White House staffer Mark Meadows said the administration did not even know what the QAnon collusion theory was after President Donald Trump spoke last week about her supporters.
Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace confronted Meadows about the president’s remarks during an interview on Sunday, and asked the chief of staff if the president denies the completely baseless theory.
The conspiracy theory claims – without proof – that Trump is working to save the world from a satanic cult of cannibals and pedophiles linked to Hollywood, Democratic lawmakers, and the so-called “deep state” government. FBI documents reported over the past year have shown that the bureau believes that supporters of the conspiracy theory represent a domestic terror threat.
“Well, listen, we – we do not even know what it is,” Meadows told Wallace, saying he needed Google QAnon last week, after the president was immediately asked about it.
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“It’s not a central part of what the president is talking about. I do not even know a thing about it. I do not even know if it is credible,” he said.
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During a press conference on Wednesday, Trump said he “heard that these are people who love our country,” referring to believers in QAnon. “That I really know nothing about it, other than that they accept me,” he said.
After a reporter explained what the theory required, Trump responded by saying, “Is that meant to be a bad thing or a good thing?”
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“If I can help save the world from problems, I’m ready to do it. I’m ready to put myself out there,” he said.
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany echoed Trump’s remarks in a Thursday interview with Fox News. The president is talking “about his supporters,” McEnany said. “He believes his supporters are good hardworking people who love this country. He is not in the business of a ‘course of sad’ politics.”
FBI documents reported by Yahoo! News in August 2019 revealed that the bureau considers believers in conspiracy theory to be a growing threat to domestic terrorism. According to the report, the FBI is concerned about ‘conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists’, specifically citing QAnon and other judicial conspiracy theories.
“The FBI estimates that these conspiracy theories are likely to appear, spread and evolve in the modern information market, and sometimes drive groups and individual extremists to commit criminal or violent acts,” the document explained.
Newsweek reached out to the FBI for comment, but received no response by the time of publication.
The president was asked last week about QAnon as multiple GOP congressional candidates who have won their primary faith and support the baseless conspiracy. Trump has publicly supported several of these candidates and has also repeated posts with featured QAnon-centric content since being in the White House. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter have stepped up their efforts to take down and censor social media accounts that QAnon promotes.
“QAnon promotes political disinformation, medical disinformation and leads a legacy of anti-Semitic tropes,” said Joan Donovan, research director at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy. The New York Times last week. “The president’s attention is going to these groups only to grow their ranks.”
