This article compares Trump to Jim Jones.
--Kim
Never doubt WHAT made all the Followers of Jim Jones drink that Koolaid..MAGA are the modern day version of that cult .. they are them !
Where Trump’s sidewalk ends 
In November of 1978, the Reverend Jim Jones ordered his followers to drink grape flavoured punch laced with cyanide — children and babies first. Before he ordered them to commit suicide he told them, “How very much I have loved you. How very much I have tried my best to give you the good life. But in spite of all I have tried, a handful of our people with their lies have made our life impossible.”
Jones, a charismatic cult leader, led a group of a thousand people from California to a leased compound in the jungles of Guyana, South America. He promised them utopia. Instead, he gave them forced labour, public humiliation and propaganda — broadcast over loudspeakers 24-hours a day. It was a tough place to get a good night’s sleep.
In place of a paradise, he gave them a highly restrictive prison camp. He confiscated their passports, medications and life savings. In spite of this, most of his followers continued to worship him. A small number of them saw him for the monster that he was and wanted out.
The ones that wanted to leave were the ones that Jones referred to as the “handful of our people with their lies.” He said their daring to want to leave him was “the betrayal of a century.” To one of his followers he said, “Without me, life has no meaning.”
In the end, 908 of his followers lay dead. Jones either shot himself or was shot by someone else, it’s never been certain which. Democratic congressman Leo Ryan, 3 journalists and one of Jones’ followers were murdered trying to escape.
It is often said that people who are attracted to cults have certain psychological defects. Or they’re just stupid. Not necessarily so.
Just as the Dunning Kruger effect does not, strictly speaking, exclusively apply to the weak minded, the same can be said of people who join cults. It can happen to almost anybody. And therein lies the danger.
The best defence against falling captive to a cult is to cultivate critical thinking and to get into the habit of fact-checking all claims. Especially if those claims confirm what you wish to believe.
People like Jim Jones are very good at manipulating others. Like most conmen, he wasn’t born with this skill, he developed it over time. Cult leaders are almost always malignant narcissists or sociopaths. Jones was both.
So is Donald Trump. There are many worrying parallels between Jim Jones and Trump. I was particularly struck by these parallels when, as stated above, Jones characterised the act of a follower wanting to leave as “the betrayal of a century.”
When evidence was uncovered that Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election, Trump wrote, “Obama himself manufactured the Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX. Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe, and numerous others participated in this, THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY!”
“The betrayal of a century.” “The crime of the century.” Even their language is the same.
Cult leaders easily excuse their own moral shortcomings but treat the smallest insult against them as the blackest sin imaginable and in terms so draconian as to seem ridiculous. To those of us on the outside looking in it is ridiculous. But to the cult member it’s obvious, unimpeachable truth.
The amount of damage that Jim Jones inflicted on his followers was shocking and horrifying at the time. It still is. You might even say the damage he did was total. The scope of the power he had was limited to the men and women and children of his compound. And he destroyed them all.
Imagine what would have happened if Jones had been president of the United States.
Well, you don’t have to imagine it. In a very real sense, he is. This is something we have to keep clearly in mind. Trump and Jones are cut from the same cloth. Trump is capable of making his followers drink the KOOL-AID, so to speak. Or something worse.
Jim Jones showed us what happens when a malignant narcissist with power is backed into a corner. Trump is being backed into a corner right now, and it looks like a corner from which there is no escape.
His people are turning against him: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Ashley St Clair, Nick Fuentes, and so on. And tens of thousands of ordinary people who used to be MAGA have either publicly renounced the Trump cult or are quietly sneaking out the backdoor. Members of the Senate and Congress are turning against him, some publicly some privately.
So where will Trump’s sidewalk end, and what will he do when he gets to the end of it? I don’t know. We saw a mini demonstration of how Trump behaves when backed into a corner on January 6, 2021. Whatever he does this time you can rest assured it will be bolder, scarier and far more violent.
The best that we can hope for is that Trump’s calamitous bad health fails quickly and ends his miserable life as soon as possible. Because a thwarted malignant narcissist with almost unlimited power is the worst scenario imaginable.
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