Here is what ChatGPT created after some discussion on the topic:

People who become deeply committed to a political movement, religious group, ideology, or even a cult are usually not there because something is inherently wrong with them. Human beings are social creatures whose beliefs are influenced by identity, belonging, emotions, incentives, and social environments as much as by logic.

Whether someone becomes deeply attached to a movement is rarely explained by a single factor. It emerges from an interaction between circumstances, individual characteristics, group dynamics, and chance.

High-control groups and strongly identity-based movements often use mechanisms such as:
- Gradual escalation of commitment.
- Providing community, purpose, and belonging.
- Creating a strong distinction between insiders and outsiders.
- Encouraging loyalty to the group or leader.
- Framing criticism as hostile or illegitimate.
- Increasing the psychological cost of dissent.
- Normalizing ideas or behaviors that initially seemed extreme.
- Rewarding conformity and punishing deviation socially.

Personal addition:
Trump is using these mechanisms to perfection. He is probably not doing it all deliberately, the behavior may arise naturally from his personality, instincts, worldview, and interpersonal style, rather than from a calculated plan.

These mechanisms can produce behavior that outsiders find puzzling. Members may defend actions they once condemned, overlook contradictions, or reinterpret events in ways that protect the group. This is not necessarily because they are unintelligent. Similar tendencies appear in many human groups.

At the same time, susceptibility is not entirely random. Some factors can make a person more resistant:
- Comfort with disagreement.
- Strong independent social networks.
- Tolerance for uncertainty.
- Habitually questioning authority figures.
- Willingness to revise beliefs when evidence changes.

Yet even these traits do not create immunity. Highly intelligent, educated, skeptical, and independent-minded people have joined cults, political movements, ideological causes, and organizations that later proved harmful.

When people observe strong loyalty to a leader—whether in MAGA, a revolutionary movement, a religious sect, or another cause—they often conclude that supporters must possess some defective character trait. Usually the reality is more complicated. What often looks like a character flaw from the outside can emerge from ordinary psychological processes such as identity formation, social belonging, fear of exclusion, confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and sunk-cost thinking.

That does not mean all movements are equally healthy or equally prone to these dynamics. Some organizations and movements encourage independent criticism more than others. But the existence of intense loyalty, rationalization, or hypocrisy by itself does not prove that members are fundamentally different kinds of people. More often, it shows how powerful group identity can become when personal identity and group identity start to merge.

So if a movement exhibits cult-like behavior, the most useful explanation is usually not that its members possess a special "cult member personality." Rather, it is that ordinary human tendencies—belonging, loyalty, conformity, identity protection, and motivated reasoning—have become unusually strong within a particular social and political environment.