As Trump walks off stage, Republicans grapple with new conspiracy caucus

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“There is a violent anarchy at QAnon that’s baked into it,” said Mike Rothschild, the author of a book examining and debunking some of the most important conspiracy theories.

How far QAnon has penetrated the GOP infrastructure is an open question. The same goes for how Trump’s departure from the presidency and his ban from most social media will affect the scope of the plot within the Republican Party.

“This stuff has always been part of the stew,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist in Washington. “Trump just mounted the fire and brought it to the surface.

The value of wooing QAnon, as Republican leaders like Trump saw it, was to cast votes from a disaffected and passionate base of support. The risk of doing so was that they would get a seat at the table.

The Republican House Conference now includes two QAnon adherents, first-year representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. While Greene backed down and said candidate label QAnon “does not represent me”, she praised “Q” as a patriot and spread baseless conspiracy theories related to the movement. . And although Boebert claimed she was not a follower and worked to distance herself from conspiracy theorists, she said of QAnon, “I hope this is real.”

Now that they are there, it will be much more difficult to dislodge them.

“You can’t just fend off the followers of QAnon,” Rothschild said. “We’ve seen, certainly in the Georgia runoff, where those margins are slim, you can’t piss off 1% or 2% of your voters.”

A QAnon caucus

QAnon’s devotion will persist within the GOP long after Trump leaves.

On the one hand, it is already in the party’s agricultural system. In the 2020 election, dozens of Republican candidates in local races across the country flirted with conspiracy theory. Dozens more have had adjacent views and pursued other Trump-inspired conspiracy theories, ranging from railing against alleged mail-in ballot fraud to wearing masks. Many of those candidates lost races in Democratic-leaning districts, but others, like curious Dave Armstrong of the Wisconsin state assembly, won comfortably.

And now, some of those conspiratorial-minded politicians have joined the big leagues in Washington.

“It’s as if Trump was looking for the most gullible members, found the Freedom Caucus and even decided that they weren’t ready for the job, so he prepared this transferred QAnon caucus,” one said. GOP agent.

So far, there has been virtually no crackdown on QAnon candidates by national party leaders – no refusals of campaign funding or threats to revoke committee appointments. There is a recent precedent for doing so, when House Republicans in 2019 stripped Iowa Representative Steve King of his duties on the committee in his defense of white nationalism. King lost the GOP primary in 2020 largely because of his ban by the GOP conference.
Such a fate does not yet await Greene and Boebert. In fact, Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, defended his two new members after their election in November.

“Give them a chance before they claim what you think they’ve done and what they’re going to do,” McCarthy, the leading House Republican, told reporters. (The GOP agent described McCarthy as “playing soccer” with politicians supporting QAnon.)

Others, including Rep. Mo Brooks from Alabama, have voted against official condemnations of conspiracy theory. Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar meddled in conspiracy theories that were interpreted by supporters of QAnon as signals of his allegiance, which he denied. A staff member of newly elected Representative Bob Good of Virginia was among those in Washington on January 6 – along with her husband, a local Republican Party chairman.

There are many Republicans in the conference unsettled by the prominence of these conspiracy theorists’ “traveling companions” and the long-term impact this will have on the party.

“If the leadership does not hold some members to account, there will be a real problem,” a member of the Republican Chamber told CNN this week.

Mia Love, a former Republican representative from Utah and a CNN contributor, said failure to deal decisively with toxic members endangers the unity of the GOP conference.

“Kevin, whom I adore, whom I have a lot of respect, the only advice I can give him, if he wants to keep the conference going he has to handle this,” Love said.

While the actual members of Congress who are aligned with QAnon are relatively small, the influence of the larger conspiratorial mindset is not. In the end, 147 Republican members of the House and Senate, including McCarthy, voted to oppose and overturn the election results following the assault on Capitol Hill. That’s 56% of all Republicans in Congress.

“It’s not just that there are voters who walk into this theory and therefore politicians don’t push back. People in power embrace it,” said Seth Masket, professor of political science at the University of Denver. “It seems like a path to success in the Republican Party.”

‘Everything has become for everything’

Trump’s centrality in QAnon theory cannot be overstated, which is why this is an open question as to the endurance of the movement. While he was president, however, party leaders essentially welcomed conspiracy theorists into the coalition.

Across the GOP, the emergence of QAnon candidates has been either softly condemned or tolerated. While leaders of the Republican House clashed with Greene in the GOP competitive primary in Georgia and condemned the offensive comments she made about blacks and Jewish donors to the Democratic Party, the National Campaign Committee Republican ended up spending thousands of dollars to support his election. The NRCC also supported Boebert’s general election campaign, and both were backed by Trump.

The survival of the plot over the next few years as a party force depends in part on how long Trump stays on the scene. For years, the president has been a pivotal player in QAnon’s narrative, and experts say he’s uncertain how believers will take him into account once he’s no longer president.

Emerging in far-right online forums in mid-2017, QAnon presented itself as an outlet for Trump supporters seeking a unifying explanation for the administration’s setbacks or disappointments. By the time the coronavirus pandemic was in full swing, QAnon had absorbed much of the far-right conspiracy theories and concerns, Rothschild says.

“With the pandemic, everything has become pretty much everything,” he told CNN. “He transforms into Bill Gates, he transforms into China, he transforms into 5G. All kinds of mushes together and it becomes impossible to separate.”

Once Trump began to ramp up in his own fake ‘stolen election’ theorizing conspiracy, there was a ready and willed community of people online ready to subsume these lies and act on them. The president’s Republican and Conservative allies amplifying his false electoral claims gave more legitimacy to a movement of people who didn’t just believe in a conspiracy – they were preparing to fight it.

But the Jan.6 assault on Capitol Hill showed Republicans and the country the consequences of tolerating conspiracy theories without fully understanding them or justifying the threat of danger on their part. To some, it was a wake-up call that the contagion had spread and could not be contained.

But enough waking up? The slippery nature of “support” for QAnon means that politicians – even Greene and Boebert – maintain the plausible deniability that they are not aligned with QAnon’s violent end.

“As it comes to Congress, it’s mostly in the form of ‘just asking questions’ or ‘giving a voice’ on behalf of voters,” Donovan said. “For those where it’s a vocal constituency, there’s little incentive to confront the people who vote for you. So I suspect it will be laissez-faire in most cases until another case arises and cannot be ignored.

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