Liz Crokin, a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, posed for photos with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago last Tuesday after participating in an event at the club. Crokin’s evening at Mar-a-Lago occurred just two weeks after Trump hosted antisemitic rapper Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and holocaust-denying YouTuber Nick Fuentes. Crokin’s presence at Mar-a-Lago suggests Trump didn’t learn much from the fallout that the Ye/Fuentes dinner caused.
Trump’s dinner with Ye and Fuentes caused a political “nightmare.” Ye has been outspoken about his antisemitic views; he lost an Adidas contract in the fall over his antisemitic views, and he went on Alex Jones’s InfoWars last week and said things like “I like Hitler.”
Fuentes, meanwhile, was permanently suspended from YouTube for violating the company’s hate speech policies. Fuentes is known for being an incel, an antisemite, and a Holocaust denier. Naturally, Ye and Fuentes together with Trump at Mar-a-Lago caused an uproar. Trump was seen as giving credibility to the two controversial figures. The political fallout damaged Trump’s nascent 2024 presidential campaign. Yet, two weeks later, Trump is committing similar political sins in hosting Crokin.
Crokin, a long-time journalist who used to cover celebrity news, has gained notoriety recently as an adherent of Pizzagate and QAnon. The QAnon conspiracy holds that Donald Trump is secretly fighting a group of liberal elites who are running a worldwide child sex trafficking ring. It’s wild stuff, straight from the darkest trenches of the internet. Crokin said she “immediately knew [QAnon] was legit.”
Crokin also believes that the Mueller investigation was a cover-up of a pedophile investigation and that the cabal of child abusers Mueller was actually investigating will one day be arrested en masse in an event known as “the Storm.” Crokin has also proposed that John F. Kennedy, Jr. did not die in his 1999 plane crash, but rather, faked his own death and is now the man behind QAnon.
According to Right Wing Watch, Crokin predicted in 2018 that “thousands of high-level political, business, and entertainment figures are involved in cannibalistic satanic pedophilia.”
Like I said, it’s wild stuff.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Crokin was a proponent of the #FilmYourHospital hashtag – which proposed filming local hospitals as proof that the pandemic was a lie that the “cabal” (and China) had engineered.
Crokin has since been banned from all mainstream social media platforms.
But earlier this week, Crokin appeared at Mar-a-Lago for an event billed as a fundraiser in support of a “documentary” on sex trafficking.
Trump addressed the crowd assembled for the event. “You are incredible people, you are doing unbelievable work, and we just appreciate you being here, and we hope you’re going to be back.”
While the fallout from Crokin’s Mar-a-Lago appearance is not likely to equal the fallout from the Ye/Fuentes dinner, Trump’s newest gaffe further indicates that Trump is persistently self-destructive.
It’s just stupid stuff that is increasingly self-defeating.
There may have been a time when Trump’s recalcitrance – and his embrace of far-right zaniness – had a political upside. But MAGA has been proven to be a politically limited movement. The ceiling is low; the potential has been maxed. Far-right candidates got trounced in last month’s midterms. Trump has been slow to evolve and accommodate the more mainstream preferences of right-wing constituents.
Trump’s stubbornness and Trump’s embrace of the far-right served as political assets in the past. But that appears to be changing. If Trump can’t figure it out, he’ll continue to lose relevance.
Harrison Kass is the Senior Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, he joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. He lives in Oregon and listens to Dokken.
