Residents of North Carolina began noticing the mysterious billboards days before this month’s Super Tuesday primaries.
Across Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Greensboro, and beyond, digital posters displaying the smiling faces of former President Donald Trump and his old friend, the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, greeted drivers as they traveled highways and busy intersections.
Soon after, the Trump-Epstein signs popped up in Georgia.
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“I live in this little tiny Trump town and there’s one person here that I want to be friends with,” said liberal Jeff Wagenius in a TikTok documenting the enigma. He added, “Cuz this right here deserves the best beer we have in town on me, I swear to God.”
The digital billboards—rented through Lamar Advertising—show a 1990s image of Epstein and Trump at the GOP frontrunner’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. The photo flashes on rotation among more mundane ads for things like pest control and realty firms.
The signs have no message, save for the line: “Paid for by ProtectChildrenQ LLC.”
Social media users have reported seeing them in MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district of Dalton, Georgia, and a short drive from the Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts the Masters Tournament. “Whoever put the billboard of donald trump and jeffrey epstein together near Augusta Georgia,” one X user wrote, “I LOVE YOU I LAUGHED SO HARD I ALMOST CRASHED.”
Others found them in Greensboro, North Carolina, during the weekend of a Trump rally. “No words just the pic,” a witness tweeted, “now who was petty enough to pay for that[.] I was so weak.” About 93 miles south in Fayetteville, a newspaper columnist located three billboards and noted, “The mystery rollout of the billboards has the feel of a guerilla marketing campaign. But the political attack it showcases is strictly old school: Guilt by association.”
“A picture says a thousand words,” Wagenius, who counted four billboards around his town of Valdosta, told The Daily Beast. “In this case, it’s more like a million words.”
Wagenius tried to find the display’s creators but only hit dead ends. He thinks Republicans who are tired of being associated with Trump could be behind the signs—which total at least 30 across two states, if onlookers’ posts on Reddit, X, and TikTok are accurate.
Others suspect Democrats are funding the stunt. “This is right above our welcome sign to our town,” one Georgia Trump fan fumed in a TikTok, adding, “Anything to fit that left narrative. Y’all ought to be ashamed. That’s pathetiful.”
Among the posts devoted to the puzzle, one Redditor asked, “What’s with ‘Protect Children Q LLC’? Makes me wonder is this a QAnon thing?” Another commented, “Huh I wonder if QAnon is turning against Trump now or if some other group is using the QAnon trigger words or whatever to try to appeal to conspiracy theorists and get their attention.”
“Folks have been suggesting maybe Qanon has turned but I think it’s more likely a Dem PAC is just using the ‘Protect The Children’ name because of it’s [sic] association with that movement and their constant use of the phrase,” a third user wrote.
Other Redditors speculated the creator could be Republican “Never-Trumpers” or “Nikki Haley’s campaign trying to get people to make the association.”
“Protect Children LLC, who are you? I need to know,” asked the TikToker @deesknots, who crochets voodoo dolls of Republicans like Ron DeSantis. When a commenter asked why the group was purposefully anonymous, she replied, “Great question. They must have a good source of funding already.”
Whoever launched the effort is a mystery. But it’s clear they want to remind voters of Trump’s former ties to Epstein—a wealthy sex predator who died in 2019 while in jail on child sex-trafficking charges—and paid, at minimum, tens of thousands of dollars to do so.
As in North Carolina, the Georgia ads appeared ahead of the state’s March 12 primary race. By then, both of Trump’s main opponents, DeSantis and Nikki Haley, had dropped out. (Haley suspended her campaign after getting trounced on Super Tuesday.)
Lamar Advertising didn’t return messages seeking comment. Based on product inventory and pricing on the company’s website, however, it appears the shadowy ProtectChildrenQ LLC spent at least $50,000 on the digital billboards.
The creators of the billboards were savvy about keeping their identities hidden, suggesting the operation was somewhat sophisticated.
Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer at Harmon Curran, said the billboards don’t fall under the Federal Election Commission’s rules on independent expenditures because they don’t expressly advocate for the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate.
“We’ve got a clearly identified candidate, but it doesn’t expressly advocate his defeat,” Kappel told The Daily Beast. “It just links him with one of the most loathsome individuals in American history.”
“I’ve never seen that before, where there was a billboard or political ad that had no text in it, just a photograph, and I’ve been doing this for 35 years,” Kappel added.
From his perspective, the Trump-Epstein ad’s lack of words was intentional.
“It’s a clever way to avoid FEC reporting,” Kappel said. “It doesn’t really advocate anything; it’s just a picture of two lowlifes, one of whom happens to be running for president of the United States and one who killed himself in prison. Draw your own conclusions about why those people would be together.”
Public records show that the limited liability company named in the ads, ProtectChildrenQ LLC, was incorporated in Delaware on Feb. 27 using a registered agent service, ensuring the absolute secrecy of the parties involved in the campaign. The state doesn’t require LLCs to file information about their members or managers.
“People who want to engage in skullduggery in American elections anonymously don’t have to go to tax havens to create organizations. They can just use Delaware. There’s going to be no information about who created it,” Kappel said.
Meanwhile, a barebones website using the same name as the LLC includes a private mailbox address in Miami and email, and a brief statement that appears to adopt QAnon language. “ProtectChildrenQ raises awareness about the risks and harms America’s children face every day,” protectchildrenq.com reads.
“Its orientation is to uncover the truth, follow the breadcrumbs and encourage the public to wake up to this widespread problem.”
The LLC appears to use a virtual mailbox company that collects its mail using a real address and scans it and forwards it to the LLC’s email. When The Daily Beast called the company, a representative confirmed that the LLC’s mailbox number was in use.
QAnon, the umbrella term for a collection of baseless far-right conspiracy theories, started on fringe message boards in 2017, with an anonymous individual claiming to be “Q,” a supposed high-level government insider who revealed intel in the form of “breadcrumbs.”
Adherents falsely believe that a cabal of elites including billionaires, Hollywood celebs, and high-profile Democrats Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, are devil-worshiping pedophiles who kill children and harvest their blood to keep themselves young. The conspiracies center Trump as the hero battling with the “deep state.”
By the 2020 election, QAnon drifted into the mainstream of GOP politics, with theory supporters including Greene being elected to office, and multiple followers of the theory were charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
QAnon believers have also glommed onto a viral #SaveTheChildren hashtag focused on human trafficking and used it to spread disinformation.
It’s unclear why any pro-QAnon group would distribute a billboard of Trump, its warrior and “God Emperor,” looking friendly with Epstein.
The reality TV star and the perverted money manager were old friends and partied together in ritzy Palm Beach—until they squabbled over a real estate transaction around 2004.
“I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him,” Trump told reporters after Epstein’s July 2019 arrest for trafficking minors. “He was a fixture in Palm Beach. I had a falling out with him a long time ago. I’d say maybe 15 years.”
Trump allegedly met one of Epstein’s teen victims in the ’90s at Mar-a-Lago (he was not accused of any misconduct) and flew on his private jet. In 2002, the future president gushed about Epstein for a New York magazine profile, calling him a “terrific guy” who’s “a lot of fun to be with” and “likes beautiful women as much as I do.”
Still, one lawyer for Epstein victims has claimed Trump was helpful in providing information on Epstein’s activities and called the trafficker “strange” and said he “never really liked him.” Brad Edwards, in his memoir on the case, wrote, “The first of Epstein’s powerful friends to answer our subpoena in a meaningful way was Donald Trump.”
Other famous politicians were also regulars in Epstein’s orbit, including former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former President Bill Clinton.
Clinton reportedly flew on Epstein’s plane 26 times and was even photographed getting a neck massage from one of Epstein’s victims during a trip to Africa. In the ’90s, records show, Epstein visited the Clinton White House at least 17 times.
When a cache of court documents in an Epstein lawsuit was unsealed earlier this year, both Clinton and Trump were named in depositions and other exhibits.
Jared Holt, a senior researcher of extremist movements at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and Daily Beast contributor, said he doubts anyone affiliated with QAnon would go after Trump so aggressively, as the conspiracy’s narrative arc depends on the ex-president as its hero. He suspects the billboards could be “some weird little political operative side project.”
“It’s certainly possible that this is a QAnon group doing this,” Holt told The Daily Beast. “But given the state of play in the conspiracy landscape, how QAnon has fallen out of style, I would be pretty surprised if that was the case.”
