Last Christmas, I found myself alone, stoned, and poolside at the Trump National Doral Miami wearing a “Fake News” T-shirt under a fluffy white Trump robe. Before the noon checkout, I’d gone to catch some rays and take a video of myself reading a passage about Mike Flynn from a galley of my book.

I’d done a lot of reporting on Flynn’s career. In 2012, then a lieutenant general, Flynn was appointed by President Obama to run the Defense Intelligence Agency, but he was unceremoniously fired after two years of tumult and politicking in uniform. He would go on to secretly lobby for Turkey and spout conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health, as well as an imagined pedophilia ring in a Washington pizza parlor. This post-Army fall was fascinating to me because Flynn was a true military believer, a throwback to another era, Colonel Kurtz come home. People I respected in the Army respected him. My CIA friends did not seem to share this respect. He thought differently than most Army general officers I knew.



Flynn’s tenure in the Trump administration was even briefer: He was ousted as national security advisor after just 24 days over pre-election Russia contacts and his foreign lobbying, which also led him to plead guilty to a federal count of lying to investigators. Since then, the main public support he’d garnered was from his family and the QAnon people, who exist in that liminal internet space called the chans and believe a “storm” is coming in which President Trump will bust an international pedophilia ring of Democrats, globalists, and satanists. In these apocalyptic fantasies, Flynn was a good Christian warrior working to bring the deep state cabal down from inside: Some even theorized that Flynn was Q, the anonymous author of the online posts that delineated this alleged global conspiracy. As I pondered the man’s legacy that holiday morning, a single lizard emerged from a crack in the wall, slinked to the hot tub, and swam three laps.

For me, that was a clear sign it was time to go. Doug Laux—the ex-spy I’d spent two consecutive Christmases with, staying in properties owned by the president—and I collected our rental, a red convertible Camaro, from the Venezuelan valet and rolled out, bound for South Beach. Just outside the property a woman stood, wearing a yellow reflective vest, holding a sign that said “Who is Q/I know/Do you?” As we drove past, I shouted the initials “WWG1WGA”—short for ”Where we go one we go all,” a Q tagline—from the convertible. She looked confused by the reference. I wondered who was paying her to stand there and hold the sign.

A QAnon proponent surveys the streets of Doral, Florida, and her cellphone, on Christmas Day, 2018, outside the Trump property where the president plans to host the G7 summit next year. Matt Farwell

Those who talk don’t know. Those who know don’t talk. The information wars continue apace. Earlier this month, the Trump Doral hosted the “American Priority Conference.” One panel called “Is America in a Great Awakening?” seemed like a dog-whistle to followers of what I’ve come to think of as “the QAnon psychological operation.” Before the shitshow in Syria and Trump’s grade-school notes to foreign leaders and impeachment intrigues took over the conversation, Twitter was abuzz over a snuff video shown in a side room of the Doral conference: It featured the president entering a “Church of Fake News” to beat, shoot, and stab Trump’s most-hated media members to death.

That Christmas night, at a South Beach hotel, Doug and I watched cable news. Trump had made a surprise visit to Iraq. In a commercial break between the talking heads, The 700 Club advertised a prayer line. I dialed the number. After several minutes of listening to recordings of Pat Robertson and his son asking for money, I was connected with a Filipino-accented 700 Club prayer representative. She asked for my prayer request. I thought I knew the men who needed the most prayers: the brave Navy SEALs protecting Trump in Iraq right now. The prayer she said for them was worth the wait, fierce and fiery, calling doom on the enemies of God, the president, and the SEALs. America had entered a golden age of magical thinking. It was no longer just the fringe awaiting apocalyptic scenarios. An entire political entertainment system that feasted on the next day’s hope for a deus ex machina now did eschatology as well. Not long after, I’d discover the story of The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, a 1980s Christian terrorist cult, and realize they had anticipated this very moment.