The Heaven's Gate Healthcare Cut

Republicans drank the BBB Kool-Aid. You wont believe what happens next!

The Big Beautiful Bill is Donald Trump’s latest Kool-Aid cocktail, served ice-cold to the glassy-eyed or terror-stricken cultists in Congress. Picture it: a garish blend of political polonium and economic arsenic, hand-mixed by a man whose only guiding ideology is self-worship.

Like Jim Jones passing out grape-flavored cyanide in the jungle, Trump is demanding loyalty unto political death…and once again, the red-hatted true believers (and those who play them in Congress) are lining up for their final gulp.

Except instead of dying in a jungle compound, they’re about to die politically in swing districts and suburbs, while trying to explain why they gutted Medicaid to protect tax breaks for billionaires. Before the poison closes their eyes, the pain will show up in polls, town hall meetings, and the tragic deaths of the very people they were elected to represent.

They know they’re doomed. No amount of giddy spin or cocky tweets will change that. They know the revolver is almost fully loaded, but they’re taking one more spin in their idiotic game of Republican Roulette.

Something has changed in their brains over time, a slow realization that the cult demands the ultimate political sacrifice. They’re scared. The jungle drums in the GOP consultancy class are beating in the darkness, pounding out a message of dread.

This is the secret of the MAGA caucus: it is governed not by love, nor leadership, but fear. Fear of the base. Fear of the tweets. Fear of the violence. Fear of Trump.

They’re even starting to lose their edge on the campaign side.

There’s a nugget in the Puck article I linked above that old campaign goons like myself should find either troubling (if they’re still in the Matrix) or amusing (if they’re free men): “Tillis also realized that he wasn’t going to get support from Senate Republican leadership to craft legislation that would help him ahead of a tough reelection campaign.”

A good majority leader with a decent campaign committee would have planned way, way ahead to give Tillis and others like him a few show votes, a nothingburger bill, a trifling something…to kill the pain they’ll face in 2026 after voting to cut deep into the health and lives of seniors in their states.

You may have heard the phrase MAGAcaid in recent days (and damn do I wish I’d invented it), because that’s what Medicaid is now. Even Steve Bannon admits it.

It’s not some liberal boondoggle anymore; it’s the lifeline for Trump’s own base. You think it’s Nancy Pelosi’s voters relying on that in rural Kentucky or northern Florida? No. It’s the 62-year-old ex-coal worker with black lung and a Trump flag faded from too many hard winters. It’s grandma in a red-state nursing home, where Fox plays endlessly as her life slowly fades, a reliable Trump voter living on Medicaid.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill rips the oxygen mask off his own people to fund a tax break for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. It’s a suicide pact for millions of his own voters, Jim Jones signing it with a Sharpie instead of handing out Dixie cups.

The cuts to Medicaid and Medicare aren’t just morally obscene: they’re politically suicidal. Every pollster not devoted to telling Trump that his farts smell like rainbows and sunshine has warned them: touch Medicaid and you lose independents, suburban moms, seniors, and low-income white voters.

But Trump doesn’t care. He doesn’t do tax policy (or pay taxes). His donors want it. The Vaughthadis from Project 2025 want it. Trump wants to see the GOP bow, bend, and break itself for him. This isn’t legislation; it’s a loyalty test, like asking your followers to sell their house and wait for the mothership. It’s Marshall Applewhite in a red tie, demanding the GOP wear political Nikes and lie down to wait for the comet.

And the poor bastards are doing it.

They’re going to walk off the electoral cliff in 2026 because the Dear Leader told them to. The ads write themselves: seniors moving home to their kids after losing nursing home care, grim-faced moms talking about losing care for their disabled kids, veterans cut off from Medicaid, MAGA voters realizing too late that they were the ones being sacrificed for Mar-a-Lago donors.

It’s not just bad policy. It’s a kamikaze mission, and Trump’s flying the plane into their own damn hangar.

Even culture wars won’t save them this time. It wasn’t a trans antifa immigrant who stopped those Mississippi kids from getting SNAP benefits. It wasn’t Kamala Harris who cut off dialysis programs for poor seniors. It’s all them.

But here’s the twist: Trump won’t pay the price.

He never does. Like every great cult leader, he leaves the wreckage behind him. He’ll blame immigrants, Thune, Johnson, Mandani, Mitch McConnell, the RINOs, deep-state actuaries, and the liberal media for making the numbers look bad. Meanwhile, the true believers who voted for this bill will face the music at home. They’ll get primaried from the right for not being Trumpy enough, and they’ll get slaughtered in the general for killing their own constituents.

So let’s call it what it is: The Jonestown Budget Bill. The Heaven’s Gate Healthcare Cut. A grotesque ritual sacrifice of the very voters who worship him most. And like all cults, it ends not with glory or salvation, but with a pile of corpses and a leader still babbling about how he was right all along.

At least Jones and Applewhite had the courage to go on the final journey with their cult followers.