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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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President Trump wasn’t simply furious that the flags on federal buildings had been lowered to half-staff to honor the late Senator John McCain in August 2018: He actually tried to have them raised, again, on all buildings across the country, according to a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security.
In an interview on Friday, the ex-official, Miles Taylor, who served in D.H.S. from 2017 to 2019, said he was traveling in Australia to meet with security partners to discuss sensitive counterterrorism issues, when he and others on the trip, including the former D.H.S. Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Chad Wolf, a former senior official who is now the acting secretary, got news of Mr. McCain’s death.
It was around 3 a.m. Australia time when Mr. Taylor started getting phone calls from the White House and from a military aide that eventually woke him up, he said. “I get someone from the White House, a senior person there, who calls and says, ‘What is going on with the flags. The president is upset, this has gone out too soon and he doesn’t want it to happen.’”
Mr. Taylor said he was uncertain of the procedure for lowering flags to half-staff, and spotty Wi-Fi on the trip across the globe had left him somewhat out of the loop on how the president was reacting to Mr. McCain’s death (the White House had lowered its own flag on the presidential complex, only to raise it again, in what was seen at the time as a perplexing break from protocol).
After some frantic middle-of-the-night research and calls, he said, he had a clearer picture. “D.H.S. houses the Federal Protective Service, which guards all federal buildings but also has responsibility to lower the flags in cases of national mourning,” he said. After the White House had initially lowered its flag to half-staff, D.H.S. had sent a notice for all federal buildings to follow suit.
“I was then asked, ‘Would you guys be able to rescind the directive?’” Mr. Taylor said. He had not discussed the push from the White House with Ms. Nielsen, who was still asleep down the hallway. But he told the senior White House official that “we would need a compelling reason for the White House to order us to do that.”
On a follow-up call, the official relented and said that aides back at home were hoping to push the president simply to issue a proclamation and keep the flags lowered.
“They never ended up giving us that order, but the intimation I got was, ‘This shouldn’t have happened,’” Mr. Taylor said. It was that the president “won’t want them down, and he’s angry, and look into what you would be able to do with it.” He said that he found the episode “pretty astounding and disgusting.”
The White House tried to rescind an order to lower flags to half-staff after John McCain died, a former official says.
What is QAnon?
It’s not easy to describe, but one thing we know to be true: It’s not a conspiracy theory — it’s bigger.
What started as a thread on the anonymous message board 4chan has long since entered the mainstream: Questions about QAnon have been asked in the White House press room, and a Q follower is poised to be voted into Congress later this year.
When QAnon started appearing several years ago, journalists fumbled to concisely explain it to mystified readers, and usually settled on far-right conspiracy theory.
The shorthand largely stuck. But QAnon is much more complicated and convoluted — and dangerous — than other conspiracy theories. The QAnon belief system has inspired violence and crime across the United States, leading the FBI to label it a domestic terrorism threat in 2019.
The editors at BuzzFeed News have become uneasy about using conspiracy theory to describe QAnon, which has grown to encompass a whole alternative world of beliefs and signals. The copydesk has to stay on top of language and note when terms become stale and reductive; QAnon has shifted, and so should how we write about it.
QAnon is a collective delusion, and that's what BuzzFeed News will be calling it from now on.
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