Why Trump went full QAnon: He's desperate — and "those are the only people he's got left"

During Donald Trump's Sept. 17 rally in Youngstown, Ohio, members of the audience began to sway in time with the music playing over the loudspeakers and pointed their index fingers in the air as the former president talked about the supposed disintegration of the United States. On Friday, at another rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, he seemed to invoke QAnon's main themes and language — claiming that his own MAGA movement was "standing up against" "sick, sinister and evil people from within our own country" — even as the event's security team tried to stop attendees from pointing their fingers in the air. A lot of the people involved in the stolen election industry, or the people running for office who are really into QAnon, they're not talking about JFK Jr. That stuff — the numerology and the worship of this one guy, Negative48 — is too weird and most mainstream Republicans don't want anything to do with that. If you are turning a fringe movement mainstream, you don't want anything that's going to push people away. If Trump fades away from politics, then there's some chance that more sensible people in the GOP will step up and say, "We can be conservative, we can have all these ideas, but we don't need to so completely embrace the conspiracy movement and all of the antisemitism and violence that comes with it."