There they were at the Trump rally in their “Q” t-shirts and MAGA caps, their eyes fixed in an intense-but-vacant stare, looking like a large, stoned bowling team, perpetually waiting for a lane that would never open. Yes, this is what it means to live in this 19th month of Donald Trump’s America: crazy people getting secret messages from the president, White House reporters with bodyguards, and the tote board of false or misleading presidential statements clocking in at 4,229. Turns out that Make America Great Again is a really bad science fiction film, with no finale in sight.
Welcome to “QAnon,” a growing contingent of dark internet groups devoted to a bizarre bouillabaisse of conspiracy theories. Q refers to the supposedly high-level security clearance of the contingent’s anonymous founder. The basic gist is that all presidents before Trump conspired with evildoers, including pedophile rings, to create and maintain a “deep state” that runs the government. The military, according to this storyline, got Trump to run for president in order to take back the country from evil forces.
QAnon believes the deep state perpetrators will end up in prison after “the storm”. This refers to comments Trump made last year while posing for a picture with senior military officers: “You guys know what this represents? Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.” These Trumpian foot soldiers insist that the Russia investigation is a mere decoy, and that the president and special counsel Robert Mueller are working together to imprison numerous left-leaning pedophiles, including, of course, Hillary and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Until Trump’s rally in Tampa, the Q people confined themselves to a few obscure dark places on the Internet. Apparently, they decided to come out after receiving what they saw as coded encouragement from the Donald. In a recent speech, Trump talked about how he tried to avoid Washington, D.C. before he was elected. He said he had only been in Washington 17 times, a number he repeated frequently in that presentation. BINGO! Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet, and a delirious presidential seal of approval for the Q-nuts.
Not only that, on the morning after their Tampa coming-out, QAnon got another wink and a nod from the West Wing. After months of tweeting about “Mueller and his 13 Angry Democrats” the number suddenly changed. Now it was “17 Angry Democrats”. QAnon’s Mashable site went crazy.
Although Trump has never acknowledged his Q fans in a straightforward fashion, he has also refrained from disavowing them. That’s not surprising, given this guy’s obsession with being loved by his base. According to the New York Times, QAnon’s Facebook page has 40,000 followers. Its subreddit board has 49,000 participants. YouTube videos explaining QAnon have had millions of views. Earlier this year, an app called “QDrops” was among the top ten most downloaded in the Apple Store. That’s a lot of love for any narcissist to walk away from.
But here’s the problem: These people are every bit as whacked out of their minds as the guy who shot up a Virginia pizza place after reading on the Internet that Hilary Clinton was using it to run a pedophile ring. There have been at least two Q-nuts arrested this summer, both in Arizona. One armed man parked his self-made armored car on the bridge next to the Hoover Dam, blocking traffic while he waved Q signs. The other occupied a cement plant in Tucson because he thought it was part of a child sex trafficking operation. Meanwhile, our president continues to find clever ways to tweet the number 17 to gin up the most unhinged in his base (here, here and here).
Sadly, this sick behavior pattern has been firmly in place since January 20, 2017. This president thinks nothing of compromising the security of the American people if he thinks it will help ingratiate him with his fans. As of August 1, his daily average of lies, according to the Washington Post’s data base, was 7.6, totally nullifying truth as a commodity in this administration. He hasn’t lifted a finger to stop Russia from sabotaging our elections because it might tarnish the shine of his 2016 election that he clings to like a security blanket. He tells us he has solved the North Korea problem and that we are completely safe, while that regime continues to produce nuclear weapons.
And now he has escalated his Machiavellian war on news reporters to the extent that media outlets are hiring bodyguards to protect the people who cover the president. Trump has moved from calling reporters the “enemy of the people,” to saying they are “very dangerous and sick” and cause wars. Of course, this helps reinforce the credibility of Trump’s lies since he is letting his base know that the truth-based media is the enemy. Never mind that NBC’s Katy Tur is getting messages warning of her being raped and killed, or that CNN’s Brian Stelter and Don Lemon, along with New York Times Columnist Bret Stephens were threatened with being shot. Trump’s diabolical and unprecedented attacks on reporters have drawn strong rebukes from the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, agencies used to taking on these issues with dictatorships of authoritarian countries.
In many ways, this behavior – Trump’s total indifference to truth, decency and the sanctity of human life – is a far greater offense than any Russian collusion or obstruction of justice charges that might come out of the Mueller investigation. This man – the president of the United States – is so singularly consumed, in his every moment, with elevating his ego through perverse delusion that he doesn’t give one hoot that people might be maimed or killed by his self-serving recklessness. If that doesn’t constitute “high crimes and misdemeanors”, then I don’t know what does.