We’re still 27 days away from the election, and Donald Trump has careened over the edge. Today’s speech in Palm Beach, Florida was a bizarre mix of conspiracy theory, victimhood and messianic, apocalyptic lunacy.
His nearly incoherent rambling — and the crowd’s outsized reactions to it — brought to mind the last days of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple. As Politico headlined their story on the speech, it was “Trump against the world.”
Yes, Trump really has reached that level of insanity:
“This is a conspiracy against you, the American people, and we cannot let this happen or continue,” he told supporters of alleged efforts to protect Hillary Clinton from accountability. “This is our moment of reckoning as a society and as a civilization itself.”
Trump’s entire speech was loaded with this sort of “end times” rhetoric. He told a tale of betrayal by the powerful elites — in the GOP, in the media and among the secret cabal of global special interests — who have conspired to defeat him, the only person who could save our nation from the ultimate catastrophe.
The parallels to Jim Jones’ final “sermon” are startling and frightening.
We've been so betrayed. We have been so terribly betrayed. (Music and singing) But we've tried and as (inaudible) ... if this only works one day it was worthwhile. (Applause.) Thank you.
...
Much of the news media seemed to have endorsed the idea that Peoples Temple was without merit. They heard and reported the story from the perspective of its critics without a significant attempt to look at it from the other side. The critics may have had some valid concerns about the nature of Peoples Temple, yet they could hardly be considered unbiased sources of information. Many of them had family or friends who had joined up with the group, something they were very much against and thus making it difficult for them to impartially judge the situation. But it is through the media that much of the public receives its information, and with this relative one-sidedness it is no wonder that people would simply condemn Peoples Temple as a deranged cult. There may have been evil, but there was probably good as well. The people who invested their lives in the group must have felt somewhere in their hearts that they were doing something worthwhile and even commendable.
Where does Trump go from here? There are 27 days left, and it’s only going to get worse for him. Undoubtedly, more women will come forward with stories about Trump’s assaults, and Trump’s campaign team, particularly Steve Bannon and David Bossie, will push their truly lunatic conspiracy theories even further. Given Trump’s current rhetoric and its trajectory, along with the violence and menace already present at his rallies, it is not hard to imagine him fomenting the kind savage insanity one finds in apocalyptic endings of intense cults.
As David Axelrod noted this morning on CNN, “I think it's going to be a rough 27 days for the country.”
But what of Donald Trump and his cult followers? When they are faced with the overwhelming reality of his final, crushing defeat at the hands of the “devil,” how will they react?
It’s an open, and horrifying, question.