While the beltway media spent the last week haranguing President Joe Biden over his lackluster performance in the CNN presidential debate, former President Donald Trump largely got a pass despite several days of shenanigans that Rolling Stone described as a "week from hell."
In a Friday article, Rolling Stone reporters Tom Dickinson and Asawin Suebsaeng summed up how the former president exhibited increasingly unhinged behavior while the press scrutinized Biden's debate mistakes. On his Truth Social platform, Trump posted a meme of him and his wife, Melania, with the text "Where We Go One We Go All" – the slogan of the far-right cult QAnon. The graphic also featured the letter Q, in another nod to the conspiracy theorist movement that Trump is secretly battling a cabal of wealthy elite pedophiles and will one day bring them to justice (also known as "the storm").
This is merely the latest instance of the former president flirting with the movement that researchers have described as "a danger." A 2021 study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism And Responses to Terrorism (START) found that QAnon adherents are prone to committing "acts of interpersonal violence, often targeting those around them, including their own children." Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) was a devout QAnon believer before she was elected to Congress, though she has since tried to distance herself from the movement.
That same year, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) released a report by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. That report found that, following Trump's defeat in the 2020 election, QAnon believers "likely will begin to believe they can no longer ‘trust the plan’ referenced in QAnon posts and that they have an obligation to change from serving as ‘digital soldiers’ towards engaging in real world violence."
Trump was also caught this week in a hot-mic moment in which he unleashed a profane tirade against both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris while he was golfing. The ex-president wrongly stated that he had already forced Biden out of the race and that Harris would be his general election opponent.
"She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic. She’s just so f—ing bad," Trump was heard saying.
Dickinson and Suebsaeng also characterized Trump as having a "God complex" this week, in which he praised his debate performance as "the greatest single debate performance in the long and storied history of Presidential Debates." Opining that he was "feeling himself," the two journalists noted that Trump felt his 2024 bid for the White House was "guided by divine providence."
As Rolling Stone reported, Trump reposted a Truth Social user's post of a photo of Trump with the text: "GOD HAS CHOSEN HIM TO LEAD THIS FIGHT FOR FREEDOM. GOD WINS!"
Also this week, Trump called for former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) to be prosecuted for "treason" via a "televised military tribunal." Former Republican National Committee senior official Doug Heye told the outlet that Trump is benefiting from a media double standard in which Biden's every slip-up is meticulously torn apart, while Trump's increasingly erratic behavior is given a ho-hum treatment.
"[H]is language, for years, has been so over-the-top that even with his record as president, he still gets graded on a massive curve by so many voters,” Heye says. “It’s already factored in, in a way that it could never be for almost any other candidate for the presidency. Trump saying something crazy is the oldest news there is at this point. It doesn’t mean it’s not crazy, and it doesn’t mean it’s not damaging. But this [dynamic] benefits him greatly.”
Click here to read Rolling Stone's report in its entirety (subscription required).
