The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet

Through a season of Trump rallies across the country, I spoke with dozens of Trump supporters who believed that the Democratic establishment primarily serves as a cover for child sex trafficking. Some were familiar with QAnon, the name claimed by believers in a host of conspiracy theories centered on an alleged “deep state” coup against Trump, and his supposedly ingenious countermeasures, referred to as the coming “Storm,” or “Great Awakening.” Most were not. It was, they told me, simply known. “Perverts and murderers,” said a woman in Bossier City. A youth pastor promised me that Trump knew the names of all the guilty parties and was preparing their just deserts. The president himself, in speech after speech, intimated that Judgment Day was coming. In Hershey, Pennsylvania, he spoke of “illegals” hacking and raping and bludgeoning, “relentlessly beating a wonderful, beautiful high school teenager to death with a baseball bat and chopping the body apart with a machete.” And that, he added, was only what he could reveal. There was more, he said, much, much more. Believe me.