Former GOP New Jersey Governor compares Trump supporters to the Jonestown doomsday cult, says they've 'drunk the Kool-Aid'

• Former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman has criticized Republicans who have backed President Trump's bid to overturn the election.
• "I keep comparing it somewhat to Jonestown," Whitman told The New York Times. "They've all drunk the Kool Aid. It just hasn't killed them yet."
• The comments are some of the most scathing yet by a senior Republican about Trump's bid to overturn the election, and the refusal of the GOP to stand up to him.

Former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman has compared Republicans who support President Donald Trump's bid to overturn the election to members of the Jonestown doomsday cult.

In comments to The New York Times in an article on Saturday, Whitman, a Republican and former member of President George W Bush's cabinet, was scathing about GOP support for Trump's attack on American democracy.

"I keep comparing it somewhat to Jonestown," Whitman told the publication. "They've all drunk the Kool-Aid. It just hasn't killed them yet."

Whitman was drawing parallels between Trump supporters and followers of cult leader Jim Jones, who in the late 1970s created a commune in Guyana, Latin America, dubbed "Jonestown." There, 900 members of the cult killed themselves in a mass suicide pact in 1978, drinking Kool-Aid laced with poison.

Whitman, a moderate Republican, is a prominent GOP critic of Trump, and declared that she was backing Joe Biden for president in a speech to the DNC conference in August.

The remarks highlight the divide between Republicans who have broken with America's democratic traditions to support Trump's election fraud claims, and a smaller group who have publicly accepted President-elect Joe Biden's victory and warned of the dangers of undermining America's democratic institutions.

Trump has repeatedly alleged that the election was stolen from him due to widespread voter fraud but has not produced any convincing evidence to substantiate the allegation.

The Trump campaign's bid to overturn the election result has been defeated in scores of court cases in swing states. On Friday, the latest longshot bid to overturn the election, launched by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, was dismissed by the Supreme Court.

State election officials in Georgia have been singled out in attacks by Trump, after Biden flipping the state for the first time in decades. Governor Brian Kemp has refused to bow to pressure from Trump and block certifying the election results.

The party's congressional leaders, including Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, have refused to speak out against Trump's bid to overturn the election.

Among the signatories of the failed Supreme Court lawsuit were 103 congressional Republicans and 17 Republican state attorney generals.

Some Republicans have warned that Trump's voter fraud claims will undermine faith in voting systems and could even imperil the party's future chances.

"This undermines democracy," Gabriel Sterling, voting system implementation manager for Georgia, told NBC News last week. "We have got to get to a point where responsible people act responsibly."