by Kathryn Joyc

During Donald Trump’s Sept. 17 rally in Youngstown, Ohio, members of the audience began to sway in time with the music playing over the loudspeakers and pointed their index fingers in the air as the former president talked about the supposed disintegration of the United States. That salute, as it turned out, is tied to the massive conspiracy theory QAnon (or, more specifically, with a QAnon offshoot movement called Negative48 that has spent much of the last year waiting for the resurrection of John F. Kennedy Jr.). The song was an instrumental track that did not originate with the QAnon movement but has become associated with it after being reposted online under the title “Wwg1wga” — the abbreviated movement slogan “Where we go one, we go all.”

In the week after his Ohio rally, Trump went on a Q-curious spree, posting a video on his Truth Social page that featured multiple QAnon slogans and images of the ex-president holding a playing card with the letter “Q” on it or striding through the center of a giant upper-case Q with a flagpole over his shoulder. On Friday, at another rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, he seemed to invoke QAnon’s main themes and language — claiming that his own MAGA movement was “standing up against” “sick, sinister and evil people from within our own country” — even as the event’s security team tried to stop attendees from pointing their fingers in the air.

All of this amounts to a stunning escalation of Trump’s involvement with the conspiracy theory, after years of flirting with quasi-endorsements of it or coy claims that he had only barely heard of it. In that time, as journalist Mike Rothschild writes in “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything,” QAnon metastasized, absorbing old conspiracist claims, applying its logic to new developments and ultimately coloring huge swaths of mainstream Republican politics as well. In a new edition of the book released last month, Rothschild writes that QAnon is “no longer the cool, secret club that you had to speak the jargon to have a chance of getting into. It [is] just ‘conservatism’ now.” Rothschild spoke with Salon this week.

In the last couple of weeks Donald Trump has been signaling to QAnon in far more explicit ways than he’s done before. What should we make of that? 

Trump started to retweet QAnon memes and tweets from QAnon people really early on, just a couple of weeks after the first Q drops. But it was dribs and drabs. He’d retweet something with a flaming Q, but then it would be a month before he did it again. It was never this binge where he’s sharing dozens of posts with outright explicit references to Q. And with most of the stuff he tweeted, you could say, well he maybe didn’t read anything else by this person. There was always some other reason. Now, at this point, there is no other reason. There is no other possibility than he is directly tipping his hat to QAnon and the people who follow it.

Why is he doing it? Is this just desperation? 

I think it is desperation, and trying to keep faith with the people who have been in his corner the most fervently.  He’s losing support; people are walking away from this. They’re just sick of it. And you also have to remember that he’s doing this on Truth Social. This is not a widespread mainstream application; nobody’s using it other than Trump people. So he’s signaling to the people who are already in his corner — knowing that they love him, that they will do anything he asks them to do — because those are the only people he’s got left, really.

What’s changed in the world of QAnon since the first edition of your book came out last year? 

The biggest change is certainly that Trump is no longer the president. This was a movement based on Donald Trump unleashing a purge of the deep state, and Trump is not the president anymore. So you have a movement that by its very nature has to be about something different. It can’t be about the “Storm” happening anymore. Now it has to be about all of the various things that conspired to get Trump out of office and all of the moves and countermoves that Trump is making to get back in office.

But it’s also a movement that has become much less about the branding and iconography of QAnon. A lot of the really weird stuff has been left behind, but QAnon’s ideas are much more mainstream than they ever were before: The idea of an all-powerful government that conspired to keep Trump out of office, and staged COVID-19 just to make sure that there could be mail-in voting fraud, and then that the election was stolen. All of these things are now mainstream Republican tenets. You can’t be successful in the modern GOP if you think that the 2020 election was fair. And a lot of that comes from the normalizing of conspiracy theories that you got with QAnon.

You talk about QAnon as “a conspiracy theory of everything.”

QAnon is like a lot of other past movements in that it takes in everything that’s going on around you and filters it through the lens of conspiracy theory. With QAnon, any event that happened in the world was actually part of this secret silent war, from a military plane crashing to James Comey tweeting a picture of his dog.

With [the anonymous poster or posters known as] “Q” not really being active anymore, there aren’t any more Q drops. But there is so much happening in the news that it became really easy for QAnon believers to start pulling more and more things into their conspiracy: COVID-19, the COVID vaccine, the “cancel culture” hysteria. Everything that happened got pulled in and, after a while, those different silos merged. The “wellness”/alternative medicine conspiracy movement merged with the stolen election conspiracy movement. These things normally wouldn’t have much to do with each other. But with QAnon, it’s like everything is connected to everything else; everything is part of the conspiracy.

Are newer narratives, like the “Great Reset” or the recent farm protests in the Netherlands, part of QAnon’s extended universe? 

That’s absolutely part of QAnon’s influence. I think the Great Reset idea is taking off because a lot of people have been conditioned to think there’s some vast plot that’s going on, and theories like that have been around a long time. In the book I write about things like the dinar scam — which promised there would be a great currency reset or a great economic collapse — but this was really fringe stuff, not stuff that mainstream politicians would talk about. You wouldn’t see massive events where thousands of people would show up to hear speeches about the global currency reset. That just didn’t happen. The idea that there is a vast, new world order, a deep-state plot to completely change the way we live our lives and to take all of our property and our rights, these things have existed in the right-wing conspiracy world for a long time, but they were never as mainstream as they are now.

You also write that QAnon has always drawn on these older conspiracy theories, whether the New World Order or the Blood Libel. What does it mean for QAnon to be such a pastiche? 

A lot of these theories are very durable because they work. There’s always going to be people who feel there is a vast oppressive force keeping them down and manipulating politics and banking. That’s been called the New World Order, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Freemasons, the Illuminati. QAnon is just another iteration of all that. And it works because people genuinely want someone to blame for their own misfortunes. They want to point to something failing in their life and say, “Well, it’s not my fault. It’s the Freemasons.” Or “The Jews sank my business.” That stuff has always been popular because there’s always a human need to blame somebody.