By Steve Dinneen
As Donald Trump arrived in New York to be charged with falsifying accounts, his rag-tag bunch of MAGA supporters were out in force. One of them looked familiar: a man dressed as the infamous QAnon Shaman, who was part of the raiding party that stormed the White House after Trump lost the last election.
We know it wasn’t the real QAnon Shaman because that one is currently in a halfway house in Arizona after being jailed for his part in the riot.
Anyway, a fake QAnon Shaman, complete with horned headdress and face paint, was bicycling through New York City in support of Trump. Someone was filming him: here’s what happened, frame-by-frame.
Analysis
The Fake Shaman starts in the centre of the frame. The camera is on his right-hand side as he rides past. He’s perched atop a sort of double-decker bike that makes him tower over the New York Traffic. The bike is covered in red white and blue garlands. It is a kitsch monument to the very concept of patriotism, an ironic artist’s response with the irony stripped away, leaving just a silly bike.
The Fake Shaman is wearing tan trousers, a fur cape, some kind of patriotic scarf, and the distinctive horned headdress. But this headdress is clearly a knock-off: instead of pointing proudly upwards, the horns droop down, giving him the demeanour of a sad clown. His face is painted with a white cross.
Fake Shaman has one fist in the air as he glides down the street. He is defiant, staring into the camera, mouth agape. “Not my president!” he seems to be thinking.
There is a barely audible shout from off camera – “No you don’t…”? – but it comes too late for the Fake Shaman to react. If you play the four second clip frame-by-frame, you can see a skateboarder dressed in a black hoodie appear on his left hand side, along with the skateboard he has just rolled towards the Fake Shaman.
There is a wonderful moment – maybe a tenth of a second – when Fake Shaman realises something is terribly wrong. His raised fist attempts to find the handlebar of his comedy bike. But it is too late.
His front wheel mounts the skateboard (you have to admire the timing) and for a magical second the front of the bike is skateboarding, planing gracefully sideways, albeit in a direction perpendicular to his back wheel.
The Fake Shaman’s momentum carries him up and over the board – maybe he can still save this! – but the skateboard is not finished with its terrible lesson in the power of physics. It catches under the back wheel, flicking out from under him – now both wheels are skidding sideways and the Fake Shaman is in big trouble. His right leg instinctively kicks out, attempting to correct his balance, but there is no stopping his inevitable trajectory.
The Fake Shaman travels at a 45 degree angle across the street when, in a moment of comedy timing that would be impossible to recreate without the use of expensive CGI, his droopy-horned hat flies off, landing on top of the bike at the exact moment he crashes into the tarmac.
This is where the four second clip ends – but there is a second clip in which the Fake Shaman immediately bounces up and begins to give chase to the skateboarder. What happens next… who can say.
I feel like this video speaks to our cultural moment – the hubris followed by the literal fall perfectly reflecting the hubris and fall of the real QAnon Shaman, which in turn reflects the hubris and fall of the President they were supporting. There’s a serendipity to it that creates a pleasing tension with its sense of crushing inevitability.
It’s a meme in the making, a moment that will be played again and again, perhaps looked back upon by future historians wondering what the hell happened to America in the 2020s.
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