'It is a cult': Trump pal's former lover warns MAGA will ‘come for you next’

President Donald Trump’s powerful billionaire ally, X CEO Elon Musk, once impregnated a Trump fan and anti-transgender influencer named Ashley St. Clair. Now St. Clair is warning conservatives that the Trump movement is a “cult” which will “come for you next.”

Speaking with gun control activist Cameron Kasky for the conservative website The Bulwark, St. Clair expressed regret for her past support of far right causes and urged accountability for conservatives who hurt other people.

"What I've realized since leaving is that ignoring the issues these communities were raising — the ones the woke movement fixated on for a while — means those issues come back and affect all of us,” St. Clair told Kasky. “The way the trans community is scapegoated impacts women and everyone else as well. The way BLM was scapegoated and demonized — they were warning about many of the issues we're now facing with ICE. So I do think it's important to say: here's what I missed, and here's why we should listen to those individuals. Because if you don't, it's going to come for you next.”

Several minutes later in the same conversation, St. Clair characterized the Trump movement as a “cult.”

"It is a cult,” St. Clair said. “And what you have to understand is that in any abusive relationship, your access to other people is cut off. You're isolated. Your access to information is cut off. Your access to people who might have rational perspectives on what you're involved in — that's cut off too.”

She added, “These people are told it's all fake news. The only things you can trust are Twitter and Truth Social. And for better or worse, they actually believe that. They believe that established outlets are lying to them, that nothing those outlets publish can be true."

St. Clair is not alone among former Trump supporters who describe the movement they once backed as a cult. Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) said the same thing in February shortly before Trump invaded Iran.

“And you don’t like when people call you a cult, Trump voters?” Walsh argued. “What else are people to think when you voted for Trump to get us the hell out of wars around the world, and instead he gets us involved in wars around the world and starts new wars, and you still sing his praises and support him? What are we to think, MAGA, but that you are a cult?”

Walsh added, “You’ve got no argument against people calling you a cult. And if he takes us to war against Iran, and you clap and applaud and throw him flowers, Trump supporters, I will be at the front of the parade calling you a cult.”

Conservative columnist George F. Will, a former adviser to President Ronald Reagan, wrote in February for The Washington Post that one can look at Trump’s ongoing lie about having won the 2020 presidential election to illustrate this point.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will wrote. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

He summed it up by saying, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2024, New School for Social Research professor Federico Finchelstein argued that the Trump movement’s cult-like demonization of minorities such as transgender people and pushing of objectively untrue claims such the 2020 election Big Lie can lead to literal fascism. Speaking about how Trump supporters dismiss his critics and even accuse them of inciting violence, Finchelstien identified a "kind of dissonance between what Trump is saying and what is going on. And this has been the case with totalitarians and fascists for decades, that they say stuff that doesn't connect to reality." In addition, Finchelstein pointed out that Trump "does this kind of thing again and again, and that's why he reminds us of [Nazi Germany dictator Adolf] Hitler,” as he “follows Hitler's playbook in projecting onto his enemies all his desires, fantasies, and aspirations. This includes, of course, as he said, 'retribution' and violence."

Leavitt replied to this Salon article at the time by saying, "It's been less [than] 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler. It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."

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