Trump’s Dog Whistle For QAnon
Fred Wertheimer’s Weekly Note | September 22, 2022
As former President Donald Trump’s legal problems multiply and intensify, we need to be clear-eyed about what he is up to with his latest moves to embrace QAnon.
The core belief of this right-wing fringe conspiracy movement is the off-the-charts position that Trump is “waging a secret war against a cabal of satanic cannibalistic pedophiles within Hollywood, the Democratic party, and the so-called ‘deep state’ within the United States government.”
That view is apparently not off-the-charts to Trump.
An Associated Press analysis found that more than a third of posts shared by Trump on his Truth Social platform in the past month have promoted QAnon by sharing the movement’s slogans, videos, or imagery.
This included Trump reposting an image of himself wearing a QAnon lapel pin with the words “The Storm is Coming,” a QAnon saying for Trump returning to power and his opponents being tried and potentially executed on live TV.
At Saturday’s Ohio rally, music was played during Trump’s speech that mirrored the QAnon anthem. This resulted in audience members giving a raised-arm QAnon salute eerily reminiscent of the Nazi salute.
Trump is apparently using the same game plan with QAnon followers that he used in 2020 with white supremacists, including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
At a presidential debate in September 2020, Trump sent the Proud Boys a dog whistle when he told them to “stand back and stand by.” As we now know, the Proud Boys went on to play a key role in the January 6, 2021 insurrectionist attack on the Capitol.
Trump blew his dog whistle again last week when he said that if he was indicted by the Justice Department regarding his improper possession of classified documents, we would see “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before.”
Given his recent courting of QAnon followers, they appear to be one of the main groups to whom this latest dog whistle was directed.
As Trump reaches to the bottom of the barrel for supporters to potentially cause problems “the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before,” he suffered two major legal blows yesterday.
Last night, a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled Florida federal district court Judge Aileen Cannon’s widely criticized ruling and restored the Justice Department’s access to classified documents and their use in DOJ’s criminal investigation involving Trump. Two of the three judges on the Appeals Court panel were Trump appointees and the third was an Obama appointee.
And, New York State Attorney General Letitia James brought a civil lawsuit against Trump, three of his children, and the Trump organization yesterday accusing Trump of “staggering” fraud in violating New York state laws and potentially federal laws. James is seeking $250 million in penalties and a ban on Trump and his family from doing business in New York. James also referred the case to the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan and the IRS for possible federal criminal violations.
Meanwhile, a House of Representatives vote yesterday represented progress in preventing a future coup attempt like the one Trump attempted following the 2020 election.
The House passed the Presidential Election Reform Act to repair critical flaws in the 19th-century laws that oversee our presidential elections. The Act, sponsored by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Liz Cheney (R-WY), closes the dangerous loophole that Trump attempted to exploit that would have allowed state legislatures to override the choice of their state voters, for any reason they chose, and name their own presidential electors instead.
The Senate Rules Committee is expected to mark-up a similar version of the reform legislation next week, but it is not expected to be considered in the Senate until after the November elections.
Trump has shown he is willing to do almost anything when faced with defeat.
The authorities and the country must be ready if and when Trump incites another mob in an attempt to intimidate law enforcement officials and threaten our democracy.
This week’s developments, further backing Trump into a corner, increase the possibility of that happening.
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Fred’s Weekly Note appears each Thursday in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s newsletter here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.
