This past week, Ted Cruz sauntered onto The View, clearly operating under the tragic delusion that his charisma was sufficient to win over a daytime television audience. I would say he embarrassed himself, but embarrassment requires a functioning sense of shame, and shame is something Ted Cruz had surgically removed from his system roughly around the time he decided to start praising the man who insulted his wife’s face.
There was plenty to unpack from the appearance—including the audience greeting him with the kind of warm, welcoming energy usually reserved for a corporate layoff. But the undeniable peak of cowardice came when the hosts asked him to grade Donald Trump on the economy. Cruz squirmed so violently in his seat he looked like a man trying to pass a kidney stone in real time. He dodged, he pivoted, he filibustered, doing everything short of faking a medical emergency or ducking under the table to escape the question. And then, with the trademark unearned confidence of a man who knows he’s lying to your face, he finally delivered his verdict: an A.
I actually laughed out loud at this. Because if Ted Cruz can look directly into a television camera and give this economy an A while regular people are watching their grocery bills climb to astronomical heights, then Democrats should win in a landslide this November simply by pointing at the screen and asking, “Are you going to believe this guy or your bank account?” That’s how low the bar is. That’s how staggering the gap has become between the fairy tales Republicans spin on daytime TV and the economic reality folks are actually living through.
But here’s the key distinction you have to understand: MAGA is a cult. And here’s the part almost nobody talks about when it comes to cults: they don’t actually go away when they collapse. The public narrative is always the same—the group falls apart, the leader dies or goes to prison, the headlines move on, and everyone assumes the story is over. It never is. Movements disband. Organizations dissolve. But there are always a few true believers left wandering in the wreckage, convinced the messiah was right, still waiting for a glorious comeback that isn’t coming.
The Branch Davidians lost their leader and most of their membership in the 1993 Waco siege, yet a tiny remnant still sits near the original compound, convinced David Koresh is due back any day. Heaven’s Gate lost 39 members to a mass suicide in 1997, and the handful left behind kept the group’s 1990s-era website running for decades. Aum Shinrikyo launched a lethal sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, got outlawed, rebranded as Aleph, and even after founder Shoko Asahara was executed in 2018, splinter factions still treat his ramblings as sacred text. The Rajneeshees imploded as an organization in 1985, yet people are still practicing “Osho” techniques today. Charles Manson has been six feet under since 2017, and there is still a bizarre circle of weirdos visiting his grave like it’s a religious shrine.
So unfortunately for all of us, Donald Trump is never going to completely disappear. Ted Cruz isn’t a true believer—he’s just a spineless political opportunist who calculated the survival math in today’s Republican Party and decided to crawl. He gives Trump an A because his career depends on it. The best the rest of us can hope for is to disband this circus at the ballot box. But understand that even when the political movement breaks, the residual cult members will remain.
And if you’re looking for the absolute gold standard of a true believer—someone who will worship at the altar until the day she dies—look no further than Natalie Harp.
I already wrote about this woman once, back when Jon Ossoff set MAGA world into a full-blown existential crisis with an offhand comment about her. Now, normally, when a political staffer gets dragged into the national spotlight like that, the playbook is simple: pull back, lay low, and try to convince the public you’re just a normal, boring staffer who got caught in the crossfire. You’d think the goal of revisiting her would be to prove she isn’t as completely unhinged as everyone thinks she is.
You would be dead wrong. Going back into this story a second time didn’t soften the picture. It made it look like a psychiatric evaluation.
For anyone who missed the first piece, let me remind you of who we are dealing with. This is a woman who literally climbed into the trunk of an SUV rather than be left behind by Trump’s motorcade. And here’s the detail that should bother you far more than the act itself—this didn’t happen last month. It happened back in October 2023. Trump was heading to a New York City courthouse for his criminal trial, and staffers told Harp there was simply no room for her in the vehicles.
A normal person takes the hint and calls an Uber. Natalie Harp initiated a full-blown screaming match in the lobby of Trump Tower, screaming at event staff that Trump had personally asked her to be there. When yelling didn’t produce a seat, she looked at the cargo space of a Chevy Suburban, decided that was a perfectly rational seating arrangement for an adult human being, and dove into the trunk. CNN confirmed this with two sources and an actual photograph.
Think about the sheer, unadulterated madness of that moment. Picture a grown woman in professional business attire, folding herself like origami into the back of a black SUV next to spare tires and jumper cables, all so she doesn’t lose sight of an 80-year-old man for forty-five minutes. And the kicker? Nobody told the public about this for almost three years. This wasn’t a secret Natalie Harp was keeping. This was a secret Trumpworld was hiding, which tells you everything you need to know: even the people who work for Donald Trump knew this was so deeply, deeply bizarre that it had to be buried deep in the vault.
So the next time someone brings up Kari Lake as the gold standard of MAGA unhinged, I need you to recalibrate your scales. Kari Lake is a delusional washed-up news anchor who thinks she should be a U.S. Senator. Natalie Harp is living in an alternate reality where she believes she is in a high-stakes, cinematic romance with the President of the United States that only she can see. Kari Lake is unhinged in the way of a woman causing a scene at a Denny’s because her pancakes were cold. Natalie Harp is unhinged in the way of someone you’d aggressively Google before allowing her anywhere near your children.
And any reasonable adult who watched this behavior unfold would probably sit her down and say, “Hey, maybe you should talk to someone.” But Trump, because he functions purely on the mechanics of a classic cult leader, doesn’t just tolerate this behavior—he feeds on it. In clinical terms, what you are seeing here is a textbook feedback loop of folie à deux (shared psychotic disorder) mixed with extreme paranoiac isolation. A normal boss—hell, a normal human being—watches an employee fold herself like a lawn chair into a Chevy Suburban trunk to avoid being separated from him for forty-five minutes and thinks, “This woman needs an intervention, not a security pass.”
Trump is not a normal human being, and this is not a normal workplace. In behavioral psychology, there’s a concept called operant conditioning through intermittent reinforcement—the idea that unpredictable, massive rewards for bizarre behavior will solidify that behavior forever. Instead of setting a single healthy boundary, Trump has spent years actively feeding her delusion.
When he needed to covertly escape a summit in Turkey via a catering truck, he didn’t pack his Secretary of State or his Treasury Secretary. Marco Rubio and Scott Bessent—the actual constitutional line of succession—were left sitting on the decoy Air Force One like a pair of forgotten duffel bags. Who got one of the coveted seats on the real escape plane alongside Pete Hegseth? Natalie Harp. He turned the executive branch into a middle-school clique where the Secretary of State gets demoted to the kid’s table so the personal assistant can tote her portable printer onto the getaway jet.
He let her become his de facto Truth Social ghostwriter, creating a bizarre psychological phenomenon known as identity fusion. Her mind has merged so completely with his digital persona that even White House staffers can no longer tell where his train-of-consciousness rants end and her echo chamber begins. He paraded her onstage at the 2020 RNC to call him her “Good Samaritan” and tweeted “Proud of Natalie!” like she’d just won a third-grade spelling bee.
And just this month, financial disclosures revealed he cut her a $45,000 personal cash check—in addition to her regular taxpayer-funded salary. Ethics lawyers are currently hyperventilating over 18 U.S.C. § 209, the federal criminal statute that bars executive branch employees from taking private salary supplements. But in Trump’s mind, it’s not a legal violation; it’s an anointment fee. Somewhere over the last decade, Donald Trump discovered the ultimate authoritarian life hack: if you allow someone to worship you hard enough, you never have to earn their respect. You just have to keep cashing in on their subservience.
And then, as if the man writes his own satirical sitcom specifically to prove your thesis, Trump landed in Ireland without his wife. Melania sat this one out—no illness, no sudden schedule conflict, no geopolitical crisis. She had stood next to him just twenty-four hours earlier at the Pentagon for the 9/11 anniversary, looking like a woman serving out a probation sentence. But a flight to Dublin? She simply decided it wasn’t worth the jet lag.
And Trump, incapable of letting a marital snub pass with even a shred of dignity, stood in front of a room of diplomats and business leaders and joked about it. “My wife is here in spirit,” he announced to the room. “She’s watching right now.” He then admitted he’d invited her, but she told him the flight was too long, adding, “maybe I’m not that friendly.” Real romantic. Real charming. The kind of passive-aggressive banter you deploy when a marriage is operating at peak performance.
And who was strutting right behind him off Air Force One, present for every second of the trip in a body-hugging green dress, pulling Irish officials into dominant handshakes? Natalie Harp. You could not write a more on-the-nose visual if you were drafting a political satire: the actual First Lady stays on the home continent, and the aide who climbs into trunks and prints out laudatory news clippings gets the passport stamp.
Understand something critical before we wrap this up: this man holds the nuclear codes. That is not a metaphor. That is not hyperbole. It is a daily reality. And he has purposefully engineered an ecosystem where the only people left in the room are those who fold themselves into cargo holds, cash unexplained checks, and lack the basic psychological stamina to ever say the word “no” to him. That should alarm you far more than any dishonest economic grade Ted Cruz stammers out on daytime television.
Worth noting before we close: Ted Cruz himself isn’t up for reelection this cycle. Texans just re-upped him in 2024, and his term runs through January 2031, meaning he doesn’t face voters again until 2030. He’s not on the November ballot this year. But that’s precisely why he can afford to be this shameless on national television—he doesn’t have to answer to anyone for four more years. The senators and House members who do have to face voters this November don’t get that luxury. Every one of them who nods along the way Cruz just did, who gives this economy an A while their own constituents can’t afford groceries, is a name we can strip off a ballot in a matter of weeks.
We cannot vote Donald Trump out of the Oval Office today. We can absolutely strip the power from the courtiers who are up this cycle and still choose to enable him—the ones counting on us not paying attention, the ones hoping we’ll be too exhausted by the spectacle of a Natalie Harp to notice who’s actually on the ballot.
Because a cult doesn’t fall when the leader finally goes too far. It falls when the people around him stop catching him when he jumps.
