Trump’s QAnon Supporters Thought JFK Jr., Famously Dead, Was Going to Show Up in Texas Today

There are a lot of reasons Donald Trump lost the last election, chief among them being his disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in more than 232,000 deaths by the time voters went to the polls one year ago. But we’re pretty sure another contributor was the fact that he had become even more of a batshit crazy lunatic than usual, to the point that he was going on TV and suggesting his political enemies were running a satanic pedophile cult.

If you blocked that out of your mind to make room for all of the other insane events that went down over the last year, here’s a quick refresher. On October 15, 2020, after backing out of the second presidential debate, Trump sat down with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie for a live town hall. At one point, Guthrie said, “Let me ask you about QAnon,” referring to the far-right, incomprehensibly insane conspiracy theory that a cabal of Democratic politicians, liberal Hollywood actors, and high-ranking government officials, who worship Satan, were running a child-sex-trafficking ring and simultaneously plotting against Trump, who was planning a day of reckoning in which thousands of members of the cult would be arrested. “It is this theory that Democrats are a satanic pedophile ring and that you are the savior of that,” Guthrie said. “Now, can you just, once and for all, state that that is completely not true and disavow QAnon in its entirety?”

“I know nothing about QAnon,” Trump said.

“I just told you,” Guthrie responded.

“I know very little,” the then president insisted. “You told me, but what you tell me doesn’t necessarily make it fact. I hate to say that. I know nothing about it. I do know they are very much against pedophilia,” he added, contradicting his claim to knowing nothing about the group and also giving the impression that they were lawyers bringing sex traffickers to justice instead of fringe lunatics. “They fight it very hard. But I know nothing about it…I’ll tell you what I do know about. I know about antifa, and I know about the radical left, and I know how violent they are and how vicious they are. And I know how they are burning down cities run by Democrats, not run by Republicans.”

Unfortunately for Trump and his Q followers, he did not end up winning the election. But this is a group that is not deterred by facts or anything else, and it quickly shifted gears to the idea that Trump was going to be reinstated as president on August 13, 2021.

Once again, this did not happen. So Q adherents pivoted to another theory, one they were pretty sure was airtight: that (1) John F. Kennedy Jr., who famously died in a plane crash more than 20 years ago, was going to appear in Texas today, and that (2) it was going to all be part of a larger story in which a man belonging to a Democratic dynasty was going to run on the 2024 ticket with Trump. Congratulations if you followed all of that.

Rolling Stone explains in further detail:

QAnon true believers gathered en masse on Tuesday morning in anticipation of the return of Camelot—namely, of John F. Kennedy, Jr., the lush-haired scion and former George publisher who was killed in a plane crash in 1999. The crowds chose to meet in Dealey Plaza and lined themselves around the large white “X” that marks the spot where his father, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963.

That John F. Kennedy, Jr. is set to return is a belief set forth by proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which postulates that Donald Trump is lying in wait to destroy a secret cabal of blood-drinking, child-sex-trafficking members of the liberal elite. Dozens of QAnon supporters started gathering in AT&T Discovery Plaza in downtown Dallas last night to commemorate the glorious return of JFK Jr.—a man who, again, it must be emphasized, has failed to convert oxygen into carbon dioxide for over two decades.

“Trump reinstated as 19th president calls up a new vice president, JFK Junior,” wrote a prominent QAnon influencer with more than 250,000 followers on the encrypted messaging app Telegram.

*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Vanity Fair can be found here ***