SUBURBAN DAD, CITIGROUP SVP, AND HIGH PRIEST OF Q

Jason Gelinas lived a normal suburban life with a plum Wall Street gig. He also ran the news hub for a pro-Trump conspiracy theory

- William Turton and Joshua Brustein

Like many future Donald Trump voters, Jason Gelinas felt something shift inside him during the presidency of Barack Obama. Things were going OK for him generally. He had a degree from Fordham University and had held a series of jobs at big financial-services firms, eventually becoming a senior vice president at Citigroup in the company’s technology department, where he led an AI project and oversaw a team of software developers. He was married with kids and had a comfortable house in a New Jersey suburb. According to those who know him, Gelinas was a pleasant guy who was into normal stuff: Game of Thrones, recreational soccer, and so on. Things did get weird, though, when politics came up.

Gelinas had registered as a Democrat in the runup to the 2008 election, but then seemed to drift to the right, and not in an “I’m going to vote for Romney this time” sort of way, according to two friends, who spoke to Bloomberg Businessweek on the condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to be associated with what came next in his political journey. “He hated the idea of Obama,” says one. “He thought that it was a setup and that he was elected to satisfy the Black population.” Gelinas would become agitated when the topic of the president came up, sometimes referring to Obama as “the Antichrist.”