Meet the Press

Russia, Russia, Russia

CHUCK TODD:

And there was a new phenomenon this week that a bunch of us had to explain to the public, something called QAnon. Right? And it is in sort of the dark recesses of social media, of sorts. On Reddit and places like that, less on Twitter. QAnon, apparently this elaborate– it takes one conspiracy and puts them all together. Donald Trump is either this secret deep state superhero, or John F. Kennedy, Jr. who apparently they don't believe is dead.

CLINT WATTS:

This has always been the big fear, is Russia opened the playbook for the rest of the world to copy. This is super cheap. And whether it's political interference and manipulation or just social manipulation, this gives everyone the ability to push a falsehood, which leads to a public safety issue.

QAnon, this idea that there is a secret source inside the intelligence community. Oh my, we've worried about this before with the N.S.A. And now we're talking about them leaking information. This, again, plays into this narrative that you can't trust institutions. So, if you're a foreign interference player like Russia, what do you do? You just amplify QAnon. You don't have to make it. There is so much fake news in the U.S. right now. They don't need to create manipulated truths. They can just ride them.

ROBERT COSTA:

And the president, himself, has believed in conspiracies before. His political career was very much launched on how he came onto that birtherism with President Obama. But there's not really an expectation inside of this White House that the president's going to somehow speak out on QAnon.

People inside of the president's inner circle, they see the Q signs as much as anybody in the press pen sees those Q signs. But they believe this is the Republican base. This is the Trump base. They have a deep suspicion of the deep state.

https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-august-5-2018-n897776