Republicans risk legitimizing QAnon now
But what’s less expected is to see Republican leaders be mostly quiet about QAnon, a webbed network of baseless theories. At its most basic, it alleges that there is a secret group of elites working to get President Trump out of office and that Trump will help reveal those pedophilia and Satan-worshiping elites before they can destroy the country.
Not only does Greene support “Q,” as its adherents calls its mysterious leader, but she also has made racist comments in the past. Some Republican leaders have tsked-tsked her for such comments. But The Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker and Rachael Bade report that “on her words promoting QAnon, meanwhile, her potential future colleagues have been mostly mum.”
“These comments are appalling, and Leader McCarthy has no tolerance for them,” the spokesman for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told Politico in June, specifically talking about the racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic remarks by Greene that Politico unearthed. But his spokesman said McCarthy was remaining neutral in the primary.
“The comments made by Ms. Greene are disgusting, and don’t reflect the values of equality and decency that make our country great,” Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the No. 2 House Republican, said in a statement at the time, taking it a step further than McCarthy and supporting Greene’s primary opponent in the runoff, John Cowan. “I will be supporting Dr. Cowan.”
“Obviously, Rep. Cheney opposes these offensive and bigoted comments,” said the office for Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the No. 3 House Republican, in a statement to Fox News.
Unfortunately for those Republican leaders, this is not a conspiracy theory that they can simply ignore. First, an adherent is probably coming to Congress to serve with them, legitimizing the theory more than ever. Second, it centers on Trump — and Trump has allowed it. As I wrote in June when QAnon supporters started winning some of their congressional primaries (though for now Greene is the only one with a real shot at going to Congress):
Trump has tacitly breathed life into these ideas. The central theme around QAnon fits his argument that he’s an outsider being dragged down by (mostly Democratic) lawmakers who feel threatened by him and the change he brings to governing.
Trump hasn’t explicitly endorsed QAnon, but he seems aware that its adherents align with his base. He has retweeted QAnon supporters, and there has been a growth of “Q” signs at his rallies.
Trump probably knows full well about Greene’s ties to QAnon; it has made national headlines. And on Wednesday morning, rather than reject the controversial candidate, Trump congratulated her, calling Greene a “winner” and a “future Republican Star.”
“We have a current president who uses conspiracy rhetoric arguably more than any other president in modern history,” Joanne Miller, who studies the political psychology of conspiracy theories at the University of Delaware, told me in June.
That’s the predicament Republican congressional leaders are in now. Trump seems to like being surrounded by conspiracy theories. And this particular one is centered on him. If he hasn’t spoken out against it, it puts Republicans in Congress in an awkward position to do the same. At the very least, it doesn’t signal to them that they can remain in good standing with Trump’s base voters if they criticize QAnon-supporting candidates.
It’s not dissimilar to all the other controversies that Trump creates or embraces. Over the years, Republicans have found their best political bet is just to ignore them rather than stir up a beef with Trump. His voters are their voters, QAnon adherents or not.
We saw a vastly different dynamic between Republicans in Congress and Trump in 2017 when a Republican Senate candidate accused of having sexually inappropriate relationships with teenagers won the nomination for his party in Alabama. Then, there was a wholesale break between Republicans and Trump. Trump stood by Roy Moore; Senate Republican leaders made clear they wanted Moore nowhere near the Senate floor if he won.
In the end, that showdown didn’t happen because Moore lost that Senate seat for Republicans. (Some of them privately blamed Trump for helping lift Moore up in the first place.)
This time, Republicans don’t have as much hope of preventing Greene from coming to Congress from a largely white, extremely Republican district in northwest Georgia. There is a Democratic opponent, Kevin Van Ausdal, but he has an uphill climb.
They may not want to stop Greene, either. Republicans in Congress didn’t use every tool they had to stop her from winning Tuesday’s runoff. (In Georgia, if no one gets above 50 percent in the primary, the top two vote getters from the primary have a runoff.)
But as Stanley Becker and Bade report: “Republican members of Georgia’s delegation privately urged the party’s House leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, to do more to intervene in the race, according to multiple GOP aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the conversations.” They didn’t feel that he did.
So Republicans were hesitant to even stop Greene from getting this far. It seems unlikely they’d try to jeopardize an easily winnable congressional seat to stop her from coming to Congress. Especially when Trump supports her.
And especially when you consider Georgia is a presidential and Senate swing state this November, thanks to quickly diversifying suburbs. There are also some competitive House races. Republicans need their largely white supporters in Georgia to come out and vote in high numbers to win a number of these races.
So the only other option seems likely to happen: Republicans won’t speaking out against Greene’s QAnon adherence, and in the process, will legitimize this false conspiracy theory more than even her election can.
