A major public rift has opened at the highest levels of U.S. conservatism, as former and current President Donald Trump launched a scathing verbal attack on four prominent right-wing commentators who have broken with him over his administration’s joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran. In a lengthy Thursday post on his Truth Social platform, Trump dismissed the critics, all past supporters who helped power his 2024 election victory, as “stupid people” that “nobody cares about” — an odd line of attack that came alongside a 372-word takedown that dedicated individual criticism to each figure. The targets included two ex-Fox News primetime hosts, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, plus far-right media personalities Alex Jones and Candace Owens. All four were key parts of Trump’s outreach strategy to right-wing podcasters and social media influencers during his 2024 presidential run, and all previously backed his political career openly. But in his post, Trump insisted their current views have drifted so far from his “Make America Great Again” movement that they no longer belong in the coalition. “They’re not MAGA, they’re losers,” he wrote, adding that he could win their support at any time if he chose, but refuses to return their calls because he is occupied with pressing domestic and global policy matters. Tucker Carlson, the highest-rated cable news host in the U.S. before his 2023 exit from Fox News, has built a massive new audience on X (formerly Twitter) since leaving the network, where he has pushed a populist conservative agenda that has increasingly diverged from Trump’s. A vocal opponent of the Iran war from its earliest days, Carlson escalated his criticism recently, calling a profanity-laced Easter Sunday message Trump sent to Iran “vile on every level” and labeling Trump’s open threats to strike Iranian civilian energy and transportation infrastructure a clear war crime. Responding to Trump’s attack, Carlson said he still held affection for the president but felt deep sympathy for his current state. He also echoed a growing narrative among anti-war conservatives that Trump’s decision to launch the conflict stemmed from outsized influence from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, claiming “The Israelis have him in a hammerlock.” Candace Owens, another of the targeted commentators who recently made unsubstantiated claims that conservative figure Charlie Kirk was assassinated last year over his anti-Israel positions, offered an even more blunt rebuke of Trump. “It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home,” she wrote on social media. Former Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was referenced in passing in Trump’s post, also hit back publicly, echoing the growing split within conservative ranks. “President Trump has gone mad as he wages war against Iran, a broken campaign promise,” she wrote on X, adding “I fought alongside Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens and Alex Jones to help get Trump elected. We never changed. Trump did.” Greene, who dramatically split with Trump last year over what she called his failure to disclose details of government files connected to the late Jeffrey Epstein, resigned her congressional seat in January and has since ramped up her public criticism of the administration. The public break between Trump and these high-profile conservatives lays bare growing fissures in the president’s conservative base that have emerged since the launch of the Iran conflict. The split comes at a critical moment for the administration: a fragile two-week ceasefire is currently in place between U.S. forces and Iran, and Vice President JD Vance is set to lead a U.S. delegation to Pakistan for direct, face-to-face negotiations with Iranian representatives this Saturday. Despite the ongoing ceasefire, Trump told the New York Post on Friday that the U.S. military is currently rearming and resupplying to prepare for a resumption of hostilities if negotiations fail. Should talks collapse and conflict resume, political analysts expect internal opposition to the war within Trump’s own party will grow, with more conservative figures likely to join the open criticism already led by Carlson, Greene and the other targeted commentators.
Trump’s blunt attack on former allies exposes splintered MAGA coalition
