Former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean (D-VT) went on MSNBC on Tuesday morning to compare former President Donald Trump to the deadly cult leader Jim Jones. Dean went so far as to say that just like Jones’ followers, Trump supporters will “pay with their lives.”

“How concerned are you when you see every political party in this country devoted to committing ignorance that combatting lifesaving methods in this country?” asked guest host Jason Johnson.

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“It’s pretty frightening, really,” Dean responded. “The CPAC people have gotten more and more sort of off the charts, and Trump has always been a little nuts. The thing that is so ironic about this is the people who they are killing in Missouri, for example, are actually Trump voters. Because the Trump voters have a much higher percentage of people, who are not vaccinated exactly because of this garbage the former president is putting out. They are not being vaxxed.”

“In southern Missouri, which is a conservative part of the state and a conservative part of the country, you have the death rate going up hugely,” he continued. “The highest increase in death rates have been in places like Mississippi and Alabama, Arkansas and Missouri that is where people believe this. This has become a cult. There is rationality behind this. It is a cult based on anger, fear and ignorance.”

“Do you think the Republicans just hate their own constituents?” Johnson questioned. “Because if their constituents are most likely to be the 99% dying in COVID from this new Delta variant, shouldn’t COVID vaccine acceptance be a key part of any campaign platform in order to literally to keep your constituents upright and safe for next year?”

“These guys are not interested in serving the country,” Dean responded. “This is like Jim Jones in Guyana. It really is. Trump is Jim Jones. 900 of his followers died, some of whom did not go willingly, but he mesmerized them. Trump has got these people mesmerized. That is principally because these are ineffective people. They’ve lost their own agency. They have given up their own hope.”

“So they did what the German’s did in the depression,” he concluded. “They put their faith in somebody who turned out to be a mad man. Trump has a lot of deficits. He is lazy, he is not very smart, but he is incredibly skilled at exploiting discomfort and anger. That’s what he’s doing. Just as the Germans did, people are going to pay for this with their lives, and they already are.”