Meditations on the Cult

Donald Trump has damn near hypnotized millions of Americans into not just loving Vladimir Putin, but wanting to replicate the Putin regime in America

My mother was from Georgetown, Guyana. Georgetown. That’s the name of the Capitol. But on a regular basis, she would have to explain to Americans that she was not some lucky survivor of the 1978 massacre in Jonestown, the made-up “town” that was home to the American cult of a self-appointed, megolomanical, hack religious leader named Jim Jones and his mostly American followers. Again, Jonestown was not a Guyanese city — it was an American cult complex, where more than 900 men, women and children died of poisoning and gunfire at the hands of Jones’ henchmen, including an American congressman, Leo Ryan, along with five people trying to escape from Jonestown.

Jim Jones was a madman, who invented a religious movement centered around himself. And he led his ardent followers to their deaths because he feared he would be arrested for crimes including abuse, kidnapping, money laundering, and murder. So he would rather all of his followers die than he alone face the music.

This is a story about Donald Trump.

Trump, who is irreligious, from all of the available evidence, has created a cult around himself, too. His cultists adhere to him because he is famous and they liked him on The Apprentice. They ardently believe that he knows all the things about business, and strength, and running America, based on literally no evidence, and despite his long history of failing at business, the weakness with which he sucks up to global tyrants and his complete and utter failure at running America.

Trumpism is a cult. MAGA is a cult.

And Trump is damn near hypnotizing more and more Americans into his cult, including getting more than half of his followers to believe that Vladimir Putin is better than Joe Biden. Just take that in. Millions of Americans now revere Putin just like Trump does. And that’s awfully convenient for Trump, who wants to BE Vladimir Putin in America, complete with tanking our economy with abusive tariffs, locking up his political opponents and critics, or executing them, rounding up millions of immigrants, documented or undocumented, slapping Nazi-style serial numbers on them and putting them in concentration camps as they await a “bloody” mass deportation, and “protecting” women, which apparently means letting states monitor women’s pregnancies, banning abortion and birth control nationwide by enforcing the Comstock Act and other executive branch schemes, and hopefully never being in the same room with any of us, given his decades-long history of rape, fondling, ogling teenagers, general predation and creeping on his own daughter. Not to mention the creepy way he talks about women now…

How anyone favors this person for president is a shocking, eternal conundrum.

Except the simple answer is, Trump is damn near hypnotizing millions of low information Americans with his repeated, seemingly mindless droning. He simply repeats the insane things over and over and over again until they can be repeated, mindlessly, by millions of Americans who are so terrified of and hateful toward non-white immigrants they will eagerly vote to turn us into Putin’s Russia or Maduro’s Venezuela, maybe get into a shooting war with Iran, while paying extravagant prices for food and other basic needs and watching unemployment spike due to his insane mass tariff and mass deportation plans, while their fellow Americans face the risk of death due to denial of healthcare … and let’s not leave out those concentraton camps, just so they don’t have to hear a foreign sounding accent at the WalMart.

God help us if he and his Project 2025 insane clown posse win.