If someone had told me six months ago that a former President of the United States, any former President would someday become a full-fledged supporter of QAnon, I would have said that it simply wasn’t possible – it simply couldn’t occur.
I mean, if someone as crazily stupid as Marjorie Taylor Greene says she supports QAnon, that wouldn’t be so hard to believe. But a former President? Even a former President named Donald Trump?
And yet, that’s exactly what’s happened. Trump not only actively promotes QAnon on his Truth Social platform, but even shares the group’s images and videos online.
All of which simply confirms what I have suspected about Trump’s use of social media like Twitter and Facebook before he was booted off both platforms and had to start his own social media operation in order to remain online; namely, that the whole social media thing for Trump was simply another way to make a buck without having to risk investing and maybe losing his own dough.
In fact, this is exactly how Trump approached being President as well. Back in 2000, Trump gave an interview to Fortune Magazine in which he said that he might be the first Presidential candidate to ‘run and make money on it’ even though according to the WaPo he lost maybe 50 million or so on the 2016 campaign.
But that was the campaign. That was the investment in what would become a four-year sales event for his MAGA brand, a slogan whose copyright he happened to own. And the only thing he seemed to do as President was hold public events around the country where he could continue to sell his flags, his t-shirts, his bumper stickers, his hats, and all the other crap which carried the MAGA logo, and maybe he’ll make a deal with the QAnon gang and promote their logo and their name.
I just did a search for QAnon in the copyright office and guess what? The word has been copyrighted by a rock group as music, by CBS for several documentary titles and several titles of books and other published works. But nobody’s copyrighted the Qanon logo which Trump has posted on his social media site.
For all I know, Trump or someone else has tried to claim ownership of the logo but the copyright office says that it’s been so commonly used that it can’t be owned by any individual because it’s in the public domain. That’s the reason nobody running for elective office can make money by selling a yard sign which carries their name.
On the other hand, there’s nothing illegal or necessarily wrong with using a slogan or a name to attract attention to yourself and gain public support for something you want to do, like running for President or staying out of jail.
For all the talk about how Trump’s going to face an indictment or a criminal trial or even wind up in a federal pen, I’m willing to take the short odds that the worst he will suffer is that he will be named as an unindicted co-conspirator, or some other minor-league wrist-slap like that.
I mean, can you imagine the size of the crowd that would try to get a seat in a courtroom where Trump is sitting at the defendant’s desk? The line would make the line waiting to view Queen Elizabeth’s coffin look like nothing at all.
You may want to believe what the Fake News has been saying about how Trump was leading an insurrection on January 6th. But people who have enough money to drive a thousand miles, stay overnight at a Holiday Inn to attend a rally aren’t about to overthrow the government.
The truth is that most of the jackoffs who came to D.C., listened to Trump’s speech, then marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and ran up the Capitol steps had nothing better to do.
We live in the richest and wealthiest country of all time, and maybe Trump is correct when he says that government’s just another way to make a buck.
