On Thursday, the president hit back at these critics, specifically Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones. “They have one thing in common, Low IQs,” he wrote in an unusually long missive on Truth Social. “They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!” It contained a litany of other criticisms of them. They’re “NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS, and will say anything necessary for some ‘free’ and cheap publicity.” was shrugged off by its targets. “It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home,” Owens replied.
Greene, Carlson, Owens, and Jones are all stars on the right. Greene was one of the first truly post-Trump Republican politicians; elected to Congress in 2020, she was loudly and proudly MAGA—and prone to pushing zany, often antisemitic conspiracy theories, like one that claimed “Jewish space lasers” were responsible for wildfires in California. Carlson, a longtime conservative commentator, is one of media’s great opportunists; over 20 years, he has evolved from a dorky, bow-tie-wearing supply-sider on cable news to a raucous populist podcaster who rants about the global cultural and economic elite. (In recent years, and especially since being fired by Fox News in 2023, he has embraced a growing array of conspiracy theories, many of which have been criticized as antisemitic.)
Greene, Carlson, Owens, and Jones—all in slightly different ways—have been channeling many of the novel parts of Trump’s politics: populism, conspiracy theorizing, and a profound distrust of political, economic, and cultural elites. They have advanced Trump’s agenda while also filling its holes and fleshing it out—part of a larger effort on the right to translate his rambling, discursive speeches and unhinged tweets into a coherent, populist movement. But in his second term, Trump has all but abandoned the idea that his movement has any intellectual foundation or, for that matter, coherence: MAGA simply means whatever he says it does, even if it directly contradicts past promises. In March, responding to early critics of the Iran war who rightly attacked it as a betrayal of his anti-interventionist promises, Trump responded with three words: “MAGA is Trump.”
They’re not alone on the MAGA right. Steve Bannon, the onetime Trump campaign svengali who helped get him elected in 2016 and briefly served as his senior adviser during his first term, has grown more critical of the war and recently hosted a guest who suggested Trump’s threats might constitute “war crimes” if carried out. Mike Cernovich, another conspiracy-minded member of the far-right, suggested Trump had not only lost touch with the movement but that it was “silly to claim Trump is MAGA” at all thanks in large part to the war. As far as factional battles go, this one doesn’t have a lot of drama, at least in the short-term: None of these figures have anything close to the level of influence Trump does right now.
Trump’s critics know they have little power to shift the president’s course. They have no influence over the war and surely know that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a fantasy. But as his approval rating continues to fall, and the Republicans brace for a shellacking in the November midterm elections that will deprive them of unified control of Washington, these critics can see around the corner—which, frankly, doesn’t require any prescience. Trump is a lame-duck president who is about to become even lamer. So they’re simply getting ahead of the conversation on the right by defining Trump’s second term as a failure—and a betrayal.
You can see an argument starting to form here—that they represent the future of MAGA, not the president, who can no longer be trusted to run anything. They’re setting up a factional battle ahead of the 2028 Republican presidential primary that’s between two groups: Those loyal to MAGA’s “ideals” and those loyal to the president.
The supposed current frontrunners—Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—are both closely tied to Trump. Which means the “true MAGA” lane is up for grabs. Could Carlson seriously be considering a run? Just how crazy would a Candace Owens presidential campaign be? We just might find out, and it will make the 2016 Republican race—otherwise known as the “circus” or “clown car” primary—look like a staid, predictable contest.
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