Trump tacitly endorses QAnon conspiracy after being asked to denounce it

President Trump has once again refused to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory.

During his town hall event with NBC News on Thursday, moderator Savannah Guthrie explained the concept of QAnon — "Democrats are a satanic pedophile ring and that you are the savior" — to Trump and asked him to debunk it. "I know nothing about QAnon," Trump responded, to which Guthrie made it clear, "I just told you."

But then Trump suggested he did know something about the conspiracists: "What I do hear about it is they are very strongly against pedophilia, and I agree with that," he said. Guthrie then tried to get him to say there wasn't any "satanic pedophile cult," and Trump simply said, "I don't know that, and neither do you know that."

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As Guthrie explained, the far-right QAnon conspiracy purports Democrats and Hollywood elites are part of a cannibalistic, pedophilic cabal and that Trump is leading a resistance against them. Trump's refusal to denounce the theory for the first time led QAnon supporters to celebrate. And NBC News' Ben Collins, who covers QAnon, suggested in a tweet that Trump's Thursday comments were "about as close to a dream scenario for QAnon followers as is humanly possible."