President Donald Trump has lost one of his most infamous and controversial supporters, the so-called “QAnon Shaman,” who is now calling the president a “fraud.”
Jake Chansley, the conspiracy theorist best known for storming the Capitol shirtless in war paint and horns during the Jan. 6 attack, lashed out at Trump in response to an August 2023 X post where the president shared his Georgia mugshot after being charged with trying to overturn the 2020 election.
“F— this stupid piece of s—,” Chansley replied. “What a fraud…” Chansley’s account was taken offline soon after the post went viral, although it is unclear if he deleted it himself.
It appears that the man once seen as a poster boy for MAGA extremism has turned on the president amid the ongoing backlash over the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
“F— Donald Trump!” he added in a follow-up post. “What do you think Epstein & Isreal (sic) have on Trump???”
Chansley is a high-profile advocate of QAnon, the baseless conspiracy theory that claimed Trump was secretly working to expose, arrest and even execute a global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, made up of top Democrats and elites. Many of these extreme beliefs was based around on cryptic messages, or “drops” posted on the fringe message board 4chan starting in 2017 by a mysterious figure known as “Q.”
Epstein, a billionaire sex offender with a network of powerful friends, became a key character in the QAnon universe and his name featured in multiple drops. His death in custody in 2019 only deepened believers’ convictions of the existence of an elite child trafficking ring which Trump would expose.
“Epstein is seen as one of the major players in a global ‘pedo elite’ that’s been trafficking children for centuries, and that Q and Trump were supposed to put an end to once and for all,” Mike Rothschild, conspiracy theorist expert and author of The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult and Conspiracy of Everything, told the BBC.
Many MAGA loyalists and QAnon supporters are turning on Trump after the DOJ and FBI announced it would not release any more Epstein-related files and denied the existence of a so-called Epstein “client list.” Trump has also been urging his base to move on from Epstein, which is only causing his more extremist base more anger.
In a stunning twist, Trump, who vowed to release all the Epstein files, now finds himself accused of being part of a “deep state” conspiracy that QAnon believed he was fighting.
“As Trump and other Republican figures embraced QAnon to attack Democrats, they gave legitimacy to the same conspiracy theorists who are now decrying [Attorney General] Pam Bondi and the Justice Department,” Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, told The Guardian.
Chansley was sentenced to 41 months in prison for his role in the Capitol riot and eventually freed in May 2023. He was one of around 1,500 individuals whom Trump pardoned in connection to the Jan. 6 attack in his first day back in the White House.
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