Trump Is Building Truth Social Into a QAnon Playground

In the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, the online community QAnon, which believes that Donald Trump is waging a secret war against a pedophilic cabal of elites, appeared to be on its last legs. Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter had banned tens of thousands of QAnon accounts responsible for spreading election disinformation. This purge, coupled with the sudden disappearance of the group’s leader following the election of Joe Biden, presumably led many members to believe that the movement’s proverbial “storm” (i.e., the mass arrest and punishment of cabal members) might never come.

While that “storm” still has yet to make landfall, QAnon is now experiencing a significant revival of sorts, thanks in large part to Trump’s full-throated embrace of the movement following the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago last month. The Justice Department’s investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents has breathed new life into the movement, with Truth Social, the former president’s social media platform, serving as a unique breeding ground for the group’s wildest claims yet. QAnon influencers have a symbiotic relationship with Trump: They pump up user activity on his app, where they can thrive without fear of suspension, while the former president disseminates their baseless theories to his millions of followers.

Thus far, the platform’s administrators have given Q-aligned personalities an element of legitimacy and authority that eluded them on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. According to data compiled by NewsGaurd and reported by The Daily Beast, 47 QAnon-promoting accounts have received verification badges on Truth Social, each commanding more than 10,000 followers. Trump himself has promoted 70 pro-QAnon accounts and “retruthed”—the Truth Social equivalent of a retweet—dozens of Q-related posts amid new developments in the Justice Department investigation. In one 24-hour period last week, Trump shared 88 posts to his Truth Social accounts, at one point demanding to have his presidential title restored, writing, “Declare the rightful winner or, and this would be the minimal solution, declare the 2020 Election irreparably compromised and have a new Election, immediately!”

Late in his presidential term, Trump flirted with QAnon by using coded language and vaguely praising it as a MAGA offshoot that is “strongly against pedophilia.” Now less encumbered by the political risks of associating himself with the group, his references to QAnon have been far from subtle. “The deep state whispered to President Trump ‘You cannot withstand the storm,’” read the caption of one QAnon meme that Trump shared last week. “The president whispered back, ‘I am the storm.’”

Another development that appears to have reinvigorated the “Q” crowd is Biden’s messaging campaign against the extremism of pro-MAGA Republicans. Last week, after the president gave a speech in Philadelphia condemning the election lies that are now part-and-parcel of the MAGA movement, which Biden tarred as “semi-fascism,” a QAnon Telegram channel with nearly 300,000 followers accused Biden and the “deep state” of preparing the country for a “false flag” operation that would presumably target Trump supporters, according to Newsweek. A second popular QAnon channel accused Biden of using the speech to instigate “political wars” that would split the country up. 

Though Truth Social appears to have enabled a QAnon renaissance, the platform’s future remains uncertain, with the company steeped in an ongoing legal and financial quagmire. At present, Truth Social reportedly still owes one of its service providers $1.6 million in backdated payments that have not been resolved, according to Axios. Meanwhile, Truth Social’s financial backer, Digital World Acquisition Corp., faces an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for potentially holding illegal merger discussions before it went public.  (In prospectuses filed with the SEC in May, July, August, and September of 2021, Digital World Acquisition denied “initiating any substantive discussions, directly or indirectly, with any business combination target” before its IPO.) Still, Trump’s personal troubles have proved somewhat of a boon for the fledgling business, with Truth Social garnering 88,000 downloads following the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago. As of mid-August, the platform had been downloaded nearly 3 million times since it first hit the app store in May.