Playing with fire — did QAnon start as a cynical game?

On Easter Monday 2018, Donald and Melania Trump stood on the balcony of the White House next to a giant bunny. It’s part of the job: since 1878, presidents have hosted a children’s Easter egg hunt on the south lawn. Usually they rhapsodise abut what fun the kids are going to have. Trump, true to form, told his young guests to ‘just think of 700 billion dollars, because that’s all going into our military this year’. And he also said that the White House was an amazing place, in ‘tip-top shape’.

The liberal media rolled their eyes about Trump boasting to children about military spending but quickly moved on. The fools! They’d just missed the biggest story since 9/11. The President of the United States had confirmed the existence of an international cabal of child-trafficking psychopaths including Hillary Clinton, George Soros, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Queen Elizabeth II, Bill Gates and Tom Hanks. And one day soon he was going to save the world by killing them all.

The media didn’t know they’d missed the scoop — but they were supposed to miss it. That’s why Trump spoke in code words. Those words were ‘tip’ and ‘top’. Three months earlier, there had been a message from the anonymous intelligence officer who was posting cryptic communications about this cabal to the world on the website 4chan. He called himself ‘Q’ — hence the name ‘QAnon’ to describe both his conspiracy theory and its adherents. In January 2018, Q promised that the President would confirm the truth of the claims by saying ‘tip-top’ in public. Now he had, and from the balcony of the White House. Not only was the building in tip-top shape but, Trump added, ‘sometimes we call it tippy-top shape’.