President Donald Trump’s supporters are “cultists,” according to a former Republican congressman who once voted for Trump.
“I do my damnedest not to call Trump voters cultists, because I used to be a Trump voter,” said Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) on his Substack podcast on Tuesday. “I don't always hold to that rule, but I try my best. But when it comes to my former congressional colleagues — these Republican members of Congress, and all these conservative right-wing talk radio guys and Fox News guys, the world I used to be a part of — man, I'll call them members of a cult till the cows come home.”
Walsh, who prefaced his statement by acknowledging that he gets “a bunch of anger” whenever he makes it, challenged Trump supporters in Congress by saying “if you don't like me calling you a cultist, if you don't like it when I call you a cult follower of Donald Trump, then don't act like one.” As one example, the former legislator urged his erstwhile colleagues to not back the president in attacking the Supreme Court after they ruled his tariffs unconstitutional.
“When you stand up — like Trump did — and say, ‘S---- the Supreme Court, s---- the Constitution on these tariffs,’ and you stand with him, it's just so easy for me to point the ‘you are a cult member’ finger at you,” Walsh said. He added that unlike the previous three Republican presidents (Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush), Trump ruins conservatives who do not agree with him on every issue.
“You want to stay a Republican?” Walsh said. “You want to be a Republican in good standing? You want to get elected as a Republican? You want to win that Republican primary? You want to keep your conservative talk radio show? You want to keep going on Fox News two or three times a week? Well, then you've got to get down on your knees and bow in undevoted adoration to him. You can never criticize him. You can never go crossways with him. You can never oppose him, no matter what.”
This is not the first time Walsh has said pro-Trump Republicans are in a cult. Last week, he said the same thing on his Substack.
“This is what America looks like when one of our two major political parties has become an authoritarian-embracing cult,” Walsh wrote at the time. “And I’ll throw in for good measure — hey, MAGA, MAGA — this is what America looks like when the people who voted for Donald Trump don’t get what Donald Trump said he would give them, but they still praise him to the high heavens.”
Earlier this month, when denouncing Trump’s immigration policies, Walsh described ICE and CBP agents with the epithet “thugs.”
“What these heavily armed masked thugs lawlessly roaming our streets are doing is the utter opposite of law enforcement,” Walsh explained. “And there's a reason, by the way — I talk to cops regularly — most cops in this country detest what ICE is doing.”
The ex-congressman has also exploded about Trump’s destruction of irreplaceable structures like the White House East Wing.
"This jack—— in the f—— White House is destroying a permanent structure that can't come back," Walsh said. "He can't do this on his own! There's a rigorous, rigorous process to mess with the restructuring, structural changes of the White House, and he just blows right through all of that!"
Even during his Tuesday monologue, Walsh brought up a wide range of anti-Trump criticisms, singling out the fact that the Justice Department inexplicably omitted 53 pages from the Jeffrey Epstein files pertaining to Trump.
He added, “Also missing are pages from documents where accusations against Epstein mentioned Trump directly.”