Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, certainly has absorbed the first rule of MAGA: You’re never in the wrong as long as you’re “triggering” the liberals. On Friday, she drew outrage from her constituents at a town hall in Butler County, Iowa, with her bizarre defense of taking away people’s medical care to pay for tax cuts for billionaires: “Well, we’re all going to die.” The crowd, furious about her plans to vote for drastic cuts to Medicaid that will deprive millions of health care, booed her. Ernst, having absorbed Donald Trump’s philosophy of always doubling down, responded on Saturday with a favorite lady MAGA trick: pretending to be stupid.
“I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth,” she sneered while walking in a cemetery. “So I apologize, and I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well.”
Ernst may play the mean bimbo for the camera, but she is aware that people aren’t asking to live forever. They just don’t want to die decades before their time, due to a lack of basic health care. But while most of the media focused on her act, her follow-up spin was, if anything, even more callous. She invoked Jesus Christ as the reason it’s okay to let people die from easily preventable causes. “But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ,” she smugly declared.
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To those whose understanding of Christianity is based on compassion and love, this comment was jarring. But Ernst understands the second rule of MAGA: their version of Christian “love” is cruelty. When Ernst was asked again about her comments by a CBS News reporter on Monday, she snapped. “I’m very compassionate,” she barked while running for an elevator.
Reporter: “Would you like to clarify your comments?” Joni Ernst: “I’m very compassionate.” In a Carella Deville sort of way…
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— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) June 2, 2025 at 10:28 PM
Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark speculated on MSNBC that Ernst “must be having a nervous breakdown.” That’s doubtful, as Ernst drove to the cemetery, recorded herself, and likely had a younger staffer edit and post the video to Instagram. This was a deliberate choice, which makes more sense in light of the larger trend in white evangelical circles to redefine empathy as a “sin” and insist that unfeelingness is a higher form of compassion. As David French explained in the New York Times:
At the same time, hard-right Christians began to turn against the very idea of empathy. Last year a popular right-wing podcaster, Allie Beth Stuckey, published a best-selling book called “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.” This month, a right-wing theologian, Joe Rigney, is publishing a book called “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits.”
These Christians claim that true compassion comes from rejecting empathy, arguing that empathy gets in the way of speaking what they believe are “hard truths” they need to browbeat alleged sinners with. This is how the conservative Christian convinces himself it’s love to deny LGBTQ people their freedom, because compelling heterosexuality will get them into heaven. Or to believe it’s compassion to scream invective at a woman entering an abortion clinic, which gets reimagined as “counseling” the women to stop sinning.
Ernst understands the second rule of MAGA: their version of Christian “love” is cruelty.
These are the rationalizations of people who want to hate while denying they are hateful. Ernst’s behavior also shows how it can be used to justify opposition to Republican hostility towards Jesus’ call to care for the poor and the disabled, especially if doing so means a slightly higher tax rate for the wealthy. Holly Berkley Fletcher, the author of the upcoming book “The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism,” explained this in her Monday newsletter. Evangelicals tell themselves they “prioritize saving souls for eternity over helping bodies in the here and now,” she wrote. In reality, of course, it’s a way “to avoid responsibility and reform and to serve their own interests.”
Ernst’s implication that people should welcome suffering and death has a long and ignoble history. Fletcher notes slave owners used this message to bully enslaved people in the 19th century. In recent years, the idea was revived due to the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to justify Republican opposition to life-saving measures like social distancing, masks, and eventually, vaccination. By October 2020, Tucker Carlson of Fox News was sounding this message, declaring, “At some point we are all going to die. Dying is the central fact of life,” and suggesting that was reason enough to pull back all public health measures.
It was a message that got a huge boost from evangelicals, especially pastors at megachurches who didn’t want to put church services online, depriving them of the adulation of the adoring crowd. Rev. Tony Spell of Louisiana drew headlines in early 2020 by declaring, “True Christians do not mind dying.” Caleb Mathis, pastor at the enormous Crossroads Church of Ohio, wrote at the time, “I hope it’s the end of the world,” because he believes heaven “sounds pretty freakin’ amazing.” Even after the vaccine, Joy Pullman of The Federalist wrote an article titled, “For Christians, Dying From COVID (Or Anything Else) Is A Good Thing.” In it, she argued, “There is nothing we can do to make our days on earth one second longer or shorter,” and also “death is good.”
None of these folks live by their own pro-death rules, of course. They see a doctor or take other measures to protect their health. It’s only when they’re asked to help others, whether through vaccination or paying slightly more in taxes, that they find this duty in others to welcome death with a smile. But this is worse than the usual Republican hypocrisy. It also reflects the increasingly Christian nationalist bent of the GOP. They are explicitly arguing that everyone else has to live by their fundamentalist religious belief that death is good. You may be an atheist, a non-Christian, or a more liberal Christian who believes in healing the sick. Too bad for you. In the MAGA view, we’re all members of their fanatical death cult, whether we like it or not.
The good news is that Ernst’s shut-up-and-die ideology is not popular, even with a lot of people who consider themselves conservative Christians. On Monday, Democratic state Rep. J.D. Scholten announced that he’s challenging Ernst in the 2026 election. Scholten told the Des Moines Register, “When she doubled down on Saturday with her, I felt, very disrespectful comments, I was like, ‘OK, game on.'” It’s a long shot in a deep-red state, but Scholten has some advantages, including being the pitcher for the Sioux City Explorers. He also has a long history of advocating for universal health care, drawing a contrast with Ernst’s nihilistic views. Iowa is considered conservative, but its voting population has a significantly higher percentage of elderly individuals compared to the rest of the country. They may be especially hostile to Ernst’s suck-it-up-and-die message.
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