Tucker Carlson recently confessed: “I’ll be tormented for a long time by the fact that I played a role in getting Donald Trump elected. And I want to say that I’m sorry for misleading people.” How can one not feel sorry and ashamed today for having believed in Trump? I’ll be honest: although I hold no responsibility in Trump’s election, I feel ashamed for having placed any hope in him.

The Trump phenomenon resembles a form of collective hypnosis. It has a religious dimension that makes it unique in American political history. For the believer, every failure, every scandal, every lie is proof that Trump is fighting against the Deep State, the Fake News, the Swamp, the Washington elite, the Democrats, the New World Order, the FBI, and who knows what else. The Q psy-op was particularly successful in tapping into the religious imagination of Americans who were distrustful of the government. This is well explained by Marjorie Taylor Green, who admits she “fell for that in late 2017 and 2018”:

it’s basically a cult. … What it does, it takes a layer of truth and then it twists it into a lie. … Q was very successful. It was probably one of the most successful psychological operations I’ve ever seen because it did use the layer of truth and the things that people were most passionate about and was able to use that and twist their belief to pull their full faith and trust into … an anonymous person or an anonymous entity.

This was political propaganda on a deeper level than ever experimented before. I have analyzed the methods of manipulation used by Q and other pro-Trump groups in “DARK PILL: How Satan-Worshipping Pedophiles have taken over Conspiracyland” and in “The Satanic False Flag: Dark-pilling, conspiracy cults, pied-piper operations, and Zionist spiritual warfare”.

The strangest thing, looking back, is that radical Zionists made no secret about their own quasi-religious adoration for Trump. In May 2018, commenting on Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, Netanyahu himself compared him to Cyrus the Great[1] .

There is no shame in being betrayed. No one blames Jesus for having trusted Judas. But there is shame in being fooled. And the truth about Trump is not that he has betrayed his supporters in 2025; it is that he has fooled them in 2016. Those who believed he would MAGA did so despite so many red flags.

The art of being bought

The first key to unlock Trump was his prose. A man who writes books should be measured by his books, before anything else. In that case, one look at the titles was enough:

– The Art of the Deal (1987)

– How to Get Rich (2004)

– The Way to the Top (2004)

– Think like a Billionaire (2004)

– How to Build a Fortune (2006)

– Think Big and Kick Ass (2007)

– Think Like a Champion (2009).

Trump believes that everything can be bought, that society is purely transactional, and that cunning is the keys to success. He wrote in The Art of the Deal, his 1987 bestseller:

The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.”[2]

There is no trace in his books of a word of wisdom or a touch of humor. In fact, Trump has no literary or philosophical culture, and it shows.

What is also clear in Trump’s books is his narcissism. Every sentence comes down to: “I’m the best and I know everything about everything.” Trump isn’t just a salesman; he’s also the product.

Following the opening of Trump Tower in Manhattan in 1983, the massive promotion of his book The Art of the Deal turned Trump into a celebrity. Tony Schwartz, the book’s co-author—who, according to Schwartz, actually wrote the entire book (with Trump’s contribution limited to deleting the least flattering passages)—has said since 2016 that he is haunted by guilt for having helped Trump become president. Trump, he says, lies constantly without the slightest inhibition or guilt. “There is an emptiness inside Trump. There’s an absence of a soul. There’s an absence of a heart.”

The third element that helped craft Trump’s image as a billionaire hero—the equivalent of a saint in the religion of money—is the reality TV show The Apprentice, co-produced by Trump himself and airing since 2004, in which Trump essentially sells himself.

The second standard by which Trump should have been measured was his business record. Is Trump the artist of the deal and the winner he claims to be? No. The advertising is deceptive. Trump is not a self-made man, but a self-made myth.[3]While he has always claimed to have received a single million dollars from his father to start his business, a 2018 New York Times investigation revealed that “he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.”

Not only did he inherit this initial fortune without lifting a finger, but he invested it in failed ventures. Trump has filed for bankruptcy six times in his career. His Taj Mahal casino filed for bankruptcy just 15 months after opening—how a casino can go bankrupt? Other bankruptcies followed in the 1990s and 2000s: the Trump Castle and Trump Plaza Hotel in 1992, then Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts in 2004, with $1.8 billion in debt, and finally Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009 and 2014.

By the 1990s, Trump was in debt to the tune of $5 billion, including $1 billion personally—a negative billionaire. That’s when a group of bankers led by Wilbur Ross, former director of Rothschild Inc., decided to bail him out (Trump would reward Wilbur Ross with the position of Secretary of Commerce in 2016). According to remarks made by real estate attorney Alan Pomerantz on CNN in 2016, speaking on behalf of the bankers: “We made the decision that he would be worth more alive to us than dead—dead meaning in bankruptcy… We kept him alive to help us” (more on John Hankey’s investigation and the Forbesmagazine article).

The Roy Cohn Method

If he is a failed casino tycoon, is Trump at least an honest one? Obviously not. Trump has been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits. His first lawsuit dates back to 1973. Trump was accused by the federal government of racial discrimination in the leasing of buildings constructed with public funds. He hired attorney Roy Cohn, who taught him life. In the words of Greg Reese:

The unwritten rules that Roy Cohn helped instill into the character of Donald Trump are, one: Never Apologize. Never Admit Wrongdoing. Two: Always Counterattack and Hit Back Harder. Three: Use the Legal System as a Weapon. Four: Manipulate the Media. Five: Use Fear as Both Shield and Sword. And six: Build a Fortress of Loyalty and Punish Disloyalty Absolutely. Cohn’s playbook didn’t just work on business rivals and judges, it scaled to con millions of people.

The “art of the lie,” not the art of the deal, is the essence of Trump. Trump spouts enormous lies about everything and repeats his lies tirelessly. Persons close to Trump, such as his former communications director Stephanie Grisham, have reported that Trump believes that simply repeating something thousands of times makes it the truth.

Trump’s big lies are numerous. For example: “I ended eight wars” (and therefore “I deserve the Nobel Peace Prize”). In 2024, Trump declared: “I’m the only president in modern history who left office with a smaller national debt than when I came into office.” In reality, under his presidency, the debt increased by 7.8 trillion, a record 40 percent increase.[4] Lying and then calling liars those who expose his lies, is Trump’s instinctual pattern of behavior. Here is a nice example, posted April 20, 2026.

READ MORE: https://www.unz.com/article/deep-trump-the-conman-who-saved-america-from-the-thucydides-trap/

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