Over the weekend, a certain part of the internet was awash with some eerie footage. At a rally in Ohio for Republican Senate nominee JD Vance, former US president (and future presidential hopeful) Donald Trump spoke to dramatic background music while his supporters raised their hands in a straight-armed, one-fingered salute.
Comparisons were immediately drawn between it and the Nazi salute (or, less ominously, the three-fingered salute from The Hunger Games) but it’s still unclear what it means or why it started.
What does the new salute mean?
One of the leading theories about the Trump supporters’ gesture is that it’s a QAnon salute (QAnon being the global political conspiracy that originated in the American far-right political sphere and has a strong focus on Trump).
As Will Sommer, political reporter at The Daily Beast and author of a coming book on QAnon, pointed out on Twitter, the single finger could be related to the common QAnon rallying cry: “Where we go one, we go all.”
Indeed, the dramatic music playing as the former president talks about increased COVID-19 deaths, war in Ukraine and “fake news” is a QAnon song titled “WWG1WGA” — an acronym for the phrase.
It’s not the first time Trump has used this music. He’s used it at previous rallies and has also used it as a backing track to campaign videos. In fact, it’s been noted by many that compared with 2020 when the then president claimed he didn’t know much about the conspiracy theory, he is now embracing QAnon by using its common phrases and even posting an image of himself wearing a Q pin.
The one-fingered salute: ‘America First’?
Another theory is that the salute signalled “America First”, a popular slogan used by Trump for his Make America Great Again (MAGA) campaign. The one finger would obviously be signifying “first” in this instance, or even “number one”.
What is clear is that nobody actually knows.
As Ben Collins, an NBC News reporter on what he calls the “dystopia beat”, pointed out on Twitter, there was dispute about what the signal means, even in pro-Trump forums.
Strange things happen in crowds and it’s highly likely the signal isn’t a point to early 20th century fascism and the Nazi “Sieg Heil” salute or a far-right conspiracy theory gesture but rather a spontaneous outburst of collective emotion at an event designed to elicit exactly this kind of feeling.
However, as The Q Origins Project writes on Twitter, just because it didn’t begin as a QAnon gesture it won’t stop the far-right movement from adopting it. It’s fairly likely you’ll see it repeated at rallies and discussed at length in columns as Trump ramps up his campaign to become the 47th president of the United States.
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