Pyongyang on the Potomac

The psychology of total sycophancy, and why the choir sings louder as the building burns.

Hosanna for the Antichrist

Watch a Trump cabinet meeting with the sound on and you are watching a séance. One by one the secretaries rise and recite. The Treasury Secretary assures the room the country has never been so secure, that the president personally dragged the republic back from the lip of an abyss. The Attorney General informs the cameras that the first hundred days surpassed every presidency in American history, ever, ever, the word doubled like a liturgical response. The Labor Secretary, radiant, invites the president to come admire his own enormous face, which she has had printed on a banner and bolted to the flank of a federal building. The Agriculture Secretary thanks him for reviving Christianity and for saving college football, two miracles apparently of equal magnitude.

There is a word for this, and the word is not enthusiasm. Every observer with a functioning memory reached for the same comparison, and the comparison was exact: this is the choreography of Pyongyang. The unison rising. The lowered eyes. The competitive devotion, each courtier straining to out-grovel the last, because the only punishable sin in that room is a deficit of love. North Korea did not invent the form. Stalin’s Politburo performed it. Ceaușescu’s deputies performed it, applauding for eleven unbroken minutes because the first man to lower his hands was the man marked for the cellar. Saparmurat Niyazov renamed the month of January after himself and the citizens of Turkmenistan pronounced it lovely. The ritual is ancient and the ritual is documented. We are not improvising a new horror. We are running a very old program on American hardware.

So the diagnostic question is not whether this is a cult of personality. It self-evidently is, and a cult of personality is not a slur but a studied phenomenon with a known mechanism. The harder question, the one worth an essay, is why it holds. Why does the devotion not merely survive contact with reality but appear to digest reality and grow fat on it?