'I can smell sweet victory and vindication coming': Trump leads QAnon into another imaginary win
The world of QAnon was headed for a future of infamous ridicule after spending weeks in Dallas, Texas waiting for John F. Kennedy Jr. to rise from the dead to join their ranks. The hope was that Donald Trump's loss and the mockery of the Dallas conspiracies would tamp down what has become a kind of cult, according to GOP officials, political analysts, former law enforcement, and even ex-Q members.
Before the 2016 election, QAnon conspiracy theories about a sex-trafficking ring in the basement of a family pizza place inspired a gunman to show up and terrorize a whole neighborhood.
Lately, that violence has been reignited, with a QAnon follower shooting and killing his wife and injuring one of their daughters. A QAnon follower showed up threatening to "kill all Democrats" at a Dairy Queen. Trump supporters are taking up the mantle of violence.
Vice News noted that Trump has been spreading a lot of QAnon memes lately on his private social media website. Last weekend's Trump rally took it further, with the former president's words coming with a score behind them like a feature film. The music was similar to the theme used in QAnon films. The audience raised their fingers into a salute.
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After all of this, a QAnon influencer took to Telegram to proclaim: “He doesn't care about being accused of aligning with ‘those crazy Q people.’ In the replies, QAnon followers made it clear that they believe Trump’s actions are confirmation. “I can smell sweet victory and vindication coming."
“I hope you all are right, that something is actually going to happen,” a different Telegram user wrote. “I feel like I've been chasing a carrot for the last 2 years. Starting to feel like civil war is the only way.”
Another posted: “Waiting for ‘the question.’ How much goading will it take for [them] to ask it?”
As Vice explained, the question has become common over the past few weeks. The group desperately wants the press to ask Trump where he stands on QAnon. When he was running for reelection, he told NBC News reporter Savannah Guthrie during a town hall that he knew nothing about them but heard they were nice.
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“They're certainly not as big and networked as they once were, but they are still there,” said senior research manager Jared Holt, of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. He spends his days focusing on extremism. “And a lot of them, in the absence of Q after Biden's inauguration, pivoted towards election denialism, along with the rest of the conspiratorial GOP.”
The QAnon-focused podcast Adventures in HellwQrld told Vice that it was all inevitable.
“The people who made Truth Social worked relentlessly to recruit QAnon. Once on the platform, QAnon followers were endlessly going to promote Trump and Trump was going to start reposting their praise of him, which would get the mainstream media to cover his embrace of QAnon and give him attention," said host Mike Rains. In fact, the @Q account was set up on Truth Social before Trump set up his own account.
Trump's own staff is helping promote them too. Kash Patel told a streaming conspiracy channel that the people are so brilliant he wishes they had worked for Trump.
“I talk with the president all the time and we're just blown away at the amount of acumen some of these people have," he claimed.
Mike Rothschild, author of the book The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything, told Vice that Trump flocking to Q makes sense psychologically because Trump has essentially lost his power and control, while his back is against the wall.
"You turn to the people who've always been in your corner,” Rothschild said. "He doesn't want the fair weather MAGA people who are willing to walk away from him, he wants the hardcore believers and that's the Q people.”
Meanwhile, it makes the Q-crowd embrace Trump even more because it confirms their long-held fantasies.
“There is a feeling in that community that something big is about to happen, but because it's so vague, and because it's just how this movement works, it could be anything,” Rothschild said. “I think one of the really scary things is that the people who are most prone to potentially committing a violent act on Trump's behalf are getting really excited and I don't think that's good.”
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