President Donald Trump is focused on dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic issues resulting from pandemic-fueled lockdowns, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Thursday when asked whether he supports the QAnon movement.
Asked if Trump is “supporting this conspiracy theory,” she said, “No, what the president is doing is working for the American people.”
“He is talking about his supporters, he believes his supporters are good, hard-working people that love this country. He’s not in the business of ‘basket of deplorable’ politics,'” McEnany said, referring to former Democratic Presidential nominee Hilary Clinton calling some Americans deplorable in 2016.
“He has not at all looked into who QAnon is. Again, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic,” she added, appearing to become exasperated with the line of questioning.
QAnon is a movement that started on 4chan and 8chan message boards with a trickle of clandestine-sounding posts, often centered on the theme of big government plots to curb individual liberties and advance so-called deep state and globalist agendas. It grew into a large underground movement with a number of splinter groups and sometimes claims that members of the world’s social, economic, and political elites have engaged in child sex trafficking, abuse, and cannibalism.
The conspiracy theories have included claims that Clinton and other high-level politicians will land in jail for committing crimes.
The theories aren’t widely known. When asked earlier this year how much they’d heard or read about QAnon, just 3 percent of respondents to a Pew Research survey answered “a lot,” while 76 percent said “nothing at all.”
