The GOP is Still a Death Cult
The Texas energy crisis shows that the post-Trump GOP is just as sadistic as ever
In 2020, Donald Trump’s deadly combination of negligence and malice in response to the coronavirus pandemic led to the rise of the phrase death cult as a descriptor of the Republican Party.
Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote about how tribal politics led conservative Americans to eschew masks, endangering themselves and their families out of loyalty to Trump. The Los Angeles Times’ Matthew Fleischer similarly lamented the impossibility of working with a right-wing party seemingly hellbent on ensuring that the pandemic is far deadlier than necessary. Former Democratic congressman Beto O’Rourke called the Texas GOP a “death cult” with one reservation: “they want you to do the dying,” not themselves.
The label was hardly hyperbole. Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick suggested that elderly people volunteer to die in order to keep the economy going during the early days of pandemic shutdowns. Conservative commentator and chalkboard abuser Glenn Beck told his credulous listeners that he would be willing to sacrifice himself for the good of the economy. (Epidemiologists and economists insist it doesn’t work like that.)
