As many have noted over the past few weeks—at least since his “mega-tantrum” during an Atlanta rally, as The Bulwark’s A.B. Stoddard put it—Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been behaving erratically. Indeed, although his campaign is reportedly grateful that it’s confined to Truth Social, that hasn’t stopped publications like the New Republic and Rolling Stone (among others) from labeling his latest posting spree “fascist,” as well as “vulgar,” “unhinged,” “crazed,” and “violent.”
At a certain point, we become so inundated with lies, conspiracy theories, grifts, nonsensical Jaws ripoffs, and the sharing of posts from horrific antisemites and racists that we start to shut down when presented with new ones. QAnon, for example, has become so deeply ingrained in far-right discourse—and, more disturbingly, in conventional Republican rhetoric—that we tend to just move past it.
Not because the damage is healed: as Jesselynn Cook details in her new book, The Quiet Damage, QAnon has ripped apart families and left lasting scars. And not because, post-Q, the beliefs have gone away: a PRRI survey from 2021 showed that as many as one in five Americans believes one of the core ideas of QAnon. Maybe it’s because, for the last two years, Trump has been openly embracing the rhetoric of the conspiracy movement. Maybe it’s because post-January 6th, rhetoric scares us less than open coup attempts. Or maybe it’s the fatigue of being told that a bizarre conspiracy theory like QAnon matters in the midst of all of the other calls for violence, conspiratorial garbage, and open legislative threats on America. After all, Project 2025 exists in this realm of reality, the Christofascist nightmare looming over us.
Still, it would be a potentially catastrophic mistake for us to ignore the former president’s open embrace of QAnon; not a single casual reference, not a rally song, not a sly wink and a nod, but the open sharing of core eschatological ideas and doctrine. Take the series of images the former President re-Truthed—yes, that’s the name for it—from “SpiritualStreetfighter 17.”
The image itself might not seem that worrisome: Trump, arms outstretched, with the world behind him. He holds in his right hand a ghostly “Q+” (according to some, the code name Trump himself uses when he posts on Q message boards) and the text reads “The World Will Soon Understand/Nothing Can Stop What is Coming,” a direct reference to “The Storm.” As I wrote back in 2020:
The QAnoners’ apocalypse, unsurprisingly, is one of political partisan violence, culminating in “The Storm,” when all of the so-called “deep state leaders” will be arrested and sent to Guantanamo Bay, including a variety of Democratic politicians, celebrities, and public servants numbering in the thousands, and then public executions and the works.
That last bit is really the key: the Day of the Rope, from the White supremacist guidebook/novel The Turner Diaries, reimagined for a Christofascist eschatological vision. That call for violence permeates the current campaign, from its opening rally in Waco last year onwards.
And that image is not a one off. Trump shared others from the same account, on the same theme:
That second one also declares that “Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming” but it includes “WWG1WGA” (Where We Go One, We Go All), perhaps the most common QAnon catch phrase. But if you scroll one more “re-Truth” down, you get to why it all matters.
Sometimes we miss the forest for the trees. The former President keeps talking about retaliatory violence and criminal prosecutions. He’s made it clear that he wants to prosecute President Biden and his family when he takes office, declaring that he would lock up a variety of his political enemies. And political violence continues to be on the rise in America, including threats against senators and other public officials, the QAnon-linked attacker of Nancy Pelosi’s husband (in a failed attempt to murder her), and the assassination attempt on Trump himself, the motive of which remains unknown.
Donald Trump doesn’t create things like QAnon. he harnesses them, or yokes himself to the ones that amuse or flatter him. And it’s tempting to see it as just another in a long series of conspiracies, making it easy to forget that the heart of it is a brutal contempt for democracy, a full throated call for the execution of his political opponents.
It’s not as simple as a belief in an internet conspiracy; it’s a belief in exercising power to slaughter an entire segment of society in the name of an eschatological future. So the image of all of Trump’s major opponents in prison? That’s the stepping stone to their execution. And the other QAnon images he re-Truthed only emphasize and contextualize that goal.
“In the End, God Wins!” (see main article image) combines Christian nationalist imagery with the Big Lie (see the 45-47 on the hat, implying that Trump was not only the 45th President but also the 46th instead of Biden and will be the 47th as well) and the QAnon slogans WWG1WGA and Q+ on the side.
“Hold the Line, Justice is Coming,” with the call for “ReTruth if you want Justice to Be Served.” Against whom? Well, the re-Truth before that was a call to try the J6 Select Committee for sedition and lock them up. And before that, an image of Trump, head bowed in prayer, saying, “2024 is the final battle. We’re either going to have a country better than we’ve ever had before, or we’re not going to have a country at all.” And before that an image of a host of government officials under the title “American Coup d’Etat” with “a Truth” from Trump loyalist Kash Patel pinned to it.
And if you get down far enough in the re-Truths, you get to this:
“All Roads Lead to Obama. ReTruth if you want Public Military Tribunals.” Perhaps the most basic, fundamental, and widely known promise of QAnon: that it ends in military tribunals and mass executions.
Yes, on the one hand, these are re-Truths of meme images. You can always make the argument that the internet isn’t real life. And I understand the ways in which that argument used to be compelling. But it doesn’t work anymore. QAnon moved offline. The Alt Right moved offline. Christofascists organized online and circled the Capitol before storming it. The Groypers went from neo-Nazi online fringe to speaking at major conventions. And Trump calling out QAnon at its most basic and violent, summoning it back into his spaces, can once again bring it offline like he did in January of 2020.
Hopefully that’s not true. Hopefully it’s just memes. Hopefully the worst rallies of the movement spent their energy four years ago. But hope, by itself, is not enough to diffuse fascist movements, not enough to stop religious violence, not enough to stop an apocalyptic conspiracy theory that’s still champing at the bit to murder any leader or elected member of government, or official who opposes the former president.
