QAnon followers think that Donald Trump used Morse code to communicate a secret message to them in a video released last night, January 14.
After more than a week of criticism and his historic second impeachment, Trump stated yesterday night that the violence at the US Capitol on January 6 ‘goes against everything [he] believe[s] in.’
Trump went on to stress that no supporter of his would ever ‘endorse political violence’ or ‘disrespect law enforcement or our great American flag’.
However, conspiracy theorists believe that the president wasn’t only using his words to communicate.
The president spends most of the video with his hands crossed in front of him, but at the end – about halfway through the clip – he broke them apart to make gestures as he said: ‘All of us can choose, by our actions, to rise above the rancor and find common ground.’
For an average viewer, the hand gestures simply seem to add emphasis to Trump’s call for peace. But followers of QAnon believes the gestures were actually an attempt to signal them using Morse code.
While it’s highly unlikely that Trump went to the effort of using a 19th-century code to pass a secret message to his supporters, after having been banned from most major social media platforms, it is somehow possible that he may see it as his only option.
According to Vice, theories about Trump’s hand gestures first showed up on a QAnon-focused forum called the Great Awakening where the poster claimed that Trump’s hand movements represented ‘dash-dash-dot-dash.’ – that sequence represents the letter Q.
Alongside the Morse code conspiracy theory, Trump supporters have suggested that the president may be preparing to send them a message using the Emergency Broadcast System, which provides the POTUS a method of communicating with the American public in the event of war or grave national crisis.
While QAnon followers may remain adamant that Trump is about to put some master plan into action, it’s more likely that his hand movements were just that.