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Trump’s Die-Hards Are Taking Their Cultishness to New Lows

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.

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........

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