Former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean (D-VT) said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “The Beat” that former President Donald Trump is like Jim Jones, the cult leader.
Guest-host Jason Johnson said, “How concerned are you when you see every political party in this country devoted to committing ignorance that combatting lifesaving methods in this country?”
Dean said, “It’s pretty frightening, really. The CPAC people have gotten more and more sort of off the charts, and Trump has always been a little nuts. The thing that is so ironic about this is the people who they are killing in Missouri, for example, are actually Trump voters. Because the Trump voters have a much higher percentage of people, who are not vaccinated exactly because of this garbage the former president is putting out. They are not being vaxxed. In southern Missouri, which is a conservative part of the state and a conservative part of the country, you have the death rate going up hugely. The highest increase in death rates have been in places like Mississippi and Alabama, Arkansas and Missouri that is where people believe this. This has become a cult. There is rationality behind this. It is a cult based on anger, fear and ignorance.”
Johnson said, “Do you think the Republicans just hate their own constituents? Because if their constituents are most likely to be the 99% dying in COVID from this new Delta variant, shouldn’t COVID vaccine acceptance be a key part of any campaign platform in order to literally to keep your constituents upright and safe for next year?”
Dean said, “These guys are not interested in serving the country. This is like Jim Jones in Guyana. It really is. Trump is Jim Jones. 900 of his followers died, some of whom did not go willingly, but he mesmerized them. Trump has got these people mesmerized. That is principally because these are ineffective people. They’ve lost their own agency. They have given up their own hope. So they did what the German’s did in the depression. They put their faith in somebody who turned out to be a mad man. Trump has a lot of deficits. He is lazy, he is not very smart, but he is incredibly skilled at exploiting discomfort and anger. That’s what he’s doing. Just as the Germans did, people are going to pay for this with their lives, and they already are.”
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