Why Trump went full QAnon: He's desperate — and "those are the only people he's got left"
Author Mike Rothschild says Trump may be fading, but the QAnon cult is spreading — and could bring "mass violence"
By Kathryn Joyce - Investigative Reporter
Published September 27, 2022 6:00AM (EDT)
Donald Trump | Alex Jones | QAnon Supporter Getty Images/Salon
During Donald Trump's Sept. 17 rally in Youngstown, Ohio, members of the audience began to sway in time with the music playing over the loudspeakers and pointed their index fingers in the air as the former president talked about the supposed disintegration of the United States. That salute, as it turned out, is tied to the massive conspiracy theory QAnon (or, more specifically, with a QAnon offshoot movement called Negative48 that has spent much of the last year waiting for the resurrection of John F. Kennedy Jr.). The song was an instrumental track that did not originate with the QAnon movement but has become associated with it after being reposted online under the title "Wwg1wga" — the abbreviated movement slogan "Where we go one, we go all."
In the week after his Ohio rally, Trump went on a Q-curious spree, posting a video on his Truth Social page that featured multiple QAnon slogans and images of the ex-president holding a playing card with the letter "Q" on it or striding through the center of a giant upper-case Q with a flagpole over his shoulder. On Friday, at another rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, he seemed to invoke QAnon's main themes and language — claiming that his own MAGA movement was "standing up against" "sick, sinister and evil people from within our own country" — even as the event's security team tried to stop attendees from pointing their fingers in the air.
Donald Trump's QAnon cult rally: If you thought the fever was breaking, think again
All of this amounts to a stunning escalation of Trump's involvement with the conspiracy theory, after years of flirting with quasi-endorsements of it or coy claims that he had only barely heard of it. In that time, as journalist Mike Rothschild writes in "The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything," QAnon metastasized, absorbing old conspiracist claims, applying its logic to new developments and ultimately coloring huge swaths of mainstream Republican politics as well. In a new edition of the book released last month, Rothschild writes that QAnon is "no longer the cool, secret club that you had to speak the jargon to have a chance of getting into. It [is] just 'conservatism' now." Rothschild spoke with Salon this week.
https://www.salon.com/2022/09/27/why-went-full-qanon-hes-desperate–and-those-are-the-only-people-hes-got-left/
It's a long article, Anon only posted the first few paragraphs