The moment the title was born.

Every book has a birthday. This one was born at a table in the White House.

The Moment the Title Was Born

The title of this book was not born in a library.

It was born while I was watching a scene unfold in real time — Black religious leaders seated at a White House table during Donald Trump's first term, glasses of water set before them, voices being used to tell the country that this man was somehow pro-Black.

But what I saw was something deeper than a photo opportunity.

I saw the cup on the table.

Not literal Kool-Aid. Water, maybe. Political theater, certainly. But to my eyes, and in my spirit, it looked like something far more dangerous: the familiar ritual of people being asked to drink what power had poured for them.

The meeting opened with a prayer. One of our own — a prominent Black pastor — bowed his head at that table and asked God to give wisdom and insight to a President who had spent years building a public identity that the prayer itself seemed to bless. He invoked Dr. King to justify the seat. He asked God to bless the President's family, his health, and everything that he put his hands to do. Then he handed the room to the King.

The first thing the King did was joke.

Then, one by one, the pastors at the table took their turns. They affirmed. They complimented. They praised. They had been given the seat, and they were going to use it. They were going to influence the table they were seated at — that was the logic. That was the trade.

As a Black pastor myself, I could not look at that room without hearing the weight of Scripture, history, and common sense pressing against the performance. Our people know what it means to be used as props. Our pulpits know what it means when Pharaoh invites the preacher to the palace but still refuses to let the people go. Our history has taught us to examine every invitation, every promise, every seat at the table, and every cup placed before us.

That was the moment the question came to me:

Who's drinking the Kool-Aid?

Not because I believed only one political party was capable of deception. Not because I believed only one group of people could be manipulated. But because I understood that political Kool-Aid is most dangerous when it is served by people we already trust — pastors, politicians, media personalities, party leaders, family members, and friends who tell us not to question what we are being asked to consume.

That moment stayed with me.

And then time did what time always does. It told the truth about the table.

Within a few years of that meeting, the very pastor who opened it in prayer was on a public sabbatical for moral failure. His church was being sued for eviction. His own chief financial officer — a man who had also sat at that table beside him, in matching suit and matching smile — would later take him to court over money. Others around that table would face their own reckonings, their own scandals, their own quiet undoings. Some kept their pulpits. Some lost them. None of them walked away unchanged.

The seat at the table did not save them.

Whatever was in that cup, it did not preserve them. It did not preserve them from the King they were praying for. It did not preserve them from each other. It did not preserve them from the consequences of agreeing to drink what had been poured.

This book is my attempt to say what I felt then but could not yet fully explain: before we drink what has been placed in front of us, we had better ask who poured it, what is in it, who else has tasted it, what it cost them, and what it will cost us if we swallow it.

Our people know better. Our pulpits should remember.

— Leroy Godfrey Jr., excerpted from Who's Drinking the Kool-Aid? — Jonestown Revisited. The gathering described is the August 1, 2018 White House “Meeting With Inner City Pastors.” Sourced to The Christian Post, the official White House transcript, MinistryWatch, The Greenville News, The State, WYFF News 4, and The Roys Report; full citations appear in the book. © 2026 Leroy Godfrey Jr. · wdtkbook.com