The story behind president’s notorious fans

Washington – The tattoo-chested man in a horned headdress, the middle-aged intruder with his foot on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk and the woman shot dead by police: their images have been beamed around the world but who are the Donald Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol?

Pro-gun campaigner

Richard Barnett, 60, from Gravette in northwest Arkansas, barged into the office of House Democrat leader Pelosi where he was photographed leaning back in a chair with his left foot on her desk.

Barnett, known locally for hosting the pro-gun Facebook group 2A NWA STAND!!!, told Arkansas news channel KFSM 5News that he somehow ended up there by accident.

“I didn’t break the doors. I was shoved in. I didn’t mean to be in there. Hell, I was looking for the bathroom,” said Barnett.

He added though that he had every right to be in Pelosi’s office.

“My desk. I’m a taxpayer. I’m a patriot. It ain’t her desk. We loaned her that desk.”

Before leaving, Barnett stole an envelope and left Pelosi a note calling her a “bitch,” he said.

QAnon ‘digital soldier’

Shirtless, sporting face paint and a fur hat complete with buffalo horns, Jake Angeli is a prominent supporter of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory.

He describes himself as a “digital soldier” of the movement that claims Trump is waging a secret war against a global liberal cult of Satan-worshipping paedophiles.

The 33-year-old Angeli presented himself as a “shamanist and consultant for the Trump supporters” when he was photographed at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona in November. He was wearing his headdress then too.

“We’re patriots on the front lines in Arizona who wish to take our positive energy to DC,” he wrote on the ultra-conservative social network Parler in December.

Neo-Nazi

Photographed standing alongside Angeli was 29-year-old Matthew Heimbach, “considered by many to be the face of a new generation of white nationalists”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre.

Heimbach was one of the organisers of the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, on the sidelines of which a woman was killed by a neo-Nazi.

Military veteran

Ashli Babbitt was named by police as the woman shot at close range by a police officer as she tried to climb through a broken window.

The 35-year-old from San Diego later died from her injuries.

Babbitt was a US Air Force veteran who described herself as a “Libertarian” on her Twitter page. –