I’m finally starting to understand why Jim Jones’s lieutenants didn’t try to stop him.
Mike Johnson during a news conference at the US Capitol on Wednesday, May 20, 2026.
(Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
This week, as outrage grew over Donald Trump’s use of $20 million of taxpayer money to run a series of hyper-partisan, cultish ads about his own greatness—including one seemingly claiming a mandate from God —Mike Johnson, the hapless speaker of the House, rushed to defend the president. He told reporters that, actually, spending huge sums of public money in this way was fine, because the ads were “talking about America’s greatness” and were “pro-Americana” (whatever that means).
In reality, there was, of course, literally nothing appropriate about these ads, as a wide array of legal scholars from across the political spectrum immediately pointed out. The wave of revulsion at this gross misuse of public dollars even spread to a select few Republican members of the Senate who girded their wobbly spines to issue milquetoast objections.
It should have been easy for even the most craven of sycophants to distance themselves from this extraordinarily overt abuse of power. Yet Johnson simply couldn’t find the words to call Trump out. Instead, he glommed onto the slimmest of silver linings—Trump’s reluctant announcement, a day earlier, that his PAC would reimburse the government for the money spent on the ads. That, preacher Johnson piously averred, was a good thing. Hours later, Trump withdrew the offer and said that US taxpayers would, after all, be left to foot the bill. From Johnson? Silence. It was yet another humiliation that Trump has, quite deliberately, inflicted on his lickspittle congressional enabler.
Meanwhile, thousands of people at a rally in Nebraska on Monday cheered when Trump appeared to pronounce himself unbothered by the prospect of Iran “taking out” Los Angeles or San Diego. This from The Guardian’s article on the bizarre event: “At the president’s rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, Trump claimed that high prices due to the war with Iran are a ‘small price to pay for keeping the world safe—keeping our country safe.’ He went on: ‘They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.’ The crowd applauded the line.”
It’s that last sentence that really gets me. Trump seemingly gave his blessing to another country—one he launched a war against—wiping out millions of people in California, and his die-hard supporters, part of the dwindling band of Americans who still think there’s no greater entertainment than a MAGA rally, cheered him on.
Several attendees tapped into their inner Mike Johnson afterward, telling reporters that implicitly daring another country to nuke two huge American cities was fine because Trump was speaking at a campaign event. The Guardian article quoted one attendee as saying, “I defend his comments absolutely. It is not inappropriate to mention something like that now because you have to take it in the context in which it is spoken. If you look at that context, it’s appropriate for a rally in which the president is addressing his base.”
Current Issue
It’s as if, somehow, the venue launders the foulness of tongue-in-cheek treason by the commander in chief. But in reality there is no context in which Trump’s comment either makes sense or is “appropriate,” and the vast majority of Americans would have either been befuddled or outraged at the commander in chief’s incitement to violence against two of America’s largest cities.
Facing blowback, the White House communications team doubled down in defending Trump’s remark. Once again, in true Orwellian form, it demanded that the world ignore its own collective eyes and ears as to what Trump had clearly said and accused the media of being “buffoons” for reporting and broadcasting Trump’s own words.
There is a common theme here: Trump pushes every conceivable envelope, violates every notion of civility, decency, and common sense, and his team simply hands out more Kool-Aid and demands that the world slurp it up. Take Ken Paxton, the grotesquely corrupt and, it seems, inept Texas GOP Senate candidate. At one campaign rally after the next, Trump has “endorsed” Paxton by calling out his physical appearance, impugning his intelligence, denigrating his speaking style. And as the humiliations pile on, as a president with barely 30 percent approval ratings tells the crowds to pretend that he’s the one on the ballot—thus doling out yet another poison pellet to the actual candidate—Paxton just stands there, his shit-eating grin expanding like that of a Cheshire Cat fighting a bad case of hemorrhoids.
I have often wondered why Jim Jones’s lieutenants didn’t pull the plug before he urged hundreds of his followers to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. Or why, in the final days of the Third Reich, so many of Hitler’s officials, as well as on-the-ground followers, decided to stay the course and fight it out to the death. What is it about death cults that lures cultists into the final, fatal trap?
Trump is, in real time, providing the world with yet another example of such a cult in action. Flailing haplessly, he is trapped between an unpopular war and a hard place. Inflation is on the march; interest rates are rising, mortgages becoming ever more unaffordable, once-nearly-eliminated childhood diseases surging, and entire industries—including home healthcare—are under assault as more and more immigrants are driven out of the country. By nearly two-to-one margins, poll after poll suggests that the general public is rejecting him. Huge numbers of independents are walking away from the GOP, and a not insignificant percentage of self-identified Republicans are also preparing to either cross the aisle in November or simply sit out the elections. In consequence, Republicans are on the defensive even in deep-red states such as Texas, Kansas, Ohio, and Florida.
In such an environment, one would think that GOP politicians would be going out of their way to distance themselves from their mad MAGA leader, if only to save their own political necks. Instead, as Trump grows more erratic and more extreme, they tether themselves even more tightly to him. Drink the Kool-Aid, fight the final battle, prepare for the political Rapture, he demands; and, one after the other, they line up to oblige.
More from The Nation
Let’s build an economy where patients, renters, and even youth hockey teams are given priority over investor profits.
Establishment Democrats obsessing over Hasan Piker’s every move seem to have no issue talking to Maher, despite his decades of open bigotry.
Houthi attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure heighten regional tensions and push up oil prices.
With more than 900,000 Puerto Rican voters, Florida can be won in 2026 and put in play for 2028. Give Angie Nixon the chance she deserves.