Trump Just Lost One of His Most Famous Followers: the QAnon Shaman

Even Donald Trump’s most sycophantic followers are turning on the president.

Jacob Chansley—better known as the QAnon shaman—denounced the MAGA leader Wednesday morning, responding to a post of Trump’s 2023 mugshot by decrying the president as a “fraud.”

“Fuck this stupid piece of shit,” Chansley wrote in a since-deleted post that accrued more than 34,000 views.

In a follow-up post, Chansley wrote: “Oh yea & Fuck Israel! And Fuck Donald Trump!”

Chansley captured national attention when he stormed through the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an elaborate, horned fur headdress. In the aftermath of the attack, a face-painted Chansley emerged as one of the central figures of the revolt. Once at the Capitol building, Chansley was in the first group of rioters to break inside. Wielding a bullhorn, he worked to “rile up the crowd and demand that lawmakers be brought out,” according to a sentencing memo.

In late 2021, a federal judge sentenced Chansley to 41 months in prison for his role in the January 6 insurrection. But that was undone hours after Trump was inaugurated at the start of this year, when he included Chansley in a clemency order for some 1,600 of his supporters who were involved in the riot.

Trump has held messiah-like status within QAnon’s conspiratorial circle for years thanks to their principal belief that, despite being named and photographed as an associate of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Trump would rid the world of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run the government and media.

In turn, Trump readily welcomed the cockeyed adoration. In 2020, he offered the movement plausible deniability at an executive level—claiming that while he didn’t know much about QAnon, he couldn’t disprove its theories. Just two years later, Trump was regularly circulating bits of the conspiracy on TruthSocial and reposting images of himself wearing Q pins emblazoned with the cult’s messaging, “A Storm Is Coming,” referring to Trump’s supposed final victory, when QAnon supporters expect him to mass-execute his opponents.

QAnon supporters turned out en masse in November to help Trump return to the Oval Office. But Trump’s sudden backpedalling on unearthing records related to the Epstein investigation has left a bitter taste in those supporters’ mouths. Their relationship was further strained when Trump referred to his Epstein-minded allies as “stupid,” “naive,” and “foolish,” accusing them of being “duped” by Democrats who he claimed invented the Epstein “hoax.”

But Trump has a well-documented history with the New York financier. Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together several times, Trump allegedly penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the pedophile’s 50th birthday, the real estate mogul reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times, and the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

In a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he had known Epstein for 15 years and referred to him as a “terrific guy.”

“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump said at the time.

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration’s highly advertised investigation into former President Barack Obama has come up remarkably short.

Speaking at a White House press briefing Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard repeatedly accused the former president of initiating a “coup” against Donald Trump’s political aspirations—though she was pretty thin on evidence.

“What do you now have that refutes” previous investigations into the matter, inquired a reporter.

“I will encourage you, in my role as director of national intelligence—my job, again, I said when I came into this role, was to make sure we are telling the truth to the American people, and that we are ensuring the intelligence community is not being politicized,” Gabbard began, before handing off the burden of responsibility for proving her theory.

“So I’m not asking you to take my word for it,” she continued. “I’m asking you in the media to conduct honest journalism, and the American people, to see for yourself in the documents that we’ve released—now, close to 200 pages—that point in multiple references, multiple examples, to include comments that have been made by senior intelligence professionals, who are some still working within these agencies today, that confirm the conclusions that we have drawn: that President Obama directed an intelligence community assessment to be created to further this contrived false narrative that ultimately led to a yearslong coup to undermine Trump’s presidency.”

The reporter then pressed if Gabbard believed that previous investigations, which included probes by special counsel Robert Mueller as well as a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee led by now–Secretary of State Marco Rubio, had either “missed that” or “covered it up.”

“Look at the evidence, and you will know the truth,” Gabbard responded.

Last week, Gabbard declassified a September 2020 House Intelligence Committee report, leveraging the document as evidence that Obama had pushed for an Intelligence Community Assessment to be released in January 2017 before Trump was to be inaugurated. Days before releasing the report, Gabbard wrote on X that Americans would “finally learn the truth” of how Obama had, according to her, “invented” the Trump-Russia “hoax.”

Trump picked up the theory and ran with it, using the new conspiracy as cover from his own explosive scandals. Deflecting a question about his widely reported ties to pedophilic sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein on Tuesday, Trump claimed that the only “witch hunt” America’s press should be focused on is the one in which he claimed his administration “caught” Obama “absolutely cold” trying to “rig” the 2020 presidential election.

Obama spokesman Patrick Rodenbush excoriated the administration in turn, referring to the allegations as “a weak attempt at distraction.”

“Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes,” Rodenbush said Tuesday in a statement, underscoring that any treason charges would also implicate Rubio—the second-highest-ranking official in Trump’s Cabinet.

When asked to clarify how Obama could be charged with treason when he has presidential immunity, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that she trusted the Justice Department to sort it out.

President Trump’s recent bid to quell outrage over his administration’s perceived lack of transparency about the late sex criminal (and the president’s onetime friend) Jeffrey Epstein has hit a stumbling block.

Trump over the weekend requested that grand jury transcripts related to United States v. Epstein be unsealed—a seeming sop to his angry supporters that falls far short of the release of all Epstein-related Justice Department files, which many are demanding. But on Wednesday, a federal judge in Florida denied the DOJ’s request.

In a 12-page opinion, Judge Robin L. Rosenberg wrote that “the Court’s hands are tied,” as Trump’s DOJ failed to argue that its request fell under an exception to “the general rule of secrecy” governing grand jury materials, instead invalidly claiming “special circumstances.”

The Trump administration even acknowledged that its petition wouldn’t pass muster, Rosenberg wrote, as the DOJ conceded that the court couldn’t flout existing precedent regarding grand jury materials. So, Rosenberg ruled, “consistent with [that precedent] and the Government’s concessions, the request to disclose is denied.”

The Justice Department has filed two other requests for Epstein grand jury testimony, both in New York. While those are still pending, the Florida decision is bad news for the president, who’s surely hoping for as swift an end as possible to MAGA’s fury over the Epstein story.

The Trump administration reportedly plans to eliminate an Environmental Protection Agency rule that’s crucial to the federal government’s ability to combat climate change.

According to The New York Times, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is anticipated to officially do away with the agency’s “endangerment finding” in the coming days. The landmark 2009 rule scientifically establishes greenhouse gases as hazards to public health and welfare, and serves as the backbone of the agency’s ability to regulate such gases under the Clean Air Act.

The news of Zeldin’s plan comes on the very same day the United Nations’ top court ruled that countries have a “duty” to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Those that fail to take steps to protect the planet from climate change, the International Court of Justice said, may run afoul of international law.

Zeldin in March announced that the EPA was reconsidering the endangerment finding as part of a broader effort to drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”

The planned move shows Trump’s EPA acting in accordance with the president’s long-standing conviction that climate change is a hoax. His administration’s second term priorities have included—among other iniquities—increasing American reliance on fossil fuels, gutting climate research, passing the “most anti-environment bill in history,” per Sierra Club, and once again withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.

Reliance on artificial intelligence is breaking down the Food and Drug Administration.

Health officials in the Trump administration have vaunted the burgeoning technology as a way to fast-track and streamline drug approvals, but that hasn’t been the case. Instead, the program is cooking up nonexistent studies, a process referred to as “hallucinating,” according to current and former FDA officials that spoke with CNN.

“Anything that you don’t have time to double-check is unreliable. It hallucinates confidently,” one agency worker told the network.

Insiders claim that the program, Elsa, is helpful when it comes to summarizing meetings or email templates, but its usefulness ends there.

“AI is supposed to save our time, but I guarantee you that I waste a lot of extra time just due to the heightened vigilance that I have to have” regarding fact-checking potentially fake or misrepresented studies, another FDA employee told CNN.

Hallucinations are a known problem with generative AI models—and Elsa is no different, according to Jeremy Walsh, the head of AI at the FDA.

“Elsa is no different from lots of [large language models] and generative AI,” Walsh told CNN. “They could potentially hallucinate.”

It’s not the first time that the Department of Health and Human Services has majorly fumbled its use of artificial intelligence.

In May, AI researchers claimed there was “definitive” proof that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his team used the tech to write his “Make America Healthy Again” report, and had completely botched the job in the meantime.

Kennedy’s report projected a new vision for America’s health policy, taking aim at childhood vaccines, ultraprocessed foods, and pesticides. But a NOTUS investigation found seven studies referenced in Kennedy’s 68-page report that the listed study authors said were either wildly misinterpreted or never occurred at all. Researchers noted 522 scientific references in the report that included the phrase “OAIcite” in their URLs—a marker indicating the use of OpenAI.

At the time, administration officials brushed off the controversy as a temporary flub. But the new over-reliance on the tech indicates that the MAHA report was actually a horrifically dangerous precedent, allowing the White House to tiptoe into the realm of unvetted and unverified AI usage to form the basis of America’s public health policy.