Reason #3,547: It’s a cult!

The beauty of mathematics is there will always be a single correct answer, and everything else is WRONG. 

No room for interpretation; no “it depends on what you mean by…” One right answer and nothing else.

Say what you like about Bobby Kennedy Jr, Mehmet Oz and Howard Lutnick. I certainly do. None of them are actually stupid.

 

RFK Jr: "A Democratic senator claimed it's mathematically impossible to have a drug drop by 600%. I said, 'Well, if the drug was $100 and it raises to $600, that would be a 600% rise. If it drops from $600 to $100, that's a 600% savings.'" Trump: "Right"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 24, 2026 at 5:28 AM

And yet look at Lutnick and Oz nodding along as Kennedy – a lawyer by trade, where you can get any answer you want depending on how you ask the question – presents a mathematical argument that wouldn’t pass muster with a 6^th grader, much less your bank manager. Try it out if you don’t believe me.

They all know it’s stupid but they dutifully agree because the god king must not be shown to be wrong.

Tell me again it’s not a cult. 

Update:

The brilliant Stonekettle, Jim Wright, goes further, taking us into Godwin territory and with good reason.

There is a scene in The West Wing (and yes, I KNOW it’s a fantasy – that’s why I like it!) where Bartlett and his chief of staff test a new staffer by telling him something they know is untrue to see if he has the courage to speak truth to power and tell the president he is wrong.

The staffer passes the test. Yes, I told you it’s a fantasy.

If the Trump administration had the wit to apply such a test, the staffer would surely have been fired.

This is important because if the administration is filled with people who don’t have the backbone to correct the president about their own frigging shoe size, if they volunteer to invent a bullshit branch of mathematics as justification for their leader pulling a number out of his arse, who is going to tell him that his justification for attacking Iran was a fever dream? Who is going to tell him his tariffs and wars have led to higher prices, not lower? Who is going to tell him the only golden age America is seeing right now is Trump’s ongoing bedazzling of the White House?

It’s not as if this has all started recently. This is the man who told us in 2020 that Covid would disappear like, and this is a direct quote, a miracle. This is the man who suggested disinfectant or ultra violet light could be applied internally to treat Covid. And people still took him seriously.

The difference then was that there were still a few serious people in the US government who were willing to say it straight. That forced him to save face by claiming he was joking. Because a global pandemic is a big joke, isn’t it? I laughed. Did you?

If he did it today, tomorrow he would push Kennedy and Oz up to the podium to give a made up medical reason why injecting Lysol is just fine. And they would do it even though at least one of them knows it’s bullshit.

Despite some recent pushback from his base, there are still more than enough people willing to believe whatever the MAGA king says despite the evidence of their own eyes and lives. If you disagree and present your reasoning, they will just spew out some waffle about the woke left and legacy media.

 

We are not getting close to claiming the president’s Big Beautiful New Suit is invisible to those not smart enough to see it. We’re way beyond it.

If you have to turn off the rational thinking part of your brain in order for your politics to make sense, you’re doing both wrong.

Jim Wright’s comparison with the last days of the führer is a valid one, because those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.  

 

 

 

The line you won’t cross

When the current US president tried to Trumpsplain Catholicism to, um, the Pope(!) I commented on one post that he has officially entered his Henry VIII phase. 

Well, I was wrong.

You see, when Henry VIII had a beef with the Vatican, his response was ‘Fuck you, I’M the Pope now!’

Within hours, Trump has upped the ante to ‘Fuck you, I’m JESUS now!’ 

And to their great credit, his base are not happy about it.

A lot of people who chose to be on the right side of history from the beginning and follow the Jesus parts in the Bible are looking at the blowback from MAGAworld and saying, “Really? Of all the fundamentally un-Christian and blasphemous behaviour, that’s the line you won’t cross?”

It’s a fair comment but I don’t mind. I say it’s okay to do the right thing for the wrong reason. It would be better to do the right thing for the right reason, but so long as you’re doing the right thing, that’s progress and I welcome it.

If Trump has done anything for the world, it’s to show us exactly where everyone’s line in the sand is.

Be it sexual assault, bankrupting businesses, palling around with a known pdf, felony fraud (x34), refusing to accept the results of a free and fair election, inciting his mob to trash the capitol, stealing classified documents, calling journalists enemies of the state, filling the Cabinet with his favourite television personalities, belligerent expansionism, insulting allies, tantrums over bad press, building monuments to himself, hiring untrained goons who shoot citizens in the streets, starting a new foreign regime-change war after running on a platform of exactly not that, higher fuel prices, or sharing A.I. slop portraying himself as a Christ-like figure…

This will be Trump’s true legacy. Everyone alive from 2016 onwards will be partly defined by when and how they realised he’s a second-rate charlatan. Or if they did at all.

This time, it isn’t just a token expression of disapproval. Between this and the war, many of his supporters are openly wondering whether they’ve been conned, and questioning whether they ever should have believed him against all observable reality. This is fine. Some are even wondering if he’s the Anti-Christ.

And there will no doubt be others who see this as the god king’s genius at 40-dimensional chess. For sure, this is all part of the administration flooding the zone because – as I will expand upon in a future post – stupidity is easier to process than evil.

To those who are belatedly realising it, no shame, no judgement. Welcome back to reality.

All I ask is that you learn from this experience and act on what you’ve learnt.

 

And THIS is why you don’t let a 6x bankrupt run a country

 

Think the bankruptcies and the idiocy over attacking Iran aren’t connected?

Well, let’s think it through…

Okay, so the bankruptcies were technically legal and he used the system to his advantage so that makes him smart.

Whatever. That’s not the point.

The point is this is a man who is used to having someone else come in and clean up the mess he’s made while he wipes the slate clean and merrily staggers on to his next inevitable fuckup.

Look at his history. You know it’s true.

In fact, it’s this very appalling lack of consequences for decades of hubristic malfeasance that makes him a hero to many.

Turns out international relations don’t work that way. Who knew?

 

As that well-known anti-American radical leftist Colin “I’m not reading this, it’s bullshit” Powell said, You break it, you own it.

You wouldn’t drive your car into someone’s house and then expect them to fix the damage for you. Mind you, this numb nut possibly would.

My suggestion to the US administration is to take the advice of one of MAGA’s favourite thinkers: Clean your room!