QAnon, Mike Lindell, and the MAGA Diehards Who Believe Trump Retakes the Presidency on August 13
Friday was supposed to be a big day. “The morning of August 13 it’ll be the talk of the world,” Mike Lindell, the MyPillow impresario and purveyor of discredited conspiracy theories about a stolen presidential election, warned during a recent appearance on a conservative podcast. Lindell, who is being sued for billions in damages by Dominion, a maker of voting machines that the right-wing bedding entrepreneur has called fraudulent, promised a day of reckoning, when the “Communists” would be kicked out of power and Donald Trump would rightly reassume his place in the Oval Office. Trump, himself no stranger to barely intelligible theories of political change, was reportedly a believer, telling underlings that he would somehow be reinstated as president in August.
The day isn’t over yet, of course, but none of this has yet come to pass, and I feel fairly confident that it won’t. Instead, Lindell is once again left looking like a fool—that is, except in the eyes of MAGA die-hards, Q followers, credulous right-wing news hosts, and other fellow travelers who, ensconced in filter bubbles, have managed to finger-paint their own reality in which a series of ever-shifting prophecies will one day, somehow, lead to Trump’s restoration and the deaths of their enemies. (This isn’t that unusual: The date the world is supposed to end has changed a lot over the years.) Despite the obvious absurdity of these beliefs, and despite content crackdowns on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, Q-style paranoid fantasies persist. It’s difficult to call the movement monolithic, given its fractured and proliferating narratives, but it’s clear that no amount of fact-checking or adversarial media coverage can break these people out of their epistemic prisons. This movement, this paradigm of wild and even violent political prophecy, is here to stay. Trump may be its worshipped figurehead, but for now, Lindell is its lead missionary—a born-again, bumbling millionaire salesman, his success as unlikely, and as indelibly American, as his confused political rantings. There seems little doubt that Lindell will continue to spread this deranged gospel for as long as he can—until, perhaps, Dominion’s lawyers seize his phone from his hands.
Some Republican politicians and MAGA personalities may embrace these beliefs out of expediency—it can pay to be a loyal Trumpist—but what may be more disturbing is the authenticity of belief demonstrated by millions of Americans who have succumbed to delusions about stolen elections, chip-laden vaccines, and a government cabal of child-eating pedophiles. Chalk some of it up to the proliferation of misinformation, but in the absence of decent social policy—of well-funded education systems, universal health care, measures to reduce inequality, and even a general sense of trust in government—these kinds of beliefs can easily fester. Conspiratorial thinking has long been a feature of the American political and cultural scene, and it thrives in times of social and economic upheaval. A cruel, incompetent reality TV presidency capped by a pandemic and economic meltdown—along with the regular climate disasters—is a perfect environment for people to believe that, sure, why not, Trump could be president again, without an election. To paraphrase Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who referred positively to the military coup in Myanmar, it happened there—why can’t it happen here?
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