THE BRANCH DONALDIAN:

Last week, retiring Senator Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) openly worried that his party was "becoming a cultish thing" marked by forced fidelity to its mercurial leader. While he's not the first to make the point, his insider perspective carried considerable weight.

But is his description hyperbole, or an accurate assessment? While cautioning that not everyone who voted for Donald Trump falls into the mindless-follower category, an expert on cults leans toward the latter.

"I think he has touched on something important," says scholar and author Janja Lalich, who has extensively studied the phenomenon. "I think there are plenty of similarities--enough to be concerned about."

She continues: "The people around Trump, and the Republicans in Washington, absolutely kowtow to him, either out of fear they're going to anger him, or out of adulation. That behavior is very typical of a cult."

Polling suggests the party has been shrinking, and its remaining members are solidly behind Trump, giving him a remarkable 87 percent support in a recent poll. Even the policy of separating immigrant parents and children, which directly contradicts the traditional conservative belief in the sanctity of the family, was supported by more than half of Republicans before Trump rescinded it under pressure on Wednesday.

Is that decision to support the leader, even if it means ignoring long-professed moral precepts, cult-like behavior? Pacific Standard asked Lalich, a professor emerita of sociology at California State University-Chico. She has written or co-authored a series of books about the cults, including the infamous Heaven's Gate sect that committed mass suicide in 1997.

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