After more than three years of Donald Trump not taking down satanic pedophiles and the “deep state” working against him, losing the election, then failing to order mass executions at Joe Biden’s inauguration, followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory are now claiming March 4 as the next significant date for the movement.
Supporters of the radical conspiracy now believe that March 4 will be the day that Trump will still somehow be sworn in as president, seemingly undeterred by the January 20 ceremony, after which Biden entered the White House, and all their other predictions since late 2017 having failed.
The theory around March 4 has been bubbling since January, as QAnon found new ways to suggest “the plan” is still in place—despite Trump no longer being president—and that supporters just need to keep faith.
Interest around the date re-emerged after it was revealed that prices to rent a room at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C on March 4 have been hiked to $1,331, more than double the $596 price for a guest room for most of that month and nearly triple the lowest cost.
The hotel in the capital has previously raised its prices on dates that are significant to Trump’s supporters. On January 6, the date of the Capitol attack in which QAnon followers were a part of, it cost $8,000 to rent a room that night.
The latest prediction from the QAnon movement seems to echo that of the sovereign citizen movement, whose followers believe they do not have to follow federal laws or pay taxes.
The basis of this comes from a law they believe passed in 1871 which secretly turned the U.S. into a corporation. The sovereign citizen movement, therefore, believes that every president after Ulysses S. Grant is illegitimate.
They also claim the U.S. has been run by a group of shadowy investors since 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the gold standard. The date of presidential inaugurations was also changed from March 4 to January 20 in 1933.
As noted by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), sovereign citizens provide officials with “hundreds of pages of pseudo-legal nonsense” to help back their claims if they are implicated in a legal case.
The FBI considers sovereign citizen extremists a domestic terrorist threat and their members have been behind a number of violent incidents. Many theories in both the QAnon and sovereign citizen movements are also rooted in anti-Semitism.
“They believe that March 4, 2021 is the start for the new Republic. March 4 was the start date of the new President until it was changed in 1933,” Marc-André Argentino, a researcher who studies QAnon, tweeted on January 13.
“Why do they believe all of this? Well at the end of his Jan 7 speech Trump said ‘Our incredible journey is only just beginning.’ QAnon obviously latched on to that statement and they are using it to provide hope to their movement that no matter what it looks like in the media it is all about optics; because the Military and Qteam have thought of everything.”