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Trump openly embraces, amplifies QAnon conspiracy theories
By DAVID KLEPPER and ALI SWENSON
today
After winking at QAnon for years, Donald Trump is overtly embracing the baseless conspiracy theory, even as the number of frightening real-world events linked to it grows.
On Tuesday, using his Truth Social platform, the Republican former president reposted an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin overlaid with the words “The Storm is Coming.” In QAnon lore, the “storm” refers to Trump’s final victory, when supposedly he will regain power and his opponents will be tried, and potentially executed, on live television.
As Trump contemplates another run for the presidency and has become increasingly assertive in the Republican primary process during the midterm elections, his actions show that far from distancing himself from the political fringe, he is welcoming it.
He’s published dozens of recent Q-related posts, in contrast to 2020, when he claimed that while he didn’t know much about QAnon, he couldn’t disprove its conspiracy theory.
Pressed on QAnon theories that Trump allegedly is saving the nation from a satanic cult of child sex traffickers, he claimed ignorance but asked, “Is that supposed to be a bad thing?”
“If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it,” Trump said.
Trump’s recent postings have included images referring to himself as a martyr fighting criminals, psychopaths and the so-called deep state. In one now-deleted post from late August, he reposted a “q drop,” one of the cryptic message board postings that QAnon supporters claim come from an anonymous government worker with top secret clearance.
A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Even when his posts haven’t referred to the conspiracy theory directly, Trump has amplified users who do. An Associated Press analysis found that of nearly 75 accounts Trump has reposted on his Truth Social profile in the past month, more than a third of them have promoted QAnon by sharing the movement’s slogans, videos or imagery. About 1 in 10 include QAnon language or links in their profile bios.
Earlier this month, Trump chose a QAnon song to close out a rally in Pennsylvania. The same song appears in one of his recent campaign videos and is titled “WWG1WGA,” an acronym used as a rallying cry for Q adherents that stands for “Where we go one, we go all.”
Online, Q adherents basked in Trump’s attention.
“Yup, haters!” wrote one commenter on an anonymous QAnon message board. “Trump re-truthed Q memes. And he’ll do it again, more and more of them, over and OVER, until (asterisk)everyone(asterisk) finally gets it. Make fun of us all you want, whatever! Soon Q will be everywhere!”
“Trump Sending a Clear Message Patriots,” a QAnon-linked account on Truth Social wrote. “He Re-Truthed This for a Reason.”
The former president may be seeking solidarity with his most loyal supporters at a time when he faces escalating investigations and potential challengers within his own party, according to Mia Bloom, a professor at Georgia State University who has studied QAnon and recently wrote a book about the group.
“These are people who have elevated Trump to messiah-like status, where only he can stop this cabal,” Bloom told the AP on Thursday. “That’s why you see so many images (in online QAnon spaces) of Trump as Jesus.”
On Truth Social, QAnon-affiliated accounts hail Trump as a hero and savior and vilify President Joe Biden by comparing him to Adolf Hitler or the devil. When Trump shares the content, they congratulate each other. Some accounts proudly display how many times Trump has “re-truthed” them in their bios.
By using their own language to directly address QAnon supporters, Trump is telling them that they’ve been right all along and that he shares their secret mission, according to Janet McIntosh, an anthropologist at Brandeis University who has studied QAnon’s use of language and symbols.
It also allows Trump to endorse their beliefs and their hope for a violent uprising without expressly saying so, she said, citing his recent post about “the storm” as a particularly frightening example.
“The ‘storm is coming’ is shorthand for something really dark that he’s not saying out loud,” McIntosh said. “This is a way for him to point to violence without explicitly calling for it. He is the prince of plausible deniability.”
Bloom predicted that Trump may later attempt to market Q-related merchandise or perhaps ask QAnon followers to donate to his legal defense.
Regardless of motive, Bloom said, it’s a reckless move that feeds a dangerous movement.
A growing list of criminal episodes has been linked to people who had expressed support for the conspiracy theory, which U.S. intelligence officials have warned could trigger more violence.
QAnon supporters were among those who violently stormed the Capitol during the failed Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
In November 2020, two men drove to a vote-counting site in Philadelphia in a Hummer adorned with QAnon stickers and loaded with a rifle, 100 rounds of ammunition and other weapons. Prosecutors alleged they were trying to interfere with the election.
Last year, a California man who told authorities he had been enlightened by QAnon was accused of killing his two children because he believed they had serpent DNA.
Last month, a Colorado woman was found guilty of attempting to kidnap her son from foster care after her daughter said she began associating with QAnon supporters. Other adherents have been accused of environmental vandalism, firing paintballs at military reservists, abducting a child in France and even killing a New York City mob boss.
On Sunday, police fatally shot a Michigan man who they say had killed his wife and severely injured his daughter. A surviving daughter told The Detroit News that she believes her father was motivated by QAnon.
“I think that he was always prone to (mental issues), but it really brought him down when he was reading all those weird things on the internet,” she told the newspaper.
The same weekend a Pennsylvania man who had reposted QAnon content on Facebook was arrested after he allegedly charged into a Dairy Queen with a gun, saying he wanted to kill all Democrats and restore Trump to power.
Major social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have banned content associated with QAnon and have suspended or blocked accounts that seek to spread it. That’s forced much of the group’s activities onto platforms that have less moderation, including Telegram, Gab and Trump’s struggling platform, Truth Social.
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Current events
DEBATE-DODGING TAKES off in MIDETERM CAMPAIGNS
The traditional candidate debate might be on its last legs.
The traditional candidate debate might be on its last legs.
A time-honored staple of political campaigns, the traditional candidate debate, appears to be on life support.
Republican candidates this year are increasingly ducking out of primary debates or demanding greater control over the terms than ever before, raising questions about the future of an institution that has long been a central part of American campaigns.
It isn’t just the traditional reluctance of front-runners to share a stage with their challengers that’s to blame. Instead, a confluence of factors is jeopardizing the once universally agreed notion that candidate debates are a valuable practice in elections.
The media — a traditional arbiter of many debates — is so reviled by Republican primary voters that campaigns now recognize there may be more to gain from criticizing the process than participating. There’s also been a surge in self-funding and celebrity candidates in 2022, whose inexperience at debating and fears of campaign-ending missteps may be leading them to dodge debates altogether. Then there’s the shadow of Donald Trump, whose complaints that debates are rigged is now the party line, with the Republican National Committee throwing the prospect of presidential debates in two years into question.
“The media will fight like cats and dogs, because it’s the last thing in a campaign environment they have any control over,” said Dave Carney, the Republican strategist who advises Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whose campaign is suggesting he may not debate his Democratic opponent, Beto O’Rourke, in the fall. “But in 10 years, when debates don’t happen anymore, no one will notice, voters won’t notice or care.”
Debates, Carney said, are “crazy … It’s like having your candidates do pet tricks for the media, and I’m against them.”
So far this year, in more than a half-dozen Senate, House and governor’s races across the electoral map, Republican candidates have skipped primary debates, seemingly with few repercussions.
Former football star Herschel Walker, the front-runner in Georgia’s Republican Senate primary, has refused to debate his primary opponents. So has Jim Pillen, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Nebraska, and Mike DeWine, the incumbent governor of Ohio. In North Carolina, Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) ducked a Senate primary debate last month. Mehmet Oz, the TV personality-turned Pennsylvania Senate candidate, says he wants to debate Anthony Fauci — who isn’t running against him — but has skipped debating the Republicans who are. And in Nevada’s race for governor, Joe Lombardo, the Clark County sheriff, was a no-show at a debate among Republicans last month.
In Pennsylvania, four GOP campaigns for governor sent a joint letter to the media recently laying out the conditions under which they would participate. One of them was a no-brainer: No one who has endorsed or donated to one of the candidates on stage can serve as a moderator.
The other criteria, however, were more constraining on the media or any other entity that sought to host a debate. There could be no questions with answers shorter than 30 seconds. Moderators must be registered Republicans who live in the state, and must not have spoken negatively about any of the candidates on stage. Nor can the moderator work “for an organization that has maligned one of the candidates.”
Republicans like Walker have suggested they will debate in their general elections, if they advance. But in a midterm year in which Republicans are favored across the electoral map, many candidates may have little imperative to agree to a debate in the fall. Already, it’s clear they no longer consider it a requirement of a campaign.
“In general, most candidates do not feel they get a fair shake from the mainstream media,” said Saul Anuzis, a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party. “So, I think you put yourself at risk going up … against a Democrat in debates, depending on who the moderators are going to be.”
He said, “Just from a strategic perspective, there’s not a whole lot of reason to give your opponents an opportunity to attack you or make a mistake or set yourself up on an issue that may backfire against you … Why put yourself at risk for anything?”
In Nebraska, Pillen’s campaign said the only thing he was missing by declining a primary debate was “political theater.”
In the past, debate avoidance has come at the cost of bad publicity, and some debate skippers are getting a taste of that this year. Earlier this month, Dan Moulthrop, president of the board of the Ohio Debate Commission, penned an op-ed in The Columbus Dispatch blistering DeWine for his refusal to participate, under the headline, “It’s bad for democracy.”
A spokesperson for one of Walker’s opponents in Georgia, Gary Black, was quoted in the local news saying Walker “isn’t smart enough to debate anybody.” The Philadelphia Inquirer headlined its piece on a recent debate, “What we learned from a Pa. Republican Senate debate that Oz and [David] McCormick skipped,” while in Nebraska, Ryan Horn, a Republican media strategist, said Pillen was only hurting himself.
“He’s not sharing the stage with Edmund Burke. Winston Churchill’s not going to be up there,” Horn said. “We’re talking about [gubernatorial candidates] Charles Herbster and Theresa Thibodeau.”
In Minnesota, where five GOP candidates did debate, in December, Gregg Peppin, a Republican strategist in the state, said, “I would hope that we don’t get to a position where we can’t have spirited robust debates among candidates on the challenges that face our country. If we get to that point, we’ll have really lost something in our democracy.”
But even Republicans who lament the decline of debates as a tentpole of political campaigns can see the logic in some candidates passing on them — and the prospect that they will increasingly elect not to.
“If you’ve got $50 million in the pipeline to bomb your opponent back to the Stone Age, then why even put yourself out there, other than to have a very crafted message that is essentially manufactured in a PR factory,” said Carl Fogliani, a Republican strategist based in Pittsburgh, who added that voters should question the qualifications of any candidate who lacks “the courage to answer questions.”
Money and courage are only two of the factors working against debates as a lasting institution. There is also the kind of candidate that the GOP is increasingly fielding in the post-Trump era. Following the former president’s outsider example, other politically inexperienced millionaires or high-name-recognition individuals have crowded into races.
“There’s no upside to debate,” said Jason Shepherd, the chair of the Republican Party in Cobb County, Ga., “if you’re someone like Herschel Walker who is already the frontrunner … and has no experience debating.”
With the electorate as polarized as it is, the number of viewers a candidate could hope to persuade in a debate is vanishingly small. Meanwhile, for Republican base voters, skewering the media’s role in the process is a slam dunk, especially after Trump’s effective use of the media as his “fake news” foil. Today, just about 1 in 5 Republicans now say they trust the news media — a lower level of support than government, the scientific community, Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Trump’s 2020 attacks on the Commission on Presidential Debates as a partisan outfit bent on undermining him also continue to color discussions surrounding debates. The Republican National Committee is moving forward with its threat to prohibit future presidential nominees from participating in commission-sponsored debates, pleasing Republicans who have long argued moderators are biased against them.
“Campaigns have come to the realization that no one watches debates, so the risk outweighs the reward,” said John Thomas, a Republican strategist who works on House campaigns across the country.
In the past, he said, “part of the reason you would debate is you were afraid of being shamed by the voters that public discourse, campaigning and governing requires public debate.” Now, Thomas said, “Voters are totally cool with you going on Facebook Live for 20 minutes and having a conversation with them about your policies and your agenda.”
Thomas added, “I’m just waiting for campaigns to finally come to the realization that lawn signs don’t work.”
Holly Otterbein contributed to this report.
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Politics
WILL THERE be PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES in 2024?
Republicans cast doubt on the prospect
David Jackson
USA TODAY
WASHINGTON – The Republican Party took a step closer Thursday to eliminating presidential debates in the fall of 2024, voting to stop working with the foundation that has organized such debates since 1987.
"The Commission on Presidential Debates is biased and has refused to enact simple and commonsense reforms to help ensure fair debates," said Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.
The move underscores how former President Donald Trump reshaped and continues to reshape the GOP, with his complaints about debates in 2016 and 2020 laying the groundwork for the possible withdrawal of Republican candidates in the future.
McDaniel and other party members who voted unanimously to withdraw from cooperation with the commission said they want "freer and fairer debate platforms." But it is unclear who might organize a new set of debates and whether the Democrats and their presidential candidate would agree to a new sponsor.
The RNC is also requiring Republicans to state in writing that they will only participate in party-sanctioned debates.
The Republicans are responding in part to complaints by Trump, who protested microphone muting and other aspects of his two debates against President Joe Biden in 2020. Trump refused to participate in one scheduled debate because the commission decided to hold it virtually instead of in-person because of the COVID pandemic.
And before the series of debates in 2016, Trump said he would prefer to face Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton without moderators because they were apt to "rig" the set-up against him.
McDaniel said the party would continue to sanction debates among GOP candidates competing in party primaries. This decision applies only to general elections sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates.
Democrats said Republicans are just looking for excuses to avoid a presidential debate.
Jaime Harrison, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement that "after years of having their toxic policies exposed on the national stage, the RNC has decided they would rather hide their ideas and candidates from voters."
In recent negotiations, Republicans said they wanted the first debates of 2024 to be held before the start of early voting periods. They also sought more say-so over the appointment of debate moderators, claiming past ones have been biased against Republicans.
The commission said it was set up in 1987 "to ensure, for the benefit of the American electorate, that general election debates between or among the leading candidates for the offices of President and Vice President of the United States are a permanent part of the electoral process."
Prior to Thursday's vote, the Republicans have sought to discourage corporate contributions to the commission.
When the Republicans threatened to withdraw from the process in February, the Commission on Presidential Debates said its "plans for 2024 will be based on fairness, neutrality and a firm commitment to help the American public learn about the candidates and the issues."
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Politics