Eric Swalwell Brings Back “Cult” Roast for Bonkers Trump Rally

Representative Eric Swalwell reprised his pitch-perfect burn for the cultish fervor of MAGA Republicans after Donald Trump and his disciples demonstrated their demented brand of devotion on Sunday.

Last week, Swalwell made waves on the internet for a viral speech declaring that Republicans’ steadfast loyalty to Trump, despite his obvious faultiness and recent guilty verdict, reminded him of the unwavering followers in a cult.

After Sunday’s sweltering rally, Swalwell resurrected his gag, after Trump and his disciples doubled down on their crazy.

“Thank God we’re here in Sunset Park to worship and bring back the greatest president we’ve ever known in our generation!” cried Nevada Republican Party Chair Michael McDonald, beneath the blazing sun that sent several so-called parishioners to the hospital.

McDonald’s suggestion that Trump supporters should “worship” the presumptive Republican nominee seemed particularly unhinged, especially in the context of what Trump said later that day during one of his many rambling rants.

“Easier to vote for Biden? I don’t think so! It would be suicide before Biden, right?” Trump asked the crowd.

Swalwell seized on the unhinged comments, which evoked the taste-memory of Kool-Aid. He posted the newest installment of his viral rant on X, formerly Twitter, and captioned it, “You might be in a cult if …”

Incredibly enough, Swalwell’s video didn’t even contain all of the insane pseudoreligious comments from even that one rally.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene proudly touted a particularly blasphemous comparison. “The Democrats and the fake news media want to constantly talk about, ‘Oh, President Trump is a convicted felon,’” the Georgia Republican griped. “Well, you wanna know something? The man that I worship is also a convicted felon. And he was murdered on a Roman cross.”

Greene’s comment suggests she lacks an understanding of the Bible, or Trump, or hey, maybe even both. As the poster child for Trump’s cult, it should surprise no one that she has actually already compared Trump to Jesus after he was arrested last year.

Donald Trump appeared fully unable to articulate a story about electric batteries on Sunday, instead opting to spin a thread in which zero of the underlying premises were actually true.

During his Las Vegas rally, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee told a story that flew a bit off the rails. The tale began by allegedly asking a South Carolinian boat manufacturer, who made boats that were too heavy and “can’t go fast,” a self-described “very smart” question about the efficacy of electric batteries in water-faring vessels—but then quickly devolved into nonsense about Trump’s fear of sharks.

“So I said, ‘Let me ask you a question,’” Trump told the crowd. “And he said, ‘Nobody ever asked this question.’ And it must be because of MIT. My relationship to MIT. Very smart. He goes. I say, “What would happen if the boat sank from its weight? And you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery is now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there.”

Then, a quick sidenote: “By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately. You notice that? A lot of shark. I watch some guys justifying it today. ‘Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were—they were not hungry, but they misunderstood what-who she was.’ These people are crazy.”

And back to the story.

“He said, ‘There’s no problem with sharks. They just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming. No really got decimated and other people too, a lot of shark attacks,’” Trump recalled, his voice pitching. “So I said, ‘So there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards or here. Do I get electrocuted? If the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted? Or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?”

“Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer. He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’ I said, ‘I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water.’ But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted? I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark!” Trump said.

Meanwhile, things didn’t look so hot for Trump’s team behind the scenes. At several points during the rally, Trump actually attempted to read his teleprompter but claimed it wasn’t working, suggesting to the crowd that he didn’t intend to pay for a “shitty job.”

“And then I don’t pay the company that does it, right?” Trump said. “And then I end up with a story, ‘Trump doesn’t pay.’ I don’t pay contractors that do a shitty job. And that’s a shitty job. That’s a shitty job. You can’t read a word.”

Then they’ll say, ‘Oh, isn’t it terrible? Trump takes advantage of his—,’” he continued, before cutting himself off. “No … when I have a good contractor, a subcontractor, nobody gets paid faster. But when I have contractors that do this kind of work? You can have them.”

Trump is notorious for stepping out on the check, according to several former employees and contractors who have accused him of failing to pay up, sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars. His former attorney Rudy Giuliani may be one of the most recent instances of a former fixer being left holding the bag, but even before his 2016 presidential win, Trump was involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits for allegedly skirting the bill.

“The press will take that and they’ll say ‘he said a horrible thing,” Trump accurately predicted after telling supporters in Nevada on Sunday, “I don’t care about you. I just want your vote. I don’t care.”

The comments came as Trump remarked on a passing breeze during a scorching outdoor rally in Las Vegas where temperatures climbed above 100 degrees. Six people were hospitalized, and 24 more were treated by EMTs on-site for heat-related illness. Sunday’s rally followed a similar event in Arizona on Thursday where at least 11 people were hospitalized for heat exhaustion, which Team Trump wrote off as “enthusiasm.”

Trump’s recent rallies, which either occur outdoors or involve long lines outside waiting to be let in, have been punctuated by people boiling in the sun. Team Trump has taken no efforts to mitigate the heat for his followers—and in fact booked the Nevada rally after his supporters collapsed in Arizona. This comes despite the fact that a third of Trump’s supporters are those most sensitive to heat.

Though Trump’s sun-fried supporters let out laughs at his remark, Trump has a history of despising his supporters. During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump expressed gratitude for the highly contagious disease because it meant he didn’t have to shake hands with “these disgusting people.”

“He talked all the time about the people themselves being disgusting,” Olivia Troye, former homeland security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence and member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, told The New York Times in 2020 while discussing Trump’s view of his supporters. “It was clear immediately that he wanted nothing to do with them.”

Trump’s latest admission of apathy while holding rallies that keep sending people to the hospital speaks volumes on Trump’s perception of his base, but it begs the question of how he’s expected to get their votes if he keeps encouraging them to do things that can kill them.

MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene took the stage before Donald Trump’s campaign speech in Las Vegas on Sunday, and the Georgia Republican aimed to stoke outrage with her words, as opposed to make logical sense.

“If you think gas prices are high now, just wait until you’re forced to drive an electric vehicle,” she shouted into the microphone. Greene waited a moment to let her word salad sink in and grinned as the crowd began to boo.

Could they even understand why, or had the confused alchemy of her buzz words worked their magic? Either way, the crowd at Sunset Park appeared to follow her down her rabbit hole.

To try to imagine what Greene actually meant by this comment would be a disservice to the facts, which are that gas prices are down this month, and that electric vehicles don’t actually use gas, as Greene seems to imply. While it’s cheaper to buy a gas-guzzling car, it’s ultimately less expensive to power and maintain an E.V.—again, widely understood to be powered by electricity, as the name suggests.

Greene grinned as she looked out onto the booing crowd, and put her hand up as if to say “I know that’s right!” instead of simply spewing a list of meaningless words to describe a nonexistent grievance.

Representative Dan Bishop, a far-right Republican from North Carolina who is currently campaigning to be the state’s attorney general, is portraying himself as a champion for the little guy. Just this week, he promised a “reckoning” against the “gangster government.”

But Bishop’s track record shows that he doesn’t just protect the little guy. While he won consumer protection victories over his 23-year career, he also has worked with powerful organizations accused of taking advantage of much weaker individuals. Case in point: his “gangster government” comment wasn’t about sticking up for citizens’ rights against the federal government, but about billionaire Donald Trump being found guilty of felony business fraud by a jury of his peers.

Bishop also doubled down on his position that the trial was “rigged” with a wildly offensive comment.

“They go into a place where they know the fight is unfair. It’s as bad as it was in Alabama in 1950 if a person happened to be Black in order to get justice, and that’s what they did in New York. So, it was fundamentally rigged,” he said on an episode of The Pete Kaliner Show.

Bishop, who has only been a congressman since 2023, is seeking to replace his home state’s Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein. (Stein is running for governor against Hitler-quoting Republican Mark Robinson.) Bishop must defeat his congressional colleague, Democratic Representative Jeff Jackson, a former prosecutor.  

While Bishop’s own website touts his experience as a “tenacious litigator, handling complex commercial cases,” he has never served as a public prosecutor. Online records—only made available in recent months as North Carolina switches to an online court filing system—show that while working as an attorney, the Republican lawmaker worked multiple times with organizations accused of questionable business practices.

One of the most egregious cases began in 2002, when Bishop defended Fischer-Schindler, LLC, which was accused of stealing at least $1 million from plaintiff Larry Black through an invented investment scheme. In addition to F&S, Bishop also defended James Schindler. In court documents, Black’s attorney described the alleged blatant theft: “To say Defendants engaged in an elaborate ‘Ponzi’ scheme is probably an insult to the late Mr. Ponzi.” 

Ultimately, Bishop’s clients were voluntarily dismissed in this case, which simply means the plaintiff chose to drop those defendants for an unspecified reason. The estate of Doss Fischer—who is listed in the court documents as an “agent, manager or member of F&S”—was ordered to pay Black $1 million plus interest. 

Also in 2002, Bishop also defended a company that was accused of racial discrimination toward one of its employees, allegedly denying her promotions due to her race. The parties eventually reached a private settlement, ending the case. 

In 2009, Bishop represented Charlotte Hanson, who, with her husband Sidney, was accused of operating a Ponzi scheme that targeted retirement-age people, raising around $32.5 million from approximately 500 clients. While the Hansons had promised high returns on supposed investments, court documents alleged that they instead used the money to fund a lavish lifestyle for themselves of resort vacations and private plane rentals, as well as making payments to agents who supplied their scheme with new customers interested in purchasing so-called “private loan agreements.” 

Bishop provided legal counsel to Charlotte Hanson to ensure she cooperated with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, after which he withdrew from the case. She was ultimately removed as a defendant.

Two years later, a district court judge ordered Sidney to pay $23 million in restitution, plus interest, to his victims, as well as a $1.2 million fine to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison.

In 2011, Bishop helped defend Fuzion Investment Capital (FIC), which was accused of wrongfully terminating an employee, Jeffrey Stec, who was “rendered destitute” by the firing, according to the lawsuit. Stec alleged that after he sold his fitness center company to FIC as part of a bankruptcy deal, with FIC promising that he would be able to buy the company back, FIC instead underpaid him to the tune of $80,000 in owed wages and fired him and terminated his management rights without proper cause—canceling his family’s health insurance in the process. Stec voluntarily dismissed his case 29 days after filing it.*

That year, Bishop also was involved in a lawsuit against a group of businessmen who were accused of engaging in an “active conspiracy” to defraud a 78-year-old Mary Rudolph, who was recovering from heart surgery, according to the lawsuit. 

Bishop represented two of the businessmen involved in the case, as well as the company Rudolph co-owned, Beacon Independent Living LLC, in a counterclaim against Rudolph. Bishop’s firm withdrew less than three months after taking on the case, and he did not defend the plaintiff’s business partner or the person who took control of the business while the case played out. After Bishop’s firm withdrew, parties agreed to dismiss the case entirely. 

The New Republic contacted Bishop’s office for comment on his legal history, but he did not respond by time of publication.

It’s possible that Bishop’s career is merely the result of meeting the obligation of a good lawyer and representing all manner of clients. But it could also be an indication of the people he actually intends to protect if elected attorney general. And if that’s the case, then North Carolinians will pay the highest cost.

State attorneys general have a tremendous influence over how laws are implemented and prosecuted. And over the past two years, an increasing number of attorneys generals have wielded outsized influence and power, protecting the privileged while pushing through cruel regulations that target some of the most vulnerable communities.

* This article originally misstated the status of Jeffrey R. Stec v. Fuzion Investment Capital, LLC, et al., which was dismissed in March 2011. This article has also been updated for clarity.