Trump's campaign was a smear campaign. He knew he didn't even have to say anything truthful to get his cronies to start parroting him. Names like Pedo-Joe are catchy, and it helped people ferment their hate for Biden. Is it true? Of course not - but it never had to be true, only repeated enough to catch on and be endorsed by those who keep the tin foil factories running at maximum capacity. The irony of Trump and his supporters calling Biden a pedo is not lost on anyone.
We've been watching the fall of intellect and reason for a while now. Paradoxically, it is typically those who believe they are the most enlightened who are often victims of being dunning-krugers or the most gullible. QAnon is simply a symptom of a much larger lack of critical thinking issue. Rationale discourse is swept aside for sweeping generalizations and mistruths. Donald Trump has been recorded as telling 20,000 mistruths over the course of his presidency - that is on average 13 a day. Despite these being called out and fact-checked, his base simply strengthened after Trump repeatedly called the news 'FAKE'. He never needed to actually 'prove' that the news was fake, he simply just needed to say it enough to get it to catch on. It got to the point that anything he said was appearing to go unchecked by his base - to them, he was more truthful than every media outlet. He sold his lies with more lies and convinced half the population that it wasn't him that was lying, it was Democrats, the Media, Social Media, Liberals and everyone else who dared challenge him.
