The MAGA Civil War Is Just Getting Started
Who’s the biggest nut job in MAGA? That question pretty much sums up the civil war that has broken out between Donald Trump and a growing number of right-wing influencers, media personalities, and other former loyalists who have criticized the president over his war on Iran—and sometimes questioned his mental state to boot.
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.” The post was shrugged off by its targets. “It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home,” Owens replied.
It’s not 2016 anymore. It’s not even 2024. Trump is weak, and opportunists on the right are betting against his administration. That hardly seems like a dicey position, given the Iran war, high gas prices, persistent inflation, and the increasingly widespread belief that the president has lost touch with reality. They’re risking Trump’s ire now because they think it’s a better long-term bet, one that will position them to take the reins of MAGA in the near future.
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.)
Owens’s bloom has faded a bit after a sharp turn toward conspiracy theorizing in recent years, especially regarding the murder of Charlie Kirk—for which she blames Israel, a claim in line with many other antisemitic theories she espouses. Jones, a longtime radio host (of InfoWars) whose prominence predates Trump’s political career, will seemingly embrace any conspiracy theory, no matter how vile. He recently declared bankruptcy after being found liable for $1.4 billion in damages for claiming that the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting were “crisis actors” working on behalf of the U.S. government, which intended to use their tragic deaths as a pretext for seizing firearms from law-abiding citizens. (He is also a raving antisemite.)
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.”
Nowhere is this more apparent than on the war, where a president who promised to end stupid, costly foreign interventions is bogged down in one. Carlson went as far as to urge U.S. military figures to disobey orders that could kill Iranian civilians: “Now it’s time to say ‘no, absolutely not,’ and say it directly to the president, ‘no,’” he said in a recent episode of his podcast, where he described Trump’s threats against Iranians as “evil.” Greene used the same word and went even further, tweeting, “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization.” (The Twenty-Fifth Amendment allows for the removal of a president who “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”) Jones also called for Trump’s removal, saying his threats were “the definition of genocide.”
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.
But what if that changes? And what if Iran is the thing that brings that shift about? The growing MAGA divide over the war points to a significant long-term problem on the right: Without Donald Trump, what is MAGA? For that matter, what is the Republican Party? MAGA arguably means less than it ever has before, which suggests that the fight over the party’s future will not just be a post-Trump succession plan but a contentious, bitter, and confusing existential battle over its identity.
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.
Indeed, a sense of betrayal runs through each of their statements: These critics thought they were building a movement built on a shared set of convictions, but Trump was building one based on himself. “Well, President Trump came out on Truth Social and attacked myself and all the original MAGA supporters today,” Jones said in a video. “I supported the old Trump who got so many good things done … I just feel sorry for him and pray that God touches his heart and soul, and free him from the demonic influences that he’s under.” Carlson, meanwhile, said he still “loves” the president—perhaps somewhat ironically—but that he “feels sorry” for him. “The Israelis have him in a hammerlock.”
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.