Last week, President Trump took aim at four conservative media figures who have spent recent months attacking him over, among other things, the war in Iran. In a lengthy Truth Social post, he called Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones "low IQ," "nut jobs," and "troublemakers" running "third rate podcasts." He said they would "say anything necessary for some free and cheap publicity."
The mainstream press treated the episode as evidence that Trump had finally gone too far — that even his most loyal allies were abandoning him, and that the Iran war was tearing MAGA apart from within.
This is something we've been covering for a while. Every voice Trump named has gone off the deep end — some long ago, others more recently. And from both a political and moral standpoint, his denunciation is a win. These figures were actively working to undermine Republican midterm performance (except Megyn), positioning themselves against the President and trying to redirect MAGA toward a more conspiratorial, populist direction lacking a serious policy agenda.
But here's the problem. The mainstream media is reporting this as evidence that Trump has finally lost it, and that his decisions in Iran are so catastrophic that even his strongest past supporters are abandoning him.
What's conspicuously absent from that coverage is any honest accounting of just how unhinged these commentators have become. Including that context would make Trump look reasonable. So they didn't.
The consequence is that independent voters who haven't made up their minds are being led to believe that Trump is so reckless that his own movement is turning on him. It couldn't be farther from the truth. Here is the context those readers deserved.
Consider the cast of characters:
Alex Jones first became famous by claiming the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax — that grieving parents were crisis actors. He was sued, lost, and was ordered to pay roughly $1.5 billion in damages. His credibility as a serious commentator was never particularly strong. It is now nonexistent.
Megyn Kelly has built a career on well-timed pivots toward what's popular. She went from sparring with Trump during the 2016 primary to becoming a MAGA loyalist when it was popular. She once supported sex changes for kids; when the political winds shifted, she reversed course. She followed the same pattern with Trump himself, and now with Israel.
Most troublingly, she lent credibility to Candace Owens' conspiracy theories about the assassination of Charlie Kirk — including the baseless claim that Kirk's own wife, Erika, was somehow involved in his murder.
Candace Owens is perhaps the most difficult to summarize, because the list of claims is so long and so bizarre. She has spent hours on her podcast attempting to downplay Nazi cruelty in concentration camps. She staked her professional reputation on the claim that Brigitte Macron, the French first lady, was born male — then, when the Macrons sued her for defamation, she alleged they had ordered her assassination.
She has promoted the medieval antisemitic blood libel as though it were a live concern. She has accused Erika Kirk and Turning Point USA of orchestrating a "murderous coup" against Charlie Kirk. She has said Kirk was an alien time traveler who came to Earth on a mission.
Tucker Carlson has moved in a similar direction, if somewhat more carefully. He has attacked Orthodox Jews and blamed them for the Iran war. He has rewritten the history of World War II, casting Churchill — not Hitler — as the villain, and has hosted guests who openly admire Hitler without correction. He has reportedly coordinated with Iranian officials behind the Trump administration's back in an attempt to derail the war effort.
He has called Christian Zionists the worst people in America and suggested, with apparent sincerity, that Islam's reverence for Jesus should be the foundation for peace. He frames all of this as "just asking questions."
These four figures may still align with the conservative movement on perhaps sixty percent of the issues. They still land punches that resonate. But they have clearly departed the category of serious commentary and entered something else entirely — a conspiratorial, attention-driven media economy in which the most outrageous claim wins the most clicks.
That is what Trump was responding to. Not a principled policy disagreement from thoughtful allies, but an escalating campaign by figures who were actively trying to tank Republican performance ahead of the midterms and hijack the MAGA movement into something unrecognizable — a paranoid, conspiratorial, Islam-embracing project with no serious policy agenda.
None of this is the narrative the press wanted to tell. It is far more useful, if you are a mainstream outlet, to present the split as proof that Trump has lost control — that even his influencer base is turning on him, and that voters preparing for the midterms should take note.
But that story requires you to treat Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and company as credible bellwethers of conservative opinion. They are not. They have not been for some time.
Trump's denunciation was, in fact, overdue — but we’re relieved it’s here. We have spent the past year covering these voices — mostly Tucker, Candace, and a few others — because we could see the dangerous theories they were spreading to massive audiences, and no political figure was willing to draw a clear line.
Now, the split is here. And our work on this front, at least at this intensity, is finished.
