The MAGA Civil War Is Just Getting Started
Source: The New Republic · Bias: Left
Summary
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.
Related Coverage
- 'Not mentally well': MAGA suspects Trump sabotaged by liberals armed with weather machines (Far Left — Raw Story)
- Critics mangle MAGA’s crusade to make the nation 'sad and pathetic' like itself (Left — Alternet.org)
- Trump scammed MAGA — and they 'admire' him for it (Left — Alternet.org)
- A Vietnam Nurse Who Came Home, Helped Get Us to 250 (Center Right — RealClearPolitics - Homepage)
- MAGA reporter declares: 'Uncool' State Fair debacle is the 'end of Trump' (Left — Alternet.org)
- Memo to MAGA: Stop Being Idiots — The Dems Are TELLING US How to Destroy Them! (Right — PJ Media)
- Freedom from Interest Payments Starts Now — 0% APR Until 2028 (Far Right — The Gateway Pundit)
- MAGA defender stuns CNN panel by twisting himself into 'pretzel' for Trump (Left — Alternet.org)
Daily Analysis
Read the full Parallax Pulse for April 10, 2026 — an AI-powered analysis of how Left and Right media covered the biggest stories this day.
More Headlines From April 10, 2026
- Trump claims Iran has 'no cards' in unhinged Truth Social post (Left)
- Voters split on Trump's threats to pull out of NATO over Hormuz fury (Right)
- Trump Says Netanyahu Promises to “Low-Key It” Now (Left)
- WATCH LIVE: Artemis II astronauts return to Earth (Center)
- Vance leads ‘high stakes’ US peace talks, will meet directly with Iranians in Islamabad (Far Right)








