I’m not even really sure it’s a cult of personality per se. It seems more like yet another form of mental illness that affects so many Americans in different ways, where they live delusional, parasocial, vicarious lives based on a fantastical world that they’ve put in place of reality they rejected. It’s really no different than all the people in America today who will expend immense amounts of money and resources on caring about “my team” in the performance called the Super Bowl. “My team” this and “my team” that, they say as they cheer and lament “my team” that they don’t have any actual connection to in any form other than having been manipulated and groomed all their life into being in that form of cult.
Is not really limited to Trump at all, even though the consequential and public nature of Trump takes everyone’s attention … ironically, with its opponents only feeding that loop in how they oppose it.
It’s a core characteristic of narcissism people rarely understand. Narcissism (individual or system) utterly depends on conflict for its “narcissistic supply”. When you “oppose it”, you are in fact only fueling that which you believe you are opposing. It’s a paradox that people have an impossible time understanding, especially all the people who see “Nazis” everywhere, while openly and violently “protesting” in this supposed “Nazi” regime they’re opposing. Narcissistic control needs that for its manipulation. That is precisely the kind of fuel narcissists love and need and relish with glee as you oppose them, because it means they have you exactly where they want you, emotional and easily manipulated and controlled.
You think the Super Bowl would happen if people stopped living the delusion of “my team” conflict with “not my team”? When you see that stadium full of people, realize that every single one of those thousands of people, will have spent on avg. ~$15,000 per person. It takes manipulation into a state of mental illness to do that. No different than Trump supporters or Nazi fighters or all the other kind of fantasy LARPing that is so pervasive in America, living a life of delusion created for them because it is profitable and makes people easily manipulated.