbansoltan, it would glint off a 39-foot-tall golden statue of the dictator, which rotated to always face the sun, high atop an enormous marble platform shaped like a rocket ship.

That former dictator, Sapurmurat Niyazov, spent billions of dollars to transform a formerly sleepy town into a pristine, sprawling city, with wide boulevards and uniformly white building facades. Every planning decision, no matter how small, flowed through the autocrat.

When billions were spent to make a new international airport—also named after himself—Niyazov personally insisted on implementing an unsafe design, in which the ostentatious new terminal building blocked the view of the air traffic controllers. “It looks better this way,” the dictator insisted.²

The law became personal, too. His favorite food was melons, so he made the second Sunday of August a national celebration called “Melon Day.” After a health scare in which he was told to stop smoking, Niyazov banned smoking in public so as to avoid reminders of his temptation. His personal pet peeve, lip syncing, became illegal. Some of the bans inevitably killed people; he closed all rural hospitals, arguing that the sick would be more likely to be cured while basking in the pristine glow of Ashgabat, his ornate capital city.

Niyazov had constructed one of the world’s most over-the-top cults of personality, a method of authoritarian dominance that fuses propaganda, social control, iconography, hero mythology, pseudo-ideology, loyalty tests, and the constant, inescapable presence of the dictator in daily life.

Cults of personality are a nearly universal feature of authoritarian strongmen (or aspiring despots). They often involve absurd, over-the-top myths—such as the propaganda surrounding former North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-Il, who claimed to have hit 11 holes-in-one during a round of golf and that he invented the hamburger, which he called “double bread with meat.”

For the last 14 years, I’ve studied authoritarian regimes—including extended periods living within several of them for my research. Consistently, the cults of personality I’ve encountered are bizarre, kooky, and excessive. To outsiders, those professing the propaganda—or wearing outfits and symbols to honor the leader—look and sound like lunatics. Yet, they’re also essential signals to being considered “one of us.”

So, on the cusp of Donald Trump’s military parade, with hundreds of thousands of red capped disciples lining Washington’s streets to celebrate definitely not his birthday the US army’s birthday, these dynamics raise an obvious question:

Is this all about narcissism and megalomania, or is there a strategic logic to authoritarian cults of personality that makes them a rational tool to solve problems often faced by dictators and despots?

It turns out that cults of personality, bizarre as they seem, serve several unexpected purposes—and are far cleverer than most people realize.

Step 1: Make Yourself Inescapable

To construct a cult of personality, you first must become omnipresent. In functioning democracies, it’s easy to escape the presence of the president or prime minister. Without deliberately seeking out political news, it’s possible for large sections of the population to even forget who’s in charge, or at least be unaware of what they’re up to on a day-to-day basis.

Indifferent invisibility destroys any nascent cult of personality. You need people to think about you right away when they wake up, to encounter images of you everywhere, to overhear conversations about you when they get coffee, to hear your voice on a daily basis.

In democratic states that are lurching toward authoritarian rule, the leader courts the press like a stalker, unable to resist being outside the headlines for even a few hours. In full-blown dictatorships, the methods can become more blatant: ensuring that state media provides constant coverage of the dictator’s movements, covering skyscrapers with official portraits, or, as I’ve experienced in Thailand, ensuring that every filmgoer must stand at the cinema before the movie starts, watching a short biopic about the Dear Leader’s biography to better understand their sacrifices for the nation.

In Turkmenistan, Niyazov’s face was plastered on buildings, liquor bottles, even supermarket cheese counters. (The United States under Trump hasn’t gone that far, not because his iconography is less omnipresent—it’s everywhere—but because those images have not (yet) been required everywhere due to specific state coercion).

Sometimes, the extremes are surreal. In Togo, a long, narrow West African country that’s about the same size as West Virginia, former dictator Gnassingbé Eyadéma made his country’s civil servants purchase a “magic watch.” Every thirty seconds, the black face would change, revealing a portrait of the dictator in full military attire, complete with his name and rank.

Image: Fratello Watches.

After all, anything more than thirty seconds would be too long to stop thinking about the country’s supreme leader.

Step 2: Develop a Superhuman Mystique

In 2011, I first arrived in Togo. The plane landed at Gnassingbé Eyadéma International Airport, still named after the former dictator.

In 1967, Eyadéma took power in a military coup. Seven years later, on January 24, 1974, the president was flying in a Douglas C-47 Skytrain aircraft, a small propeller plane, over northern Togo. Two weeks earlier, Eyadéma had announced his intention to nationalize a phosphate mine. In mysterious circumstances, the plane crashed. Several people died, but Eyadéma survived, later claiming to be the sole survivor.³ The deep state French imperialists had tried to kill him, he claimed, but with mystical powers—and divine providence—he had cheated death, a man destined to live so he could save his nation.

Eyadéma’s survival against all odds became a central pillar of his cult of personality. He built a monument near the crash site, depicting his fallen generals who died below him, while he stands above them all, alone.

Memes, paintings, and memorabilia have, for nearly a decade, explicitly conflated Trump with a superhero persona, a dynamic that would seem out of place with normal leaders of functioning democracies. For some reason, there doesn’t seem to be an abundance of memes showing Keir Starmer as a superhero, flags depicting Kamala Harris riding a soaring eagle, or paintings of Emmanuel Macron illuminated like an angel, a halo of light above his head while Jesus guides his pen to sign legislation.

All these examples apply to Trump, who—with some imaginative photoshop of his physique—has also long been depicted by his disciples as Superman.

But now, nearly a year after Trump narrowly survived an assassin’s bullet in Pennsylvania, that escape from death has become, as with Eyadéma’s cult of personality in Togo, a central visual metaphor of the Trump mystique. An amateur painting from a Florida artist—Hopper or Hockney this is not—now hangs in the White House, immortalizing Trump’s defiant fist pump.

Image: The White House.

Within Trump’s base, as with Eyadéma, survival is interpreted as part of a larger plan, a divine blueprint. God, it seems, saw it in his eternal wisdom to narrowly spare Trump and instead guide the assassin’s bullet straight into the body of the volunteer firefighter behind him.

Step 3: Create a Pseudo Ideology

For cults of personality to truly take root, disciples need to worship not just a Dear Leader, but a broader pseudo ideology. This ideology need not be coherent, thoughtful, or sophisticated, but it must present the illusion of being part of a broader quasi-messianic movement.

There is, as with many parts of the cult of personality, a hidden logic. Most authoritarian and would-be authoritarian leaders are ineffective at governing. Their populations inevitably suffer. And when they do, it’s politically useful to be able to argue that this is all part of the struggle—against an enemy, or a rival ideology, or in pursuit of an unattainable ideal. Without successfully building a pseudo ideology within a cult of personality, leaders who catastrophically fail just end up like Liz Truss, rapidly wilting out of power.

Two of the most coherent pseudo ideologies of 20th and early 21st century dictators have color themes: Mao’s Little Red Book and Muammar Gaddafi’s Green Book. In Turkmenistan, the ideology was written in the Ruhnama. And in North Korea, the Kim dynasty propagates Juche, along with a loose set of ideals and omens descended from Mount Paektu.

Trump, who occasionally surrounds himself with knock-off, dollar store, self-proclaimed luminaries, hasn’t fully reached this step on his journey to autocracy. Yes, there are the bizarro faux intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin, who know how to wrap vile ideology in enough opaque jargon to dupe their readers.⁴ But when challenged, the intellectual rigor of their ideas melts faster than Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye in Death Valley.

Nonetheless, there is a skeletal framework of an ideology known colloquially as Trumpism. While many brows have been furrowed on cable TV, many contorted think pieces written to try to shoehorn Trump’s often self-defeating, narcissistic behavior into a cogent, logical framework, the true core of Trumpism reduces down to two central pillars:

1. Trump is always right;

2. Even when he contradicts himself.

These are the implicit ideological guardrails that ensure MAGA acolytes never need to defect from blindly praising Trump, even—or especially—when he reverses course, as has happened repeatedly with tariffs. Those dynamics are precisely why memes like the one below are both accurate and funny.

Nonetheless, Trump has created a clear sense among his followers that they are part of a movement and are not just voting for a run-of-the-mill candidate. That sense of a higher purpose is a relatively effective stand-in for the ideological social glue that keeps political zealots unified, even when governance is objectively poor. (Trump’s worshippers, like those in authoritarian regimes, are also rarely exposed to critical analysis because they self-select into partisan echo chambers; in full dictatorships, there is no choice because the only outlets that exist are those run by state media).

Step 4: Use the Cult of Personality as a Loyalty Test

Now, we’ve reached the true value of cults of personality—the reason why they’re almost universal features of autocracies.

Dictators and aspiring despots face specific political challenges not shared by normal politicians in democracies. Citizens in functional democracies do not fear expressing their true political preferences; if they dislike a leader, they openly telegraph that opinion. But in dictatorships, open expression is potentially deadly, so dissidents rarely speak out. The ancient Greek philosopher Xenophon wrote of that inescapable problem of tyranny: “It is never possible for the tyrant to trust that he is loved.”

That creates an information problem for despots: if everyone pretends to love you, how can you figure out who’s telling the truth? And if you can’t solve that dilemma, how can you determine who’s likely to be loyal when it counts?

The cult of personality offers a solution. Researchers have argued that personality cults function as loyalty tests. By giving individuals opportunities to debase themselves through repeating outlandish lies that are obviously untrue, dictators get a clear signal of zealotry.

Additionally, among elites who serve the leader, those who are most willing to publicly humiliate themselves by jettisoning their principles while repeating ridiculous claims are showcasing a heightened level of unscrupulousness. By performatively revealing that trait, they aren’t just professing their loyalty, they’re also signalling that they are willing to violate moral principles to obtain power. For dictators and aspiring despots, that signal is a valuable one, since autocratic regimes require henchmen to carry out the dirty work.

These dynamics also explain why cults of personality become so absurd. Once a lie becomes broadly accepted within the movement, it no longer is costly to repeat it. If everyone believes Kim Jong-Un is a demigod, repeating that belief isn’t going out on a limb. To keep the loyalty test valuable, the outlandishness must increase, creating a relentless ratcheting effect.

Similar dynamics exist with Trump, where each new insane conspiracy theory separates the diehard early adopters from the reluctant stragglers. And yet, because of what I call the Trumpian “banality of crazy,” in which even the most absurd claims are mere blips in the political news cycle, even the conspiracy theories are becoming less reliable metrics for blind devotion.

Moreover, by developing visual representations of idolatry, authoritarians can quickly determine whether someone is a true believer.

When I was a kid, I couldn’t easily tell whether adults were planning to vote for George H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton. Other than the odd bit of campaign memorabilia around Election Day, voters rarely publicly proclaimed their political allegiances.

Now, however, Trump supporters enthusiastically wear red hats or slap absurd iconography on their pickup trucks. (Cars themselves have even become moderately reliable indicators of partisanship). And the MAGA elites have gotten the memo. At Trump’s criminal trial, in a bit of an unplanned comic flourish, several toadies showed up in matching outfits, trying to demonstrate their loyalty through sartorial mimicry.

While we laugh, Trump is given valuable data points. In faltering democracies, checks and balances are not magical inkblots on parchment; they are people. Democracy is saved by individuals who stand up for principles even in the face of overwhelming power. And cults of personality provide an effective tool to spot principled people a mile off—and ensure that they never have a chance to stand between the would-be despot and democratic breakdown.

These dynamics, alas, come at a significant cost, and one that destroys countries the longer it is allowed to fester. Ruling by fear and intimidation while prioritizing loyalty over truth-telling is a surefire way to develop delusions and informational blindspots. In politics, yes men are the loyal bobbleheads that nod along until catastrophe inevitably strikes. Authoritarians get high on their own supply, buying into the cult of personality they’ve constructed. If you live in a fake world long enough, it will start to feel real.

Donald Trump’s birthday parade isn’t necessarily dangerous in isolation. But it is an over-the-top visual symbol of a far larger phenomenon, ubiquitous in dictatorships, in which power, dominance, and intimidation are welded to a cult of personality that conflates one nation with one man. As it continues to grow in America, it will not just provide loyalty tests, but it will also ensure that his supporters—and Trump himself—drift ever further away from reality.

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1. The word for bread was also renamed Gurbansoltan.

2. Most years, only between 7,500 and 20,000 foreigners visit Turkmenistan, making it one of the most closed off authoritarian regimes in the world. For comparison, hundreds of thousands of people visit North Korea annually, though only a few thousand are Western tourists (most come from China).

3. He was not, in fact, the sole survivor.

4. Yarvin, who hates democracy but doesn’t really have a coherent sense of what to replace it with or how it would work (because it clearly wouldn’t), is part of what has sometimes been called “The Dark Enlightenment,” but is basically just a pseudo-intellectual attempt to justify authoritarianism.