Trump is now full on Q'Anon

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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 and has become increasingly assertive in the Republican primary process during the midterm elections, his actions show that far from distancing himself from the political fringe, he is welcoming it.

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.

Pressed on QAnon theories that Trump allegedly is saving the nation from a satanic cult of child sex traffickers, he claimed ignorance but asked, "Is that supposed to be a bad thing?"

"If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it," Trump said.

Trump's recent postings have included images referring to himself as a martyr fighting criminals, psychopaths and the so-called deep state. In one now-deleted post from late August, he reposted a "q drop," one of the cryptic message board postings that QAnon supporters claim come from an anonymous government worker with top secret clearance.

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. About 1 in 10 include QAnon language or links in their profile bios.

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."

Online, Q adherents basked in Trump's attention.

"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."

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.

A growing list of criminal episodes has been linked to people who had expressed support for the conspiracy theory, which U.S. intelligence officials have warned could trigger more violence.

Last month, a Colorado woman was found guilty of attempting to kidnap her son from foster care after her daughter said 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.

The same weekend 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.

If you are a political fanatic, you’ve surely heard the old saying that when fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. That’s been proven true in this fraught year of 2022 as Christian nationalism rises to our extreme right, but no one predicted this:

That U.S. authoritarianism would also come with a bat-guano crazy musical soundtrack — music that sounds like a Bible Belt altar riff but is actually tied to the weirdly popular QAnon conspiracy theory whose legion of followers believe there’s an elite global cabal of child-trafficking, baby-blood-drinking liberal politicians and movie stars.

This terrifying crossing of some kind of autocratic Rubicon happened — where else? — at a Donald Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Saturday night.

Trump rallies are a tricky thing to cover, some 20 months after the 45th president left the White House in seeming disgrace after a failed coup and two impeachments. There’s an understandable desire to want to not give these increasingly hate-drenched rallies any oxygen, in the vain hope the flame will completely flicker out. And his Fidel Castro-length rants increasingly offer little political insight but long flights of narcissistic grievance about his 2020 election loss and an enemies list that grows longer each day.

But even had it been stripped of its creepy musical backing, Trump’s apocalyptic closing diatribe from an arena in the epicenter of Rust Belt industrial decay demands our attention — as the current front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination continues to steer his followers toward an authoritarian cult of personality, committed more to its warped leader and his perceived slights than any justifiable cause.

Trump insisted, without evidence, that Russia’s bloody unprovoked invasion of Ukraine “never would have happened with me as your commander in chief, and for four long years it didn’t happen.” The ex-POTUS veered from China threatening Taiwan to a litany of grievances against the FBI agents and prosecutors honing in on his cache of top-secret documents and his post-2020 election tampering to an old enemy in the media: “Fake news is all you get, and they are truly the enemy of the people.” That echo of Joseph Stalin wasn’t his only callback to an era where rising dictatorship inevitably led to death on a massive scale. “We have a president who is cognitively impaired,” Trump said, falsely, “and in no condition to lead our country, which may end up in World War III.”

The ax-grinding is getting worse, but the music is new.

The swelling, quasi-religious (or maybe late-night inspirational infomercial) melody that accompanied Trump’s Ohio jeremiad wasn’t random, according to Trump-tracking experts. Last month, the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters for America identified that rising melody — hinting of a coming storm — that appeared again Saturday in Youngstown as either a) “Wwg1wga,” with its title an abbreviation of the main QAnon slogan “Where we go one, we go all,” that was posted to Spotify in 2020 and often appears with online posts about the conspiracy theory, or b) an exactly identical number called “Mirrors,” as claimed by Team Trump.

Media Matters noted Trump’s use of the tune in an August posting of an anti-Biden rant to his website Truth Social sparked praise and great excitement in the online community of QAnon true believers, with one saying it “might be the biggest nod they’ve ever given us [to be honest].” Wrote another: “That’s not an accident. Team Trump knows exactly what they’re doing.”

The most striking thing about Trump’s Wagnerian moment in Youngstown on Saturday was the reaction of the crowd in the not-full arena, many of whom raised their right arm forward as the music swelled. Most also raised up their index finger or a No. 1 symbol indicative of the QAnon slogan, a callback to their Dear Leader that they “got it.” Several even flashed the “Q” hand signal. The photos and videos of mass, zombie-like right-arm obedience to America’s wannabe dictator rekindled chilling memories of Nuremberg rallies or Leni Riefenstahl documentaries, of the terrible places that cultlike devotion can lead.

Trump is counting on this to save him. He told interviewer Hugh Hewitt there’d be “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before” if he is criminally indicted. Experts in authoritarianism who saw videos of the Youngstown rally said they are alarmed at the increasingly fascistic tone of his movement, and his blatant appeals to violence.

Some might like to pretend that this is strictly a “Donald Trump problem,” a would-be felon desperate to save his own skin. But the reality is that this fascistic virus has infected most of the Republican Party, on the eve of a midterm election where the American Experiment itself is up for grabs.

As the fall campaign begins, the signs of rising Republican fascism — rallying the masses by dehumanizing “out” groups like migrants or the LGBTQ community, or the idea that Christian law trumps pluralistic democracy — are everywhere.

Trump Sr. ended his Ohio event with the musical notes of what’s known as “an altar call.”

What transpired Saturday was a culmination of an American nightmare. It can’t happen here? It just did.

I just gotta hold onto hope that Trump and his fascist enablers will get what they rightfully deserve in the end just like the Nazis in Germany did after they lost World War 2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

And what about those Nazi sobs?
They'll be given cushy jobs.

(sung to the tune of the Monorail song)

Wow... just, wow...

I really am speechless about this. Just like I was when I first learned about the torture of Iraqi POWs in Abu Ghraib or America's experiments on black people who suffered from syphilis.

Well if they are just theories, than there is no proof they exist, so it's nothing to worry about therefore. It's like how I have a friend who fully believes the moonlanding wasn't real. But if he can't prove it, then it's just a theory, and now cares?

A lot of people blame Trump for the extreme actions of his 'followers', but I feel that his followers are the real problem, and he is just one person. But everyone acts like his followers are mindless sheep that don't know any better or have no real accountability.

So many people who hate Trump give his followers the 'Nuremberg defense', and say it's all his faul that his followers did what they did. Stop giving them the Nuremberg defense people. They are a much bigger problem than Trump himself.