As Trump leaves the stage, Republicans grapple with new conspiracy caucus - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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Donald Trump may be leaving the White House in a few days, but the umbrella of conspiracy theories he inspired is only just arriving in Washington.
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The chief theory known as QAnon -- that the US government is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles only Trump can expose -- began nearly four years ago as a fringe movement in the dark corners of the internet. Now QAnon has adherents in positions of power within the Republican Party and in the halls of Congress.
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One of the more conspicuous rioters, wearing a horned helmet and carrying a six-foot spear, is known online as the "QAnon Shaman."
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"This stuff has always been part of the stew," said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist in Washington. "Trump just turned up the heat and brought it to the surface.
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"You can't just push QAnon followers away," said Rothschild. "We've seen, certainly in the Georgia runoff, where these margins are thin, you can't piss off 1 or 2% of your constituents."
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"If leadership doesn't hold certain members accountable, there's going to be a real problem," one Republican House member told CNN this week.
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"It's like Trump looked for the most gullible members, found the Freedom Caucus, and decided even they weren't up for the job so he cooked up this mutated QAnon caucus," said one GOP operative.
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So far, there's been close to zero pushback against QAnon candidates from national party leaders -- no denial of campaign funding or threats to revoke committee assignments.
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There are plenty of Republicans in the conference disturbed by the prominence of "fellow travelers" of these conspiracy theorists and the long-term impact this will have on the party.
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The centrality of Trump to the QAnon theory cannot be overstated, which is why it's an open question as to the movement's staying power. As long as he was the President, however, party leaders have essentially welcomed conspiracy theorists into the coalition.
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Whether the conspiracy survives in the next few years as a force in the party depends in part on how much Trump remains on the scene. For years, the President has been a crucial actor in the narrative of QAnon, and experts say it's not certain how believers will factor him in once he's no longer President.
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By the time the coronavirus pandemic was in full swing, QAnon had absorbed much of the far-right conspiracy theories and concerns, says Rothschild."With the pandemic, everything became about everything," he told CNN. "It turns into Bill Gates, it turns into China, it turns into 5G. This all sort of mushes together and it becomes impossible to separate."
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Once Trump began ramping up in his own false conspiracy theorizing about a "stolen election," there was a ready and willing community of people online ready to subsume those lies and act on them.
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But the January 6 assault on the Capitol showed Republicans and the country the consequences of tolerating conspiracy theories without fully understanding them or justifying the threat of danger from them. For some, it was a wake-up call that the contagion had spread and could not be contained.
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"To the extent it shows up in Congress, it's mostly in the form of 'just asking questions' or 'providing a voice' on behalf of constituents," said Donovan. "For those where this is a vocal constituency there's little incentive to confront the people who are voting for you. So I suspect it will be laissez-faire in most cases until another instance where it rears its head and can't be ignored."