<....A ProPublica analysis showed that between 2014 and 2018, Musk’s wealth increased by $13.9 billion, but he paid a “true tax rate” of only 3.27 percent on that growth.

If Musk gives his 14 children his shares of stock when he dies, his heirs won’t be taxed on any of the increases in their value over Musk’s lifetime because of a loophole in the tax laws called “stepped-up basis at death.”

So Musk’s real purpose in starting a third party can’t be to reduce the federal budget deficit. And it’s obviously not to get big money out of American politics.

What is it?

One hint comes in the people from whom Musk is seeking advice for his third party. The New York Times reported yesterday that Musk recently spoke about the task with the blogger Curtis Yarvin.

Yarvin has no particular expertise in the mechanics of American politics, but he comes as close as anyone to being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement in America.

Yarvin is at the center of a group of libertarian tech bros that includes Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. JD Vance has cited Yarvin’s writing.

In Yarvin’s view, real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.

He believes democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. “There is no such thing as ‘autocracy’ versus ‘democracy,’” Yarvin has written. “All government is arbitrary, unlimited and contingent.…All stable regimes are monarchical or oligarchic in practice.”

Democracies, says Yarvin, should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” — wealthy oligarchs — select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

Yarvin criticized Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency for not assuming <enough> power.

So it seems we’ve come to Musk’s real purpose in starting a third party. Not to reduce the federal debt (which could be done by raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy like Musk). Certainly not to get big money out of politics (Musk is Exhibit A in how big money subverts democracy).

It’s to finish the job Musk’s money in the 2024 election began and his DOGE continued once Trump was in office: the total annihilation of American democracy.>

<When someone crosses Donald Trump, the retribution tends to come fast and fierce. But when Sen. Susan Collins of Maine voted last week against his One Big Beautiful Bill, a tax- and safety net-cuts behemoth, the President was atypically silent. That may be the biggest indicator of just how much danger Collins is in as she faces re-election in Maine in 2026.

Collins’ opposition was not enough to kill the giant domestic bill that may be the lone legislative lift of the 119th Congress. She was the 50th nay, which forced Vice President J.D. Vance’s to provide a tie breaking 51st vote. Collins is seldom the deciding factor; she did not sink Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court and voted for all but one of Trump’s second-term Cabinet picks, while also voting against Kash Patel’s nomination to lead the FBI. Her protest votes are as strategic as they are symbolic; FiveThirtyEight found she voted with Trump 67% of the time during his first term. Plus, on an early test vote on this bill, she let it proceed as she continued, unsuccessfully, to negotiate for carve-outs for rural hospitals.

Collins is the lone Senator up for re-election next year in a state that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris carried in 2024. Democrats have yet to settle on a favored candidate to become the nominee although all eyes are on Maine Gov. Janet Mills, the tough-minded former prosecutor who stared down Trump at the White House and refused to comply with his administration’s anti-transgender athlete orders. State Democrats have other options at the ready if the 77-year-old Mills passes and are primed either way to make Collins own the Trump record, especially her votes for his Supreme Court nominees in his first term. While she was re-elected after those votes, the Justices have since overturned a half-century of precedent on abortion rights in Roe.

Republicans in Washington, meanwhile, have seemingly endless patience with Collins and understand her savvy. Her tangles with Trump have been largely performative, not predictive. She is no John McCain, who with a single thumbs-down signal thwarted Trump’s first-term effort to repeal Obamacare. Cynics say that Collins shows independence only when it doesn’t really make a difference; no one on her side of the aisle really unloaded on her after the vote against the latest package. Most had her back, saying they understood her choice.

Collins, a powerful player and chair of the all-important Appropriations panel, is not terribly difficult to understand, politically speaking. She has never won re-election by less than 8 points despite her home state’s fickle politics. The last time the state’s majority vote went for a Republican presidential candidate was in 1988, also the last year a Democrat won a Senate race in the state.

But her net approval rating sank 12 percentage points—more than any other Senator’s numbers—between the first and second quarters of this year, according to Morning Consult. Her disapproval number stood at 51%, up from a 44% average in the January-March window.

And she is definitely viewed less warmly than when she was at a comparable point ahead of her 2020 bid. In 2019, 52% of Mainers had a favorable impression of Collins, according to Morning Consult polling. Today, the number is 42%.

This suggests she’s going to have a trickier time than when she was at the comparable point ahead of her last campaign. In 2019, ahead of her 2020 bid, her net positive numbers were 13 points. Today she’s at a net negative of 9 points, according to the same pollsters. That means roughly 1-in-5 Maine voters have changed their minds about Collins in a state where her last victory was secured by less than 9 points.

Collins’ allies, meanwhile, offer a different read, noting that she enjoyed a net positive of 2 points in September of last year, and that has moved to a net positive of 4 points last month, according to an independent survey from Pan Atlantic Research....>

<....As a practical matter, about 34,000 Mainers stand to lose health coverage as the bill was drafted. Two solar projects in the state were put on hold even before the bill passed. Hospitals were already bracing for shifting services. Collins’ no vote, in a rational world, made sense for her constituents.

But that may not help her. Among voters in Maine, a majority—including a majority of Republicans—says she does not deserve to be re-elected, according to polling from neighboring University of New Hampshire. A striking 71% of all Maine voters say this should be her last term, and 57% of Republicans agree, according to a survey taken in April. That’s a simply brutal number.

Flipping ahead a few pages in the same UNH binder, things get even worse. Their survey finds Collins with a favorability number of just 12%, landing a 58% unfavorable number. Among Republicans, the gap is a 19% positive to a 43% negative.

The University of New Hampshire Survey Center found the bill was deeply unpopular, according to a June poll. A 58% majority did not want to see the bill pass, including 72% of independent voters.

Still, Democrats are realistic about what they face. While Collins has just $3 million in her account, she raised almost $31 million for her 2020 bid and won her 2014 campaign with less than $6 million in spending to notch 67% of the vote. Senate Republicans’ campaign committee is, first and foremost, an incumbent-retention operation and will have her back.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, are going to be defending tricky seats in Georgia, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Michigan, and Colorado. They would need a net pick-up run of four seats to take a majority, and the path to that would require upsets in Trump-backing states like Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Iowa, and Texas, plus holding every seat that is currently blue.

So Collins is facing some pretty lousy poll numbers and is going to be dogged by her no vote that had no real upside. The vote against Trump is not going to be the salve that cures her dour numbers. She defied Republicans but is not going to get any love from Democrats. She’s going to be hounded by a bill she did not support. Plus, the headwinds are historic—and that’s before Trump decides whether he will launch his own revenge.>

<Late on Tuesday, we had another missive from the mists of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket—an unsigned opinion that confirmed for the moment the president’s right to clear-cut the entire administrative structure of the executive branch’s agencies and departments. From The Guardian:

Extending a winning streak for the US president, the justices on Tuesday lifted a lower court order that had frozen sweeping federal layoffs known as “reductions in force” while litigation in the case proceeds. The decision could result in hundreds of thousands of job losses at the departments of agriculture, commerce, health and human services, state, treasury, veterans affairs and other agencies.

In February, Trump announced “a critical transformation of the federal bureaucracy” in an executive order directing agencies to prepare for a government overhaul aimed at significantly reducing the workforce and gutting offices. In its brief unsigned order on Tuesday, the supreme court said Trump’s administration was “likely to succeed on its argument that the executive order” and a memorandum implementing his order were lawful. The court said it was not assessing the legality of any specific plans for layoffs at federal agencies.

Of course not. That would mean that the carefully manufactured conservative majority on the Supreme Court was carefully manufactured in order to advance right-wing policy goals and not simply to “call balls and strikes,” as Chief Justice John Roberts once described his job. And as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in her solo dissent, the majority’s “We’re not judging the president’s actions, but we do think they’re legitimate” argument was a shuck from start to finish.

Given the fact-based nature of the issue in this case and the many serious harms that result from allowing the President to dramatically reconfigure the Federal Government, it was eminently reasonable for the District Court to maintain the status quo while the courts evaluate the lawfulness of the President’s executive action. At bottom, this case is about whether that action amounts to a structural overhaul that usurps Congress’s policymaking prerogatives—and it is hard to imagine deciding that question in any meaningful way after those changes have happened. Yet, for some reason, this Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation.

Jackson has made it her brief to push back against the pronouncements of the shadow docket. And she clearly enjoys her work. From ABC News:

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her first public appearance since the Supreme Court sharply limited the ability of federal judges to check presidential power, said Saturday she believes recent rulings by the court’s conservative majority pose an “existential threat to the rule of law.”

“Sometimes we have cases that have those kinds of implications, and, you know, are there cases in which there are issues that have that kind of significance? Absolutely,” Jackson told ABC News Live Prime anchor Linsey Davis during a wide-ranging conversation at the Global Black Economic Forum.

Brown touched off a hooley on the bench with her dissent in Trump v. CASA, the case that many observers—including Brown and, well, me—see as a prelude for a move against the concept of birthright citizenship. Brown wrote that the decision would result in a situation in which “executive power will become completely uncontainable.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett found this blunt mobilization of obvious truth so unbearably déclassé that she unleashed her inner Karen in response. This, in turn, prompted an interesting piece in The New York Times....>

<....Her opinions, sometimes joined by no other justice, have been the subject of scornful criticism from the right and have raised questions about her relationships with her fellow justices, including the other two members of its liberal wing.

Mercy me, questions are being raised. Can gathering clouds be far behind? However, the piece later is quite plain in calling out the obvious privilege behind Barrett’s suburban outrage.

Justice Jackson added her own dissent, speaking only for herself. She said the majority imperiled the rule of law, creating “a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes.” That prompted an extended response from Justice Barrett, the next most junior justice and the author of the majority opinion. It did not stint on condescension.

Yoicks!

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Justice Barrett wrote, in an opinion signed by all five of the other Republican appointees. “The principal dissent focuses on conventional legal terrain,” Justice Barrett went on, referring to Justice Sotomayor’s opinion. “Justice Jackson, however, chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever.”

The cynical mind suggests that it’s really Jackson’s outspoken opposition to the use of the shadow docket that is the real reason why the carefully manufactured conservative majority sent its newest member out to push back. Jackson’s patience with the shadow-docket sleight of hand has run out.

“This fly-by-night approach to the work of the Supreme Court is not only misguided,” she wrote in April, when the court said that Venezuelan men the administration was seeking to deport to El Salvador had sued in the wrong court. “It is also dangerous.” In a dissent from an emergency ruling in June granting Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to sensitive Social Security data, Justice Jackson accused the majority of giving Mr. Trump favored treatment. “What would be an extraordinary request for everyone else,” she wrote, “is nothing more than an ordinary day on the docket for this administration.”

Justice Jackson has a chance to be reckoned one day as the justice who rang all the alarm bells. If nobody listened, that’s on them.>

<As monstrous floodwaters surged across central Texas late last week, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency leapt into action, preparing to deploy critical search and rescue teams and life-saving resources, like they have in countless past disasters.

But almost instantly, FEMA ran into bureaucratic obstacles, four officials inside the agency told CNN.

As CNN has previously reported, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — whose department oversees FEMA — recently enacted a sweeping rule aimed at cutting spending: Every contract and grant over $100,000 now requires her personal sign-off before any funds can be released.

For FEMA, where disaster response costs routinely soar into the billions as the agency contracts with on-the-ground crews, officials say that threshold is essentially “pennies,” requiring sign-off for relatively small expenditures.

In essence, they say the order has stripped the agency of much of its autonomy at the very moment its help is needed most.

“We were operating under a clear set of guidance: lean forward, be prepared, anticipate what the state needs, and be ready to deliver it,” a longtime FEMA official told CNN. “That is not as clear of an intent for us at the moment.”

For example, as central Texas towns were submerged in rising waters, FEMA officials realized they couldn’t pre-position Urban Search and Rescue crews from a network of teams stationed regionally across the country.

In the past, FEMA would have swiftly staged these teams, which are specifically trained for situations including catastrophic floods, closer to a disaster zone in anticipation of urgent requests, multiple agency sources told CNN.

But even as Texas rescue crews raced to save lives, FEMA officials realized they needed Noem’s approval before sending those additional assets. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began, multiple sources told CNN.

Homeland Security officials have defended the federal response in Texas and President Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle FEMA and shift more responsibility for disaster response to states.

Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokeswoman, told CNN that Noem did not need to authorize additional FEMA resources initially because the department used other DHS search and rescue assets. She added that over time, as a need for FEMA resources arose, those requests received Noem’s approval.

“FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens,” McLaughlin told CNN in a statement. “The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”

Other homeland security components have assisted, including the US Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection.

One Texas state official told CNN that the Texas emergency management division has been interacting with FEMA “in the way we always do for disasters like this.” The official added that Texas has “quite a bit of capabilities” related to disaster management on its own.

But the additional red tape required at FEMA added another hurdle to getting critical federal resources deployed when hours counted.

Texas did request aerial imagery from FEMA to aid search and rescue operations, a source told CNN, but that was delayed as it awaited Noem’s approval for the necessary contract.

FEMA staff have also been answering phones at a disaster call center, where, according to one agency official, callers have faced longer wait times as the agency awaited Noem’s approval for a contract to bring in additional support staff.

The chaos has exposed a deeper uncertainty within FEMA about its ability to respond, its mission, and its authority under the Trump administration — just as hurricane and wildfire seasons have gotten underway. Officials within FEMA warn that if the disaster had spanned a larger area and multiple states, the confusion and delays could have been even more severe.

For months, FEMA officials have been warning that the agency is unprepared amid a mass exodus of experienced emergency managers and the looming threat of the agency being dismantled.

CNN has reached out to FEMA for comment.

Difficult scenes, different model

After the skies over central Texas opened up and caused waters to rise more than 23 feet in under an hour in the early morning hours of Friday, dozens were swept away in the raging flood waters that surged around the Guadalupe River where campers and merrymakers had been looking forward to the Independence Day weekend.

Five days later, the death toll of nearly 120 people continues to climb. More than 160 are still missing....>

<....Trump approved a major disaster declaration for Texas on Sunday, July 6.

By Monday night, only 86 FEMA staffers had been deployed, according to internal FEMA data seen by CNN — a fraction of the typical response for a disaster of this scale.

By Tuesday night, the federal response expanded to 311 staffers deployed, the data showed.

Multiple FEMA officials told CNN that they were taken aback by the agency’s relatively limited response in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.

The tragedy in Texas has made one thing clear: The buck now stops with Noem.

Her office has delegated little authority to acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson, who, as of Wednesday morning, has yet to visit Texas since the flooding began, multiple FEMA officials told CNN.

“DHS and its components have taken an all-hands-on-desk approach to respond to recovery efforts in Kerrville. FEMA has deployed extensive staff to support Texas response and recovery operations based on staff skills and requirements,” McLaughlin told CNN.

The agency has activated its regional response center in Austin and sent a liaison officer to Kerrville, she said.

“DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and is reprioritizing appropriated dollars. Secretary Noem is delivering accountability to the U.S. taxpayer, which Washington bureaucrats have ignored for decades at the expense of American citizens.”

Texas, which has one of the most robust emergency management systems in the country, has managed this disaster largely on its own and leaned on its state and local search and rescue teams in the early hours of the disaster. More than 2,100 people have been deployed across 20 state agencies, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office has said.

To bolster the response at the outset, officials in Texas turned to the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC), a mutual aid agreement between states to share resources during disasters.

At least one state requested a guarantee that FEMA would cover the steep costs and potential damage to equipment, a promise the federal agency couldn’t make on the spot, though the issue was quickly resolved, two sources with knowledge of the matter told CNN.

All of this raises questions over the vision of emergency management Trump has laid out several times during this administration, in which states bear the brunt of the responsibility for disaster relief and FEMA is eventually “phased out.”

On Wednesday, Noem, his DHS secretary, called for the agency to be eliminated and remade after telling reporters the previous day: “We, as a federal government, don’t manage these disasters. The state does.”

“We come in and support them, and that’s exactly what we did in this situation,” she said.

Trump said: “You had people there as fast as anybody’s ever seen.”>

<Fox News hosts Charles Hurt and Rachel Campos-Duffy said Sunday President Donald Trump and his team should publicly address lingering questions about the Epstein investigation, arguing that only a full explanation — like detailing witnesses and interviews — can calm the unrest stirred by the president’s own Truth Social post.

In a post on his Truth Social platform Saturday evening, Trump wrote: “What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’ They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.”

Trump went on to say that his critics — from former President Barack Obama, “Crooked Hillary,” Comey, Brennan, and the Biden team — were behind the documents related to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

“They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so‑called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands," Trump added.

He continued: “Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it? They haven’t even given up on the John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. Files.”

Reacting to Trump’s comments, Hurt argued during Fox News's "Fox & Friends" that Trump and his team must do more to reassure the public.

“If there’s anybody who could walk in and say, ‘OK, we’ve resolved all of the questions and there is nothing here,’ it would be President Trump and his crew,” Hurt said, adding, “The problem is, you can’t really do it without giving some explanation. And there has to be some explanation. And I think that’s why you have a lot of people still pretty with a lot a very valid questions.”

Campos-Duffy echoed this sentiment, saying: “You can defuse this ticking time bomb if you simply get out there. You can’t tell me that a thousand people were hurt and that there are no people out there that we can arrest."

She added: "You can tell me that, ‘Sorry. We don’t have a list.’ Fine, don’t have a list. Tell me who the perpetrators were. Let’s depose every single person who might have had a chance to get on that list, and might have been out there at that island and let’s talk to them. Let’s find out what happened.”

A wave of disillusionment swept through the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement after the Department of Justice and FBI recently declared there was no Epstein “client list” and reaffirmed that Epstein’s death was a suicide.

Right‑wing figures such as Laura Loomer, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FLa), and Robby Starbuck publicly criticized Bondi for allegedly misleading the base, with several calling for her resignation over what they view as a betrayal.>

<Former FBI agent Michael Fienberg has gone public, pointing out that the agency, under the leadership of Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, is purging itself of people who are not members of the Trump cult (my phrase, not his).

Similar cult-like behavior is on vivid display with the White House press secretary, the head of DHS, and the head of the Department of Justice — among numerous other administration officials and elected Republicans — regularly spouting lies and half-truths that target women, immigrants, and Democrats.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is implying that the children who died in the Texas floods were the victims of a nefarious plot — presumably by Democrats or Jews who operate space lasers — to modify the weather, completely ignoring the fact that Republican-aligned fossil fuel billionaires have been engaged in a half-century-long scheme to sabotage our atmosphere with their carbon dioxide emissions in exchange for trillions of dollars in profits. Some of which, no doubt, have been shared with Greene or her campaign.

Multiple administration officials, elected Republicans, and rightwing media cult leaders on platforms like Fox “News” have been amplifying the racist, antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory,” that wealthy Jews are paying to “replace” white people in America with Blacks, Mexicans, and other people of color. This has led to ICE becoming the largest police force in America, with a budget larger than that of the entire Russian military, soon to be sweeping a neighborhood near you in their never-ending hunt for brown-skinned people.

Donald Trump didn’t need to lure his followers into a remote jungle, like Jim Jones did in Guyana. He didn’t need to physically isolate them from the rest of the world. Instead, Trump built his Jonestown right here at home, within the boundaries of our republic, brick by brick. He did it using over 30,000 documented lies, fear, rage, and the intoxicating promise of belonging.

Today, tens of millions of Americans are trapped inside Trump’s reality-warping cult. And just as Jones’ followers drank poisoned Kool-Aid believing it was salvation, Trump’s followers have swallowed his Big Lies and are now willing to sacrifice our Constitution, our democracy, and our future on the altar of one man’s insatiable ego.

This is an old story in new packaging.

Jim Jones wasn’t always a madman. In the beginning, he offered something people desperately wanted: community, belonging, equality. He drew in the lonely, the marginalized, the disillusioned. He offered them meaning, dignity, and the hope of a better world. But slowly, he twisted that hope into a tool of control, weaponizing his followers’ trust for his own wealth, power, and self-aggrandizement.

Donald Trump followed a similar cult leader’s path.

He didn’t invent the grievances he exploited. For decades, America’s middle class was gutted by Reaganomics and neoliberal trade policies. Jobs were shipped overseas. Unions were crushed. Wages stagnated while billionaires like Trump amassed obscene wealth.

Trump didn’t cause that pain, but he channeled it. He told working-class Americans that he alone could restore their lost greatness. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, he bellowed: “I alone can fix it.”

That wasn’t a campaign promise. It was a cult leader’s declaration. Like Jones, Trump positioned himself not as a servant of the people, but as their savior, the one indispensable man without whom all hope would be lost.

All cults, whether religious or political, thrive on division and a sense of victimhood. Jim Jones taught his followers that outsiders were out to destroy them, that they were surrounded by enemies, traitors, and saboteurs. He warned that the CIA, the media, and shadowy conspirators would annihilate Jonestown unless his people followed him without question.

Trump operates from the same playbook.

His enemies list is long: immigrants, Black voters, Muslims, women, Democrats, journalists, scientists, the “deep state,” election officials, even members of his own party who dare to tell the truth. He has spent years feeding his followers a steady diet of paranoia, victimhood, and grievance, convincing them that the only thing standing between them and ruin is him.

And just as Jones’ followers were taught to see dissent as treason, Trump’s followers are conditioned to see any criticism of him as an attack on themselves. They’ve surrendered their own personal identities to him and his cult. When he tells them that an election they lost was stolen, they believe it; not because the evidence says so, but because Trump says so. And in a cult, the cult leader’s word is truth....>

<....Jones kept his followers in a physical jungle, cut off from the outside world. Trump does the same psychologically with the help of billionaire-backed media. His repeated attacks on the press as “the enemy of the people” are no accident: they are a deliberate strategy to isolate his followers in an information silo, where only his voice matters.

Fox “News,” Truth Social, MAGA podcasts, and a network of social media influencers form the walls of this new Jonestown. Alternative facts replace real ones. And when reality intrudes — when courts reject Trump’s lawsuits, when audits confirm his losses — his followers simply double down. “That’s just what the enemy wants us to believe.”

It’s classic cult behavior. And it’s why millions remain convinced that Trump won in 2020, that the COVID vaccine was a hoax or a plot, that January 6th was “legitimate political discourse.” Like Jones, Trump has taught his followers to see the world not as it is, but as he tells them it is.

When Jones’ utopia began to crumble — when defections and investigations threatened his power and a congressional delegation arrived to expose his lies and manipulations — he led his followers into mass suicide. Over 900 men, women, and children perished, drinking poisoned Kool-Aid to prove their loyalty.

Trump, faced with the reality of defeat in 2020, incited his followers to violence rather than admit loss. January 6th was America’s political Jonestown: a desperate, delusional last stand to keep their messiah in power. Trump didn’t just sit back as the Capitol was attacked. He watched with satisfaction, refusing to act for hours, while the very heart of our democracy was desecrated in his name.

And to this day, he defends that insurrection, calling those convicted of violent crimes “hostages,” giving pardons, and encouraging more violence if he’s indicted or loses again. Jones destroyed his followers; Trump is willing to destroy our nation.

I wrote about this back in the summer of 2023 in an article titled, “Will America Face “Narcissistic Collapse” as Trump Descends into Legal Hell?” Narcissistic collapse is what happens when psychopathic narcissists face defeat and humiliation and strike out against the world around them.

Think Hitler in his bunker when my old friend Armin Lehmann, then a 16-year-old Hitler Youth, handed him the news that the war was lost. Armin wrote a book about his experience, In Hitler’s Bunker: A Boy Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of the Fuhrer’s Last Days, which we discussed extensively when he was writing it and during the three years we traveled the world together, lecturing mostly across Europe and the Far East.

Hitler, in those final weeks — Armin told me and the historical record verifies — actually welcomed the destruction of Germany by American and Soviet bombs and tanks.

He hadn’t failed: his narcissism and the cult he had created and surrounded himself with wouldn’t let him confront that.

Instead, in his mind, the German people had failed, his generals had failed, his soldiers had failed. They had failed Germany, but, more importantly they had failed him and his cult — and he wanted them punished for failing him.

When he was finally pushed into full-blown narcissistic collapse — those final days that Armin spent with him — he succumbed to the fate of many severe narcissists who experience a failure so undeniable that it provokes full-blown narcissistic collapse: he killed his wife and then turned the gun on himself.

In the final stages of narcissistic collapse, long before suicide becomes an option, first comes the blaming and the attempts to punish others.

We see this now with Trump blaming the media, the courts, and the Democrats he now openly brags that he “hates” and encourages his cult followers to hate as well.

Historians and political scientists have long warned us about men like Trump. In Strongmen and on her Lucid Substack newsletter, Ruth Ben-Ghiat traces the path of authoritarians like Mussolini, Putin, and Trump: they all consistently cultivate a cult of personality, demonize opponents, destroy the press, capture the courts, collaborate with oligarchs, and use violence as a political tool.

Trump has followed that playbook to the letter....>

<....Jason Stanley, in How Fascism Works and on his Forward Substack, identifies Trump’s tactics: appeals to a mythic past, relentless lying, glorification of violence, and the creation of a “victim” identity for the dominant group. Steven Hassan, one of America’s foremost experts on cults, calls Trumpism a “destructive political cult” in his book The Cult of Trump and on his Substack newsletter Freedom of Mind.

These aren’t wild theories. They’re the sober assessments of professional scholars and historians who’ve studied how democracies fall and how cults rise.

It’s easy to see Jones’ Kool-Aid as the symbol of his evil, but let’s not forget: Trump’s lies have already cost real lives.

His downplaying of COVID, his undermining of vaccines and masks, his promotion of quack cures like hydroxychloroquine and bleach weren’t just irresponsible: they were deadly. Hundreds of thousands of Americans would be alive today if Trump hadn’t turned public health into a culture war battlefield.

And now, his Big Lies about the election and the “deep state” are poisoning faith in our democracy itself. In poll after poll, a majority of Republicans say they believe Trump won in 2020. They believe it so deeply that they’re passing laws to suppress votes, installing loyalists to oversee elections, and preparing to reject any future result that doesn’t favor their Dear Leader. The poison is spreading and fast.

So what comes next?

Jim Jones didn’t start out plotting mass suicide. He got there one lie, one power grab, one act of cruelty at a time. Trump’s path is no different. His first term tested the boundaries. His second is breaking them.

Already, Trump openly promised dictatorship “on day one.” He’s already pursuing “retribution,” purging the government, and rounding up immigrants into camps. He’s gutted the civil service, weaponized the justice department, and is today using the military for domestic crackdowns.

This isn’t hyperbole. It’s all on the record. And it’s what happens when a cult leader gains the reins of state power, as the world has seen repeatedly throughout history.

We don’t have to follow Trump into the abyss. We can refuse the poison. We can choose the hard work of repairing our democracy, telling the truth, and holding this would-be strongman accountable.

But time is short. The cult is deep, and its leader is relentless.

History tells us where this path ends. Jonestown. Berlin 1933. Rome in 1922. Moscow in 2020. The question is whether we have the courage to change course before it’s too late.

Trump may not have led us into a jungle, but he has led millions into a psychological wilderness, where lies are truth, enemies are everywhere, and only he can lead the way out. Jim Jones led his people to destruction, all in the name of salvation. Trump is leading America down the same road.

We must say no. We must tell the truth. And we must do it now.>

<[Event "21st World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1993.06.30"]
[EventDate "1993"]
[Round "2.7"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Roush, John Everett"]
[Black "Alexopoulos, Georgios"]
[ECO "A21"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 d5 3.c4 c6 4.cxd5 cxd5 5.Nc3 Nc6 6.Bf4 a6 7.e3 Bg4 8.Be2 Bxf3 9.Bxf3 e6 10.O-O Bd6 11.Bxd6 Qxd6 12.Na4 Nd7 13.Rc1 O-O 14.Nc5 Nxc5 15.Rxc5 b6 16.Rc3 Rfc8 17.Qe2 g6 18.Rfc1 Kg7 19.Qd1 Na7 20.Be2 Rxc3 21.Rxc3 Nb5 22.Rc2 Ra7 23.a4 Nc7 24.Qc1 Ne8 25.Rc3 Qb4 26.Qc2 Nd6 27.Qb3 Qxb3 28.Rxb3 b5 29.axb5 axb5 30.f3 Ra5 31.Kf2 Kf8 32.Rc3 Ra2 33.Rb3 Ra5 34.Rc3 Ra2 35.Rb3 1/2-1/2>

<[Event "21st World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1993.07.03"]
[EventDate "1993"]
[Round "5"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[White "Alexopoulos, Georgios"]
[Black "Bisguier, Arthur"]
[ECO "C44"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<President Donald Trump has found a new front in his war against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell - and a potential way to rid himself of the nation’s central banker.

Trump has made no secret of his distaste for Powell, whom he nominated to lead the Federal Reserve in 2017, primarily because of Powell’s refusal to lower interest rates, particularly in light of Trump’s decision to levy tariffs. This weekend, Trump announced that he would impose a 30 percent “reciprocal tariff” rate on Mexico, one of the United States’ biggest trading partners, and on the European Union.

Powell has said that the central bank needs time to see what effects tariffs will have on inflation and employment before making a determination on interest rates. This has prompted Trump to call Powell a “stupid person.”

The president can do little to remove Powell. Joe Biden re-nominated Powell for another five-year term in 2021 based on his steady leadership during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and his term would expire in May. Federal statute says the president can only remove Powell “for cause.”

And it looks like the White House has found a “cause.”

Last week, Russell Vought, the chairman of the Office of Management and Budget and a key architect of Project 2025, sent a letter to Powell criticizing him for running over budget. Vought assailed Powell for supposed renovations to the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building that houses the Fed, saying Powell approved VIP dining rooms, water features and premium marble.

On Sunday, Kevin Hassett, Trump’s director for the National Economic Council, appeared on ABC’s This Week, where host Jonathan Karl asked Hassett if the president had the authority to fire Powell.

“That’s a thing that’s being looked into, but certainly, if there’s cause, he does,” Hassett said. The director, who worked in the first Trump administration, has been floated as a potential replacement for Powell.

In response, the Federal Reserve took a surprising step during the weekend of putting up a “frequently asked questions” page about the building project. The page denied allegations that the renovation included plans for dining rooms, a VIP elevator or water features for the Eccles Building.

Powell’s tenure has not been perfect. Like many other officials in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Powell said that inflation would “wane” and famously said that inflation in 2021 would be “transitory.” That was not the case and the nation went through months of rapid price hikes.

He subsequently raised interest rates to break inflation, acknowledging some “pain to come.” But in the coming years, Powell largely succeeded in curbing inflation while the economy added jobs in Biden and Trump’s administrations.

All of this is immaterial though. Clearly, the White House is using the renovation as a pretext to fire Powell for a legitimate policy disagreement. Tariffs are an article of faith for the president and one of his few sincere beliefs on which he has not budged.

But almost every major economist has said that the cost of imposing would go directly to consumers.

And given the fact that it would take a while to see the actual effects of tariffs, combined with the fact that Trump has repeatedly paused them, it would make sense for the Federal Reserve to see what effects the tariffs have on the economy before taking action on interest rates. That runs counter to the president’s desire for every major federal appointee and employee to behave in fealty to his agenda, even though taxpayers do not fund the Federal Reserve, but rather through interest on government securities that it holds.

Almost any time that Trump hints at sacking Powell, the stock market proceeds to take a hit, which seems to cause him to pull back. But if Trump can create a seemingly plausible cause to dismiss Powell, he can finally install someone who is a loyalist to the central bank.

And don’t expect Congress to take action if even the dismissal would on flimsy charges, given almost no Republican wants to stand up to Trump on any legitimate policy.

All of this serves as just the latest test to see how far many ostensibly independent agencies Trump can break, and whether he can do so with the consent of the guardrails on the executive branch.>

<The Trump administration on Tuesday asked an appellate court for permission to continue warrantless arrests in Southern California as part of controversial immigration enforcement efforts.

In a 51-page filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, the U.S. Department of Justice requested emergency relief in the form of an immediate administrative stay — as well as a broader stay pending appeal of the underlying case — to pause the temporary restraining orders issued by a Los Angeles-based district court late last week.

The crux of the dispute is both the factual way Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are conducting immigration sweeps in the nation's second largest city and the executive branch's basic legal authority to conduct such sweeps. One of the government's central arguments is that it was not given enough time to prepare.

"[T]he district court has entered a sweeping, district-wide injunction placing coercive restraints on lawful immigration enforcement affecting every immigration stop and detention," the stay application begins. "The district court thought the issues presented were sufficiently urgent that she afforded the government only two business days to respond to hundreds of pages of submissions and issued the injunction in a written decision only days later."

The plaintiffs filed their underlying lawsuit earlier this month.

Acting fast, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong — a Joe Biden appointee — set an expedited briefing schedule and, in turn, granted two temporary restraining orders: one for individuals who allege their constitutional rights have been violated by deportation dragnets; the second for attorneys who claim they are being blocked from conferring with their clients, also in violation of the Constitution.

In her ruling, Frimpong chided the government for conducting raids based on the "apparent race or ethnicity" of the people being targeted – as well as other what she found to be other impermissible factors like their language, accent, location, and line of work.

In their stay application, the government says it did not use "skin color" alone at least in relation to one of the plaintiffs – but largely seeks to vindicate the notion that such factors could, in fact, be permissible reasons to arrest someone without a warrant.

"[I]n trying to reduce the Fourth Amendment test to a formula by identifying a list of 'irrelevant' factors, the court grievously erred," the appeal reads. "The Fourth Amendment imposes a totality-of-the-circumstances test, and it is entirely possible that one's language, location, or type of work could be relevant in a particular factual context. Trying to develop bright-line rules in this context is a fool's errand."

This argument somewhat echoes comments made by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Fox News over the weekend.

"We never ran our operations that way," Noem said. "We always built our operations, our investigations, on case work … and that is always how this has been done. It's been done exactly how law enforcement has operated for many years in this country, and ICE is out there making sure we get the worst of the worst off the streets."

While all but steering clear of the race discussion, the government argues the detentions of each plaintiff did, in fact, pass the test for "reasonable suspicion" – arrest without a warrant – under the Fourth Amendment. But, the appeal reiterates, the judge did not allow enough time for the DOJ to fully brief the case.

"Under federal law, the government only conducts warrantless arrest where officers have reasonable suspicion, based on specific articulable facts," the appeal goes on. "But the court's broad, structural injunction will have a chilling effect on that enforcement, because it threatens officers with contempt sanctions if the court retrospectively disagrees with their view of whether reasonable suspicion was satisfied on particular facts. And that risk is potent, given that the court reached its judgment about the past arrests of three named Plaintiffs here, without giving the government a meaningful opportunity to marshal the facts and prove that reasonable suspicion did exist."

The DOJ, in its filling, and in line with the Trump administration's general tenor against injunctions barring its behavior, says the district court clearly overstepped its bounds. And, again, the speed of the judge's work is remarked upon in a negative light....>

<....From the stay application, at length:

[O]n the eve of the July 4 holiday, [the plaintiffs] filed an "emergency" ex parte motion asking the court to impose a straight-jacket injunction that would vastly restrict the government's ability to stop and detain anyone on suspicion of being unlawfully present in the United States. The court gave the government just two business days to respond to hundreds of pages of submissions, and largely rubber-stamped Plaintiffs' proposed order just days later. The result is a sweeping, district-wide injunction that threatens to hobble lawful immigration enforcement by hanging a Damocles sword of contempt over every immigration stop.

The stay application, however, sees the aforementioned sword cutting soon – and deep. The government goes on to warn against the likelihood of a further injunction with even broader terms.

The DOJ argues the current injunction "is indefensible on every level" and "appears to be a first step to placing federal immigration enforcement under judicial monitorship."

"It is untenable for a district judge to single-handedly 'restructure the operations' of federal immigration enforcement," the filing goes on. "And make no mistake, that is exactly what this district court is doing. Indeed, the current injunction is only the start, the court has ordered the government to show cause why it should not also be required to develop policies, compel agents to undergo training, and even share records of each and every stop with the ACLU going forward. This judicial takeover cannot be allowed to stand."

In their opposition to the administrative stay, the plaintiffs say the government is complaining too much after defending itself too little.

"The court below considered a 'mountain of evidence' that Defendants likely are engaged in a pattern and practice of detaining people in the Central District of California during 'roving' immigration patrols without reasonable suspicion that the person to be seized is unlawfully present in the United States," the opposition filing begins. "The court gave Defendants nearly a week to provide contrary evidence, at their request."

And, to hear the plaintiffs tell it, the government has substantially overstated the restrictions currently put in place by the lower court.

"Contrary to Defendants' unsupported attorney argument, the order plainly allows Defendants to continue enforcing the immigration laws, including by engaging in targeted enforcement and voluntary questioning of persons present in certain locations," the opposition motion continues. "But it properly prohibits Defendants from relying solely on four factors to deprive people of their liberty, which this Circuit has repeatedly held cannot suffice for reasonable suspicion: apparent race or ethnicity; Spanish language or accent; location; and occupation.">