QAnon believers think Trump will be inaugurated again on March 4

QAnon is facing a turning point in the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s inauguration.

The inauguration contradicted the movement’s baseless conspiracy theory that former President Donald Trump would return for a second term in order to confront a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles running the Democratic Party.

With Trump no longer in office, some followers have abandoned their beliefs, attempting to make amends with family and friends they had alienated along their twisting path to an alternate reality originally concocted on 4Chan message boards.

But others have renewed their pledge of allegiance to “Q,” the anonymous poster who purports to be a Trump adviser and their leader. They have tried to rationalize Biden becoming president in increasingly outrageous ways, claiming that Biden and Trump are working together and even that Trump and Biden somehow switched bodies. And some are now looking to March 4 as the next big watershed moment for their movement — the date that they believe Trump will once again be inaugurated.

Domestic violent extremist groups have also latched on to the date as a potential opportunity to strike the US Capitol yet again. US Capitol Police said Wednesday that they had received an intelligence report about an unidentified militia group’s possible plot to break into the Capitol on March 4.

The department said in a statement that while it could not provide more details about the nature of the plot, it is “taking the intelligence seriously” and has “already made significant security upgrades” at the Capitol, including establishing a fenced perimeter and increasing manpower.

A Department of Homeland Security and FBI intelligence bulletin sent to local law enforcement agencies on Tuesday also described extremists’ plan to seize the Capitol and remove Democratic lawmakers on or around March 4, NBC News reported.

It’s unclear what will happen to QAnon once March 4 passes without the coup they have predicted coming to fruition. The movement could find itself increasingly shedding followers, who might be amenable to recruitment by white supremacist and far-right militia groups that share a common enemy in Democrats and political elites broadly. But it’s likely that the movement will not crumble entirely, given that following it in the first place has required adherents to push aside any cognitive dissonance.

“Conspiracies always have a way to explain out of what’s happening, because the whole point is different versions of reality,” Amy Iandiorio, an investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said.

QAnon disciples believe March 4 is the day Trump will return for a second term

QAnon followers started talking about March 4 beginning in early- to mid-January, after some were disappointed that the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol failed to bring about a series of predicted military tribunals and executions that they refer to as “the Storm.” But the latest conspiracy theory really began picking up steam in February, following Biden’s inauguration, and as QAnon followers sought “different ways to explain their way out of the current reality now that there’s a new administration,” Iandiorio said.

Their rationale for this evidence-free belief — and the meaning behind the March 4 date — is, perhaps unsurprisingly, convoluted and based on a series of misinterpretations, conspiracy theories, and outright lies. But here’s how the theory goes:

QAnon believers claim that the US federal government secretly became a corporation under a law they believe passed in 1871 but does not actually exist, rendering every president inaugurated and every constitutional amendment passed in the years since illegitimate.

But on March 4, the narrative goes, Trump will return as the 19th president, the first legitimate president since Ulysses S. Grant, with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as his vice president. Why March 4? It’s the original date that presidents were inaugurated. Inauguration Day changed to January 20 with the passage of the 20th Amendment in 1933 — the same year that Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the gold standard.

This is actually relevant to the conspiracy theory: QAnon believers argue that in ending the gold standard, Roosevelt transferred power to a group of shadowy foreign investors who have since been controlling the US government. (Trump sought to bring back the gold standard while in office.)

“Trump will be back on March 4. By Constitution. Read it. Read a book and educate yourself,” wrote user Wesley McBride on a Telegram channel for people who migrated from Parler after Amazon Web Services booted the right-wing social media site from its servers.

Of course, no part of their theory is true or even reasonable. It’s all disinformation, designed to explain why Biden is currently president — a reality that conflicts with their fantasy that Trump is some kind of…