OPINION
MICHELLE
GOLDBERG
Trump’s Heartless QAnon Embrace
Sept. 26,
2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/opinion/politics/trump-election-qanon.html
Michelle
Goldberg
By Michelle
Goldberg
Opinion
Columnist
The title
of the Reddit post this month seemed almost too shocking to be true: “My Qdad
snapped and killed my family this morning.”
The post —
by Rebecca Lanis, a 21-year-old from Michigan — was on a forum dedicated to
people who’ve lost loved ones to QAnon, the sprawling conspiracy cult that
imagines that Donald Trump is waging a secret war against blood-drinking
pedophiles who run Hollywood and the Democratic Party. As The Detroit News
would soon report, Lanis’s father, 53-year-old Igor Lanis, had indeed gone on a
murderous rampage.
Lanis
described how her father had fallen down the QAnon rabbit hole after the 2020
election. He wasn’t violent, however, until the morning of Sept. 11, when he
shot her mother, her sister and their dog, and was then killed in a shootout
with the police. Lanis’s sister, despite being shot in the back and legs,
survived. Her mother and the dog did not.
The
killings weren’t the first to be linked to QAnon radicalization. Last year, a
40-year-old California man confessed to killing his two young children; in an
affidavit, an F.B.I. agent said he “explained that he was enlightened by QAnon
and Illuminati conspiracy theories” and had come to believe that his children
had serpent DNA. In 2019, a QAnon devotee stabbed his brother to death after
being convinced that he was a lizard. However bizarre, the idea that the ruling
elite are really lizards or reptiles seeking to enslave the human race is an
old conspiracy theory that has been subsumed into QAnon’s paranoid omnibus
mythology.
All these
men appear to have been mentally ill, but QAnon played a role in shaping and
reinforcing their delusions, as it has for many committing lesser crimes. On
Friday, an Iowa man named Doug Jensen became the latest QAnon follower to be
convicted in connection to his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. The existence
of the Reddit forum where Lanis posted, QAnon Casualties, is itself a testament
to the way QAnon destroys lives.
Which is
why Trump’s embrace of the movement is not just dangerous, but cruel.
Trump has
long played footsie with QAnon, whose adherents prophesy an apotheosis, or
“storm,” in which Trump is returned to power and his enemies rounded up and
executed. “I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they
like me very much, which I appreciate,” Trump said in 2020. When he was still
on Twitter, he regularly retweeted QAnon followers.
But in
recent weeks, as Trump’s legal troubles have mounted, his endorsement of QAnon
has become more forthright. On Sept. 12, he reposted an image of himself
wearing a Q lapel pin and the words “The Storm Is Coming” on his social media
platform, Truth Social. An Associated Press analysis, published on Sept. 16,
found that of nearly 75 accounts Trump has reposted on Truth Social in the past
month, more than a third have promoted QAnon.
“What he’s
doing on Truth Social is a massive escalation,” said Mike Rothschild, author of
“The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory
of Everything.”
At a rally
on Sept. 17, Trump spoke over mournful music that was, as The New York Times
reported, “all but identical” to a QAnon theme song; many in the audience
raised a pointed finger in the air, a QAnon salute. On Friday, the former
president reposted a video full of QAnon memes on Truth Social. (Some around
Trump may believe it’s unhelpful for him to openly court an apocalyptic cult;
at a rally on Friday, staff reportedly made people giving the QAnon salute
lower their arms.)
Many have
speculated about why Trump is moving closer to QAnon. My own guess is that he’s
deepening his connection with his most fanatical fans to more easily whip up a
vigilante mob if he’s indicted on any of the many charges he appears to be
facing. What’s clear, though, is how little he thinks of those fans, whom he is
blithely encouraging down a ruinous path.
“We tend to
see the danger that these movements represent, but we don’t talk about the
people who are in them,” Rothschild told me. It’s easy to write off QAnon
followers, he said, many of whom have reprehensible beliefs. But “this
movement, and this philosophy, it finds an audience because it tells people things
that they want to hear, and it creates a world for them that is much safer and
makes a lot more sense than the world that we’re in now.”
It is
deeply comforting for people to feel that they’re part of an epochal battle
between good and evil in which good is destined to triumph. The world of QAnon,
said Rothschild, “becomes the only meaningful thing to them.”
Trump is
making it much harder for people to leave that world, because the man they
admire most is endorsing all their wild, violently millenarian fantasies. “It
blows away the doubt,” said Rothschild. Much was made in 2016 of Hillary
Clinton calling Trump supporters “deplorables.” But few have demonstrated as
much contempt for the people who love Trump as Trump has himself.
Michelle
Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several
books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that
won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace
sexual harassment. @michelleinbklyn
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