Trump Speaks At Mar-A-Lago Event Featuring QAnon Believer

Topline

Former President Donald Trump hosted an event at his Mar-A-Lago club Tuesday that featured well-known QAnon adherent Liz Crokin as a speaker, as Trump still reels from criticism over his dinner last month with Kanye West and a prominent white supremacist.

Key Facts

Crokin wrote in an early morning Telegram post that she spoke about “Pizzagate, Balenciaga and what President Trump’s Administration did to combat human trafficking,” during a Mar-A-Lago fundraiser for conservative group America’s Future.

Crokin also said Trump made a “surprise appearance” at the America’s Future event, and posted a brief video of the former president addressing the crowd.

Trump did not appear to express any QAnon-related themes: He spent most of the video either boasting about Mar-A-Lago or praising America’s Future and its chair, former Trump-era National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who has repeated QAnon slogans.

America’s Future is a nonprofit group that conducts right-leaning legal advocacy and puts on educational programs, and it announced Wednesday that Crokin will serve on an advisory board for a new anti-child trafficking initiative.

Crokin’s visit to Mar-A-Lago was first reported by ABC News.

Forbes has reached out to Crokin, America’s Future and Trump’s office for comment.

Tangent

A former columnist who describes herself as an advocate for sex crime victims, Crokin has amplified aspects of QAnon, a ludicrous conspiracy theory that asserts Trump is working to take down a secretive and powerful cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, the Southern Poverty Law Center says. She has also openly discussed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, a QAnon precursor that falsely claimed prominent Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring in the basement of a D.C. pizza restaurant. Crokin earned national attention in 2018, when she baselessly implied that model Chrissy Teigen is connected to child traffickers.

Key Background

Trump has drawn scrutiny for his Mar-A-Lago guests in recent weeks, after he hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes and rapper Kanye West—who has faced scorn for a string of antisemitic comments—at his Florida club two days before Thanksgiving. High-profile Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell denounced Trump for hosting Fuentes and suggested it could harm his 2024 presidential bid (Trump has insisted that Fuentes attended as West’s guest and didn’t share racist views during their dinner). For years, Trump has also faced criticism for not drawing a stark enough distinction between his political movement and QAnon, whose followers typically view him as a savior of sorts. He has shared QAnon-related imagery on his Truth Social platform, and in a pre-election NBC interview in 2020, Trump avoided disavowing QAnon, instead telling host Savannah Guthrie “I know nothing about it,” and, “I do know they are very much against pedophilia.”