Donald Trump Has Fully Embraced QAnon and No One Seems to Care
Donald Trump is a transactional figure. If you like him loudly and publicly, he’ll like you. This helps explain why he embraced super-fan Elon Musk after bragging, "When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he'd be worthless and tell me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, "drop to your knees and beg," and he would have done it.”
That's pretty damn insulting, but Musk nurses a child-like reverence for the crazed felon that he happily overlooked Trump’s words because Trump hates many of the same people as he does. That’s what being a Trump Republican is all about: hating the same people as Donald Trump and wanting to see them punished and publicly humiliated. Or imprisoned! No punishment is too harsh for hurting Donald Trump’s feelings.
No one likes Donald Trump more than QAnon folks. QAnon doesn't just think that Trump is easily the greatest leader the country has ever known; they worship him as a messianic figure fighting a holy war against an evil cabal of pedophilic, cannibalistic Satan worshippers made up of leading figures in Hollywood and Democratic politics.
It’s a testament to how utterly insane public discourse has become that news outlets have to specifically note that QAnon is a debunked and fictional conspiracy theory.
He seems nice!
During his first term in office, Trump pretended to be unfamiliar with QAnon, a massive conspiracy theory with him at the center that millions of his followers believe in even as it alienates them from their family, friends, communities, and reality.
When that became impossible, he continued to pretend that he knew almost nothing about the movement except that it held him in high esteem and that he really hated pedophiles.
How could anyone be against a pro-Trump, anti-pedophilia organization? More specifically, how could any conservative, right-wing organization object to people who are so right about two crucial issues?
Trump was flattered by QAnon. It’s a movement that holds him in even higher esteem than he holds himself. But where Trump’s impossibly inflated self-image is inextricably rooted in his raging insecurities, QAnon’s delusions are rooted in hero worship and a desire for a strong daddy to kill all the bad people and reward the Godly and devoted.
As narcissistic and dishonest as Trump might be, he couldn’t publicly embrace QAnon because it’s so transparently wrong and insane that no one in touch with reality could believe even a fraction of its claims.
Trump could wink at QAnon and graciously accept its money and support, but he couldn’t do much more.
That has changed. On Truth Social, Trump has gone full Qanon. He regularly re-posts memes from QAnon cultists, including posts explicitly referencing the conspiracy theory.
To cite a particularly egregious post, Trump “ReTruthed” a post from PatriotsInControl of a flattering image of him, but not that that flattering, in front of dark clouds with a Q pin on one side of his enormous suit and an American flag on the other accompanied by the worst “The Storm is Coming” and WWG1WGA.
“The Storm” refers to Trump’s moment of ultimate triumph, when his enemies, including the Clintons and the Obamas, are publicly executed for their crimes against humanity.
WWG1WGA, meanwhile, references the QAnon slogan, “Where one of us goes, we will go together.”
It’s telling that this lusty embrace of QAnon appeared on Truth Social and not Twitter. Truth Social is Trump’s online home. It’s his base of online operations, but he also owns the place.
You can do things at home that you would not do in public, like lying around in your underwear eating tacos and watching Tales From the Crypt or cosign a dangerous, destructive movement that depicts you as literally Christ-like in your goodness and your enemies as Satanic in their evil.
The Trump of 2024 is not the Trump or 2016 or even 2020. He's loopier, clumsier, and more out of it. As with Biden, his senility and mental decline are impossible to dismiss or ignore.
Trump now has very little left to lose. This is his last rodeo. If he’s defeated, he won’t run for a fourth time. He’s vowed to be a dictator on day one of his presidency. If you think he’ll stop there, you’re a bigger fool than the confederacy of dunces that make up the QAnon mob.
The twice-impeached one-term president and thirty-four-time felon’s misbehavior is so egregious that his unapologetic embrace of QAnon barely made news.
That makes it ironic that the Republicans’ main criticism of the Democrats this time around is that they’re crazed extremists with dangerous ideas.
Trump’s Truth Social feed consists of Trump screaming incoherently in all caps rants about the Democrats’ radical ideas liberally interspersed with reposts from QAnon accounts that suggest that he agrees with a worldview that depicts him as superhuman and his enemies as devilish apogees of child-eating evil.
Call me crazy, but that, to me, seems more radical and extreme than arguing that trans people are human beings who should be treated with dignity.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn't cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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