Donald Trump’s Usage of Cult Rhetoric on Truth Social
Cadence Sharpe
07/09/2026
This study seeks to identify the presence of common cult rhetorical strategies in Donald Trump’s 2025 Truth Social posts and analyze for potential trends within the usage of those rhetorical devices. Though previous research has discussed the variables of Donald Trump, social media, and cult rhetoric separately and suggested potential parallels between them, there were no studies analyzing how all three of these variables intersect in a practical manner. Thus, a conceptual qualitative content analysis was conducted to directly study the social media posts made by Donald Trump from the perspective of cult linguistics. This study used twenty-four original, text-based posts from Donald Trump’s Truth Social account in 2025, and created a deductive coding rubric based on rhetorical strategies that were found in previous literature to be used by cults and cult leaders as manipulation tactics. Twenty-three of those posts contained at least one instance of the aforementioned cult rhetorical strategies, with 160 instances found overall. Frequency of a rhetorical device tended to be dependent on its generalizability, or ability to be used in multiple different contexts. Thus, cult rhetorical strategies were found in Donald Trump’s 2025 Truth Social posts, directly addressing the previous gap in the literature regarding the intersection between Donald Trump, social media, and cult rhetoric. As politicians increasingly use social media platforms to reach millions, awareness of potential rhetorical and linguistic strategies that could be used to alter the opinions, emotions, and votes of citizens is imperative for the integrity of the democratic process.