I don't think there's any mystery. Jones might be able to thump a tub when he's preaching to the choir or circle jerking with those he knows read from the same page (I've never actually seen him actually 'debate' anything - not with a grown up who adheres to a different viewpoint), but like many of his type he is utterly and egregiously out of his depth when he does not control the narrative.
Jones also appears to suffer from a particularly modern malady - one which is possibly part of the general zeitgeist, but which does seem to me to be particularly endemic within elements of the more extreme right wing in the US - and that is the struggle many people have in dealing with the rather basic concept of 'consequence'.
I'm not being facetious here - it really does seem to me that the process by which many deal with any reaction to their action is based on utter bewilderment. There was a time when activists did not separate action and consequence - the latter was as much a part of the point as the former; arrest, trial, punishment - these sort of things were all part of the process by which the message was disseminated. But this lot really do seem to believe that when you start a fire, you then just get to go home.
Jones looks to me like someone who strutted into a courtroom thinking it was going to be like a TV show, and then had nothing to fall back on when it became clear it wasn't going to roll out that way.