What Is Wrong with Asking “How to Deprogram People from a Fervent Belief in Trump?”

I have been doing interviews for The Cult of Trump book and, increasingly, the question of deprogramming is used, especially in the header. What I would like my readers to understand is that this comes from the editor or producer and not at my request. I have never liked the term “deprogramming”, even though I was successfully deprogrammed from the Moonies in 1976 and spent a year of helping people exit the Moonies using a forcible method. When judges would no longer grant an ex-parte conservatorship to parents of cult members, it became clear that it was illegal to do forcible interventions on adults. I chose to keep helping but without force. In 1988, I wrote Combating Cult Mind Control and discussed my experiences and why I was referring to what my colleagues and I were doing as exit-counseling.