When the Batshit Insanity Becomes a Loyalty Test
- john raymond
- Aug 27
- 2 min read
The spectacle of President Trump’s rhetoric has long been misread. To those outside the cult, his most outrageous claims—whether declaring drug prices are “1500% lower” or insisting that hurricanes can be stopped with nuclear weapons—seem like signs of ignorance, senility, or madness.
That is the trap.
The mistake is to assume these declarations are merely blunders. They are not. They are deliberate loyalty tests.
Authoritarian leaders have used this method for centuries. Cult leaders, and especially death cult leaders, refine it into an art. Once the circle of believers has been captured—once the recruitment phase has reached its ceiling—the dynamic shifts.
The leader no longer seeks converts by persuasion; he consolidates his grip by demanding absurd affirmations. The more outlandish the statement, the more powerful the test.
To echo the leader’s madness is to prove willingness to humiliate oneself for him. To balk, even silently, is to mark oneself as unreliable, suspect, perhaps even an enemy.
This inversion is crucial. Rational thought becomes dangerous inside the cult. Pride in one’s own reason becomes dangerous. Even the instinct to preserve one’s reputation in public becomes dangerous.
The only safe position is to parrot the absurdity, to prove that one’s loyalty outweighs both self-respect and contact with reality. This is why a statement like “drug prices are 1500% lower” is not meant to be believed; it is meant to be repeated. It separates those who will submit from those who will not.
We should therefore reject the easy explanations—“insane,” “stupid,” “ignorant.” The leader knows full well what he is doing. He understands that by forcing his followers to subordinate their rational minds, he can trust them to follow orders even when those orders are self-destructive.
In this sense, the more deranged the claim, the more useful it is. The absurdity is not a bug, but the mechanism of control.
MAGA now stands at that point of cultic consolidation. The wedge is no longer between Trump and the outside world; it is between Trump and those within his orbit who still retain the slightest capacity for independent thought.
What looks like insanity is in fact the process of testing, purging, and hardening the core. And as history warns us, once that process reaches completion, the group becomes impervious to reason and ever more capable of collective self-destruction.
And if the rest of us don’t recognize it for what it is, we risk being brought low with them.
Comments