Historian explains Trump's 'magical thinking' and the far right's connection to the occult

Lachman is the author of several books and has lectured across the United States, Britain and Europe on the relationship between consciousness, esoteric knowledge, politics, history and culture. He is perhaps best known as a founding member of the New York new wave band Blondie, in which he played bass from 1975 to 1977. (He later led a Los Angeles band called The Know, and played guitar with Iggy Pop in the early 1980s.)

How did this moment with Donald Trump come to be?

I certainly think that one of the things thats happening is we're inheriting the world that the philosopher [Friedrich] Nietzsche predicted was on its way, shortly before he went mad himself in the late 1880s. He basically saw that a type of nihilism was coming and that there is no such thing as capital-T truth.

This has trickled down from the metaphysical heights into our everyday world. Hence the post-truth, "alternative facts" world we live in. Reality and unreality, the invented world of television and the real world are exchanging roles.

The singularity that people have been waiting for is taking place. As I explain in the book, I argue that Trump is the singularity, in the sense that he's been the reality-changer. He got elected, and suddenly our criteria for all these things that used to hold everything in place became very loose and shaky.

You also have to factor in the disaffection that blue-collar voters had with the Democrats on labor issues and the like. So all these things came into the mix and it seemed like somehow the time was primed for this change. Reality TV certainly played a role. Trump seems to have been the right man at the right place who knew how to take advantage of this moment. A great deal of what's recently been taking place in the United States has actually been going on in Russia for a longer time.

Trumpism is a type of political cult. Given this reality, how do we make sense of the political imagination of the so-called alt-right and Donald Trump's movement?

One of the things you need to understand is that it's not necessarily a political platform that Trump is providing for his followers. He's creating an emotional state for them. This is something that George Orwell noticed in the 1930s when he was in Germany. He saw the rise of National Socialism and what was clear to him, but also very disturbing, was that people were not necessarily entranced by the trains being on time or by becoming more economically prosperous, but by the idea that they were becoming involved with some great mighty heroic endeavor.

Their lives were given meaning. They were part of some larger overarching movement. They were fulfilling a destiny. Orwell was a very critical fellow, but he was well aware that these emotions and this hunger for meaning, if it's not fed, if it's not satisfied, can be easily manipulated. This is what Hitler did. This is what Mussolini did. This is also what gurus do -- or at least the bad ones -- as well.

In this way Trump can be compared to Hitler and Mussolini, but also to some gurus like Rajneesh. Trump is also an entertainer.

READ MORE: Malcolm Nance on Trump: We're "on the cusp" of "losing the American constitutional republic forever"

Donald Trump has the charisma of a cult leader. He is a master communicator for his public.

Well, we know that Trump was a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale and his book "The Power of Positive Thinking." Its very optimistic, forward-looking "never say die" perspective informed him from an early age. It was something that was also part of Trump's family upbringing. His father was very influenced by Peale as well. He carries that through in his own series of self-help books, "The Art of The Deal" and a variety of others, in which he can share with you his insights into how you can recreate yourself: "You too can become like me if you follow these rules." This is a version of the "prosperity gospel."

An additional part of Trump's life mantra and approach is chaos. Most people say, “Oh, well he's an idiot. He doesn't know what he's doing.” Or they make excuses: "Well, he's new to the game and he's coming in from a different arena." In many ways Trump is obviously intentional.

It's something that he aims to do and it's something he makes clear in his books, where he talks about how he doesn't like things to be too set and he doesn't want things to be too planned and he wants to be able to change his plan at the last minute and keep people on edge. He creates a type of glamour that he then offers to others  to share in. It is also mystifying. That too is part of this magician’s bag of tricks. He is a master of chaos.

You basically use whatever is at hand. It's the same principle as in found art. You can take something and suddenly put it in some other context and then it's a piece of art. You can do the same thing and it turns into a magical implement. Part of it is creating this fluidity of things, not being stable, not being fixed into some set pattern or set identity. These are all things that Trump seems to do naturally.

When you talk about "magic," you may be using the term in a different way than most people would understand it. Can you explain more?

When you talk about magic, the first thing people usually ask is, “Oh, does it work? Can you make something happen?” Then the response is, "That depends on what you mean by 'make something happen.'" But, I mean, there's two ways you can go. You can go down a long psychological route about setting and expectations and all that sort of thing. To talk about the magic that people really want to know about. I would offer one thing, if you know the phenomenon of synchronicity.

This is the term that the psychologist C.G. Jung gave to what we call "meaningful coincidence." That's basically when something is going on in your head and it's reflected in the outer world, with there being no causal relationship.

So I would say that if you accept the phenomenon of synchronicity, then there are times when the partition between the inner and the outer world is not as stable or as strong as it usually is. I would say that one of the definitions of magic is willing things to happen in the real world. That is one of the crudest, most simplistic definitions of magic. The next question follows: Is there a way to make it happen? Is there a way to induce synchronicities?

This is what is positive thinking and "chaos magic" and a variety of different types of magical practices are trying to do.

How does Steve Bannon fit into Trump and the far right's political imagination? He has written screenplays which are quite dark and disturbing. This is an underreported aspect of this political moment and Bannon's influence over Trump and the "alt-right."

He was Trump's strategist. Bannon also brought in the ultra-right and gave them a platform on Breitbart. He is an ideologue with a collection of ideas  that also manifest in film and the arts.

Bannon has an aesthetic sense. It's crude and heavy. Bannon has called himself a "Leninist" and said he wants to break down "the system." His films are generally a barrage of disturbing imagery and explosions that supposedly have some type of grand intent and message. In reference to the war on reality, the New York Times ran a story in 2017 about Bannon giving a private talk to a select group of people at the Vatican. One of the names Bannon mentioned in the talk was Julius Evola, an Italian far-right esoteric thinker who tried to ingratiate himself first with Mussolini and then with Hitler. Evola is also read by people around Vladimir Putin.

Images have power. Bannon and his allies understand this in a way that is much more sophisticated than do many Democrats, mainstream liberals and progressives. One example would be alt-right mascot Pepe the Frog.

Well, this is an example of what we can call "meme magic." Pepe the Frog started life as the creation of a cartoonist named Matt Furie. He was basically a kind of an amphibian slacker. There's an image or a panel of him taking a leak somewhere and somebody walks by and says, “Oh, hey, what are you doing that for?” He says, “Feels good, man.” Apparently that got picked up online.  This is Meme 101. A meme is some symbol, image, phrase or little cultural unit or concept that spreads.

There is a whole subculture of internet trolls who circulated the Pepe the Frog image. Someone starts appropriating Pepe and using him as a mouthpiece for their, let's say, "politically incorrect" views. What also happens is that the Trump people get ahold of it, and then it's like Hillary Clinton gave her enemies a stick to beat her with.

Pepe the Frog became like a brand name for the alt-right, and then when Hillary did her "deplorables" speech, Pepe the Frog became even more widely spread and almost like a postmodern amphibian swastika.

If you remember, right after Trump's election, at the National Policy Institute -- a very innocuous name for what many people believe is a dangerous and racist organization -- Richard Spencer, who is the president of the group, gave a speech.

He began the meeting by saying, "Hail Trump! Hail our hero. Hail our victory. We made this happen. We dreamed him into office," and so on. What happened was that Pepe the Frog became a sigil. He was a type of magical symbol for people who wanted Trump to get elected. They basically wanted to create chaos and to have some effect on the world.

So they're just doing it for kicks as it were. They flood the net with all these images, with the intention that it will somehow affect the real world.

Somehow the internet has become this exteriorized imagination. If you think about this dynamic, it actually goes back to old occult ideas about the "astral plane" and things of that nature.