In all of history, which leader amassed the most followers in his own lifetime, from scratch (meaning voluntary followers who were not inherited from ancestors or predecessors)?
Muhammad had about 100,000 followers when he died, about one of every 2,000 people on Earth.
Genghis Khan’s number of VOLUNTARY followers is indeterminate. He controlled millions, but he had no more than 250,000 in his armies, placing him in the same general category as Muhammad – about one for every 1600 on Earth
Darius the Great had an army of some 250,000 men way back in 500 BC, about one for every 400 people on Earth.
Kim Il-sung had about 22 million followers when he died in 1994, about one for every 260 people on the planet.
Hitler’s Nazi party had about nine million members, approximately one out of every 246 people on the planet.
Chairman Mao had about 30 million followers when he died in 1976, about one out of every 140 people on Earth.
As one commenter noted, Gandhi had as many as 300 million Indians willing to die, unarmed if necessary, if he led the charge. They were true believers, and he created his movement from scratch, ticking off all the boxes. That’s about one out of every eight people on earth at the time. How could I have forgotten him? I don’t know whether any leader can ever get to that level again. If you include him in the discussion, it’s like discussing relief pitchers, in the sense that you can debate about who was the second-best, but the top spot is occupied.
The population of Earth is almost exactly double what it was when Mao died in 1976, so Trump needs about 61 million true believers to beat Mao for second place. He may have done that. Between MAGA cultists and his die-hard fans in right-wing groups outside the USA, he may, in fact, have 61 million cultists who would be OK with him shooting Paul McCartney or some other universally beloved figure in Times Square.
Donald Trump may, in fact, be the second-most successful leader in history by that definition.
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Do you amateur and professional historians have other examples?
No love for Jesus?
The precise number is unknown, but Jesus had virtually no followers in his lifetime. St. Paul did better, but even there, historians estimate that there were no more than 6,000 Christians when Paul died, around the year 67.
“When you find yourself in the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” ~ Mark Twain … btw, Trump got 49.8% of 64% of all eligible U.S. voters in the 2024 election. Harris did worse.
Re: true believers would say @ 37/38% of the 49.8%. ymmv 🙂 Trump has given permission to a lotta racists, bigots, neo-fascists, anarchists, etc to cum out of the closet. So yea, they love him. ✔
carry on …
It’s kind of meaningless as we can’t be sure how many of any of these people actually support Trump, rather than voting for the GOP out of habit or political tribalism. It’s likely that the British monarch in the first half of the 20th century – until India became independent – had the largest number of people who formally owed allegiance to him or her in human history, but even that is meaningless, for the most part. While the peoples of the British Empire had varying degrees of democracy depending on where they lived, they didn’t have much of a choice over who their titular head of state was..
My point being that the huge majority of people who vote Republican in the US always vote Republican, and would do so whoever was standing.
Granted, it is difficult to say how many are Trump cultists, but my point is that the number of true cultists, those who would support him if he killed Paul McCartney in Times Square, may well be more than the 61 million he needs to top Mao.
I’d go even further. He could live stream himself performing an abortion on a 12-year-old that he raped, and he’d still have tens of millions of followers.
I HOPE that is not true.
I FEAR that it may be.
On the other side, Gengis Khan ruled an empire of about 100-110 million people, when the world population was around 360-400 million. Meaning that he had 1 follower out of 4 persons at the time of his death.
They didn’t follow him voluntarily. They were conquered. His army maxxed out at a quarter-million.
(Although, answering a completely different question, he may have ruled more of the world’s population than anyone else in history.)
Narendra Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, won approximately 226 million votes in the 2019 Indian General Election. If you count those as votes for Modi, then he easily beats Trump.
The Chinese communist party has over 100 million members, if you count those as followers of Xi Jinping then he also beats Trump.
Obviously, neither of those metrics is near perfect, but neither are the assumptions about Trump’s following.
Again, the question is followers assembled from scratch, not inherited from predecessors. (Mao is already on the list). And Modi is not a cult figure. He’s just the guy who won the election. One can’t count all of Trump’s voters as hard-core cultists, but if you take the Americans who are such cultists, plus his die-hard right-wing followers across the globe, he may have the 61 million he needs to top Mao.
Remember, Trump still has something like 37% approval rating.
Take a moment and let that sink in. The USA has 270 million adults. That means about a hundred million still approve of his actions NOW.
You have to assume you have all the actual MAGA supporters. There’s a difference between conservatives, Republicans, and MAGA. Just as there’s a difference between Episcopalians, Baptists, and Westboro Baptist Church members.
True. I don’t know how many are his cultists. But 100 million American adults still approve of him after everything he has done, and he has a big overseas following. I’m inclined to think that there are probably 61 million cultists in that group.
You’re talking cults of personality. Not leadership.
“Cult leader” still has the word “leader” in it.
It is a kind of leader.
You can see this thing from many points of view.
Gengis Khan conquered territories and people, but one of the reason why his domain lasted was that he respected local uses. I could not bet that 100% of conquired people disagreed him.
On the opposite neither Kim Il-sung nor Mao had “real” followers: surely many people followed them really, but many millions were just “forced” to follow and forced to admire them.
But an exception maybe there is: Hirohito, ruling a Japanese population of about 78 millions during WW2, that was over coercion or forced admiration.
He was a semi-divine figure for ALL the Japanese population, so we could assume that all 78 millions were real followers (able to immolate for him, and shocked even to hear the real voice of the emperor during Japan surrender).
However Trump’s approval rate is not the same of followers. Otherwise the example of Modi above is the same thing: we could take the rate of approval of Modi government and assume that they are all followers as you assume for Trump. Just my two cents.
I have not assumed that all Trump voters are Trump followers. If I did, he would have 77 million plus his overseas fanatics.
However …
Trump still has an approval rating of 37% – that’s 100 million adult Americans – that still say they approve of him even though he has done the opposite of what he told them he would do.
That fact, plus the non-Americans, leads me to believe that that group probably includes the 61 million he needs to top Mao.
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But not to top Hirohito.
Hirohito is an excellent example that I missed. He could be the all-time champion, but from what I have seen, Trump’s die-hard followers also view him as a semi-divine figure. That probably also applies to others on my list.
However, Hirohito is not an answer responsive to the original question. He did not create the Japanese view of the emperor, he inherited it. Japanese emperors were considered divine or semi-divine figures for centuries before Emperor Hirohito. The impressive thing about Trump is that he built his semi-religious following from scratch. John McCain and Mitt Romney were just guys who ran for office. Any given day of Trump’s presidency would have brought down one of those guys. And Nixon’s worst day is probably less corrupt and more law-abiding than Trump’s best, yet Nixon was swept away like a mouse on America’s doorstep, but Trump held power, regained power, and is holding on to it again.
I think America has only had two previous men with semi-divine status, John F. Kennedy (among his followers) and George Washington (among all Americans). Among conservative figures, maybe Charles Lindbergh came closest to Trump.
For better or worse – really just for worse – Trump is in the pantheon as one of the most charismatic leaders in history. In his own (______) way, he’s a towering figure.
==== Fill in your own word in that blank.
And that is amazing. I mean I was in the same school with the guy in 1966. Some of my friends were actually in classes with him. He was a nobody – an anonymous C+ student that most of his classmates can’t recall at all, and certainly not somebody earmarked for leadership of a cult of tens of millions of people. How in the world did that happen? Even though he was a privileged man himself, he certainly tapped into a great reservoir of working class resentment.
As I said … amazing.
There’s a cavaet to Trump. He’s still associated with a political party and his following isn’t radically better than Bush 1, Bush 2, McCain or Romney.
The MAGA cult isn’t lacking in enthusiasm but that enthusiasm doesn’t translate into a bigger slice of the pie.
Reagan delivered Electoral college beat downs twice and did it without an internet bullhorn.
Im pretty sure many of the Republicans in the house and senate are doing it unwillingly. I dont think its any coincidence that both the DNC and RNC servers got hacked and then suddenly, everyone who hated him, was a loyalist. That being said, they have had a huge influence on swaying the general populace in his favor.
However its sure looks like a sliding scale to me. The more people there are in the world at any given time the more “successful” (by this measure) a leader we see.
There’s a reason why that is true. The message of Jesus was restricted to the people he and a few followers could reach on foot. Muhammad and Genghis had horses. Hitler had radio. Trump has the internet.
The more recent the time, the better the communication tools, the greater the reach. Today’s leaders can preach to the whole world with their thumbs, and a very high percentage of people have the technology necessary to receive the message.
Before Gutenberg, people had to be within the sound of a leader’s voice. And that didn’t change much until the telegraph came along. It wasn’t until the 20th century that people got truly international reach, and even then, they needed to be granted a platform. It wasn’t until the internet that universal reach became possible for anyone and everyone. Trump came along at a time when he could send out his Tweets/Truths globally, to a bazillion people, directly and simultaneously, without requiring a platform from publishers or broadcasters.
So you’re saying Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication.
Napoleon?
Yes, maybe. I thought about him, but I’m not sure how many true believers he had, as opposed to those who had no choice. He did get a million men to die for him in Russia.
What about Gandhi?
My bad.
He obviously belongs!
Stalin could be another example of cult of personality leader. During his government (after WW2) the Soviet Union population was around 200 millions, while the world population about 2.5 billions, meaning that 1 person out 12.5 in the world was a follower. I have the same concerns I expressed for China and North Korea, but if we consider them valid then Stalin could overpass also Hirohito and by far Trump.
Napoleon should share the same throughts of Gengis Khan, but in any case the world population under France reign was a little percentile of the world population.
I could not focus Gandhi, since millions of Indian followed him for sure, but I could not quantify really.
Gandhi may be the correct answer!.
I would say Stalin inherited true believers, then got the rest through oppression, although he did have his own true believers as well. I just don’t know how to count them. It is possible that he deserves a very high spot on the list.
Only a moron,a Democrat or a heartless/brainless asshole would compare president Trump to Genghis Khan or Hitler.Being a American of Jewish faith I find it disgusting to compare the president to a man that SLAUGHTERED millions of Jews .There’s a special wing in Hell reserved for someone that believes or even this of something so hateful
I think you missed the point of the discussion. There is no hate involved in this calculation. Math is neither hateful nor loving. Trump is being compared to the most beloved leaders in history, like Jesus, Muhammad and Gandhi. He is also being compared to some leaders who were considered monsters, like Mao and Hitler. He is being compared to men who accumulated immense power and basically ruled the world, like Darius the Great, Napoleon and Genghis.
Frankly, this is a compliment to Trump. It is measuring each person’s influence, and he ranks as one of the most influential. It evaluates which leader had the largest group of devoted followers, true believers, in his own lifetime. It does not try to evaluate good and evil.
Obviously, the only thing that Jesus and Hitler had in common was that they had devoted followers.
The point is that Trump has relatively more true believers in his lifetime than Jesus, Muhammad, or Hitler. He may or may not have more than Mao. He seems to have had fewer than Gandhi. That makes him one of the most successful and influential leaders in the history of mankind.
Whether that is good or bad is for you to decide.
Are Trump’s followers willing to fight and die for him? If he asked them to pick up a rifle and all get into formation on Iran’s border or even Canada’s or Mexico’s borders, how many would? His followers are willing to fight on Facebook for him, I don’t know about IRL.
Charles Manson at one time had at least 10,000s of thousands of fans if not exactly supporters.
I’ve said here before that if Manson had been born into wealth like Trump that there would have been a President Charles Manson.
Gandhi had 300 million Indians ready to die on his one command back in 1942 quit India movement. Almost every world leader of democratic state pays homage to him at rajghat.
That’s a good one. Gandhi may have been the one with the largest number of true believers in his own lifetime.
Ask yourself when there’s ever been a political candidate, or ANY individual with the amount of propaganda tied to some random person’s personal identity. Who else period has had the amount of flags, signs, bumper stickers, T-shirts, etc that Trump cultists attach themselves to? Outside of sports franchises and Universities, and maybe some prime WWE/WWF/WCW mainstream merchandise – I don’t know anything period that does in US history.
That’s the scary thing is Trump cultists are basically nothing more than political team sports with cruelty as the scoreboard. You have a guy declaring a war and dropping bombs on children and then the same day having a fundraiser at his country club while the bombs are dropping. This is a guy joking about drapes and the ballroom at a press conference after soldiers died, innocents are dying, and he’s spending billions on a crisis created only by himself.
What’s wrong with these people who support him? Then they proclaim to be Christian and think whatever warped version of Jesus aligns with their fucked up violent authoritarian beliefs led by a rich cult leader. They may do well to see Trump aligns with something a lot more appropriate in the Bible, but they should check out the last chapter on who that leader of deception is and where they’re likely going according to theology discussed there.