Trump openly embraces, amplifies QAnon
conspiracy theories
After winking at QAnon for years, Donald Trump is overtly embracing the baseless conspiracy theory, even as the number of frightening real-world events linked to it grows.
On Tuesday, using his Truth Social platform, the Republican former president
reposted an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin overlaid with the
words “The Storm is Coming.” In QAnon lore, the “storm” refers to
Trump’s final victory, when supposedly he will regain power and his
opponents will be tried, and potentially executed, on live television.
As Trump contemplates another run for the presidency ...his actions show that far from distancing himself from the political fringe, he is welcoming it.
He knows that he cannot win a democratic election, but he can win an undemocratic, even violent, election. This is what motivated Jan. 6 and has motivated him ever since. President Biden's great failing was not getting a national voting rights act passed. Numerous red and purple states, like Arizona and Texas, have passed vote suppression like making it more difficult to vote. States with Republican legislatures have passed additional laws to make it easier to void electoral victories that they don't like. And Republicans have nominated or elected election deniers to the key state posts who certify election results. If Trump had had the election deniers he now has in place in 2020 in, e.g., Pennsylvania Arizona and Georgia, we would now be half-way through his second term and democracy in America would be over. We'd have Russian-style show-elections only. So the polls of "all voters" or "likely voters" that consistently show President Biden beating Trump in a rematch have to be understood as "if they can vote." And of course if all non-violent un-democratic means fail Trump has always got Coup Part Two.
He’s published dozens of recent Q-related posts, in contrast to 2020, when he claimed that while he didn’t know much about QAnon, he couldn’t disprove its conspiracy theory.
Trump’s recent postings have included images referring to himself as a martyr fighting criminals, psychopaths and the so-called deep state. ...
Even when his posts haven’t referred to the conspiracy theory directly, Trump has amplified users who do. An Associated Press analysis found that of nearly 75 accounts Trump has reposted on his Truth Social profile in the past month, more than a third of them have promoted QAnon by sharing the movement’s slogans, videos or imagery.
Earlier this month, Trump chose a QAnon song to close out a rally in Pennsylvania. The same song appears in one of his recent campaign videos and is titled “WWG1WGA,” an acronym used as a rallying cry for Q adherents that stands for “Where we go one, we go all.”
“Yup, haters!” wrote one commenter on an anonymous QAnon message board. “Trump re-truthed Q memes. And he’ll do it again, more and more of them, over and OVER, until (asterisk)everyone(asterisk) finally gets it. Make fun of us all you want, whatever! Soon Q will be everywhere!”
“Trump Sending a Clear Message Patriots,” a QAnon-linked account on Truth Social wrote. “He Re-Truthed This for a Reason.”
Roger that.
By using their own language to directly address QAnon supporters, Trump is telling them that they’ve been right all along and that he shares their secret mission, according to Janet McIntosh, an anthropologist at Brandeis University who has studied QAnon’s use of language and symbols.
It also allows Trump to endorse their beliefs and their hope for a violent uprising without expressly saying so, she said, citing his recent post about “the storm” as a particularly frightening example.
“The ‘storm is coming’ is shorthand for something really dark that he’s not saying out loud,” McIntosh said. “This is a way for him to point to violence without explicitly calling for it. ...
Bloom predicted that Trump may later attempt to market Q-related merchandise or perhaps ask QAnon followers to donate to his legal defense.
A growing list of criminal episodes has been linked to people who had expressed support for the conspiracy theory...
QAnon supporters...Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
In November 2020, two men drove to a vote-counting site in Philadelphia in a Hummer adorned with QAnon stickers and loaded with a rifle, 100 rounds of ammunition and other weapons...
Last year, a California man who told authorities he had been enlightened by QAnon was accused of killing his two children because he believed they had serpent DNA.
Last month, a Colorado woman was found guilty of attempting to kidnap her son...after she began associating with QAnon supporters. Other adherents have been accused of environmental vandalism, firing paintballs at military reservists, abducting a child in France and even killing a New York City mob boss.
On Sunday, police fatally shot a Michigan man who they say had killed his wife and severely injured his daughter. A surviving daughter told The Detroit News that she believes her father was motivated by QAnon.
“I think that he was always prone to (mental issues), but it really brought him down when he was reading all those weird things on the internet,” she told the newspaper.
...a Pennsylvania man who had reposted QAnon content on Facebook was arrested after he allegedly charged into a Dairy Queen with a gun, saying he wanted to kill all Democrats and restore Trump to power.