Candace Owens has delivered the sharpest and most personal response yet to Donald Trump’s public attack on her, telling the president on her podcast that he has lost his own base and advising him to keep quiet about it.
The confrontation reached its most explosive point on April 9, when Trump posted on Truth Social in the early hours attacking four conservative media figures who have been vocal about opposing the Iran war.
Trump named Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Alex Jones and Owens in the same post, calling them “low IQ losers” and “nut jobs” who are “troublemakers” seeking “free and cheap publicity.”
He went further, claiming the group “think it’s great for Iran to have nuclear weapons,” a characterisation all four have publicly rejected.
On Owens specifically, Trump made it personal, bringing up the defamation lawsuit against her by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte over her widely-criticised theories about the French First Lady.
“She’s a crazy person who claims the respected French First Lady is a man,” Trump wrote. “The French First Lady is far more beautiful than Candace. In fact, it’s not even close.”
Owens responded on social media by posting a screenshot of the message with a single line: “It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home.”
On her podcast the following day, she expanded into a direct address to the president, reading what she framed as an open letter.
“Only a fool or someone under the express direction of one could have thought to hit send on what you published on Truth Social last night,” she said.
She went further, questioning Trump’s mental state rather than simply his policy decisions.
“When someone starts attacking your physical appearance and screaming about nuclear weapons in all-caps at 3 AM because you don’t want a third World War, it’s not a policy debate anymore,” she told her audience. “It’s a health concern.”
Her most politically pointed line targeted the loyalty dynamic at the core of the MAGA movement.
“People will not fight beside, behind, or for someone who is fundamentally disloyal,” she said. “If disloyalty and deceit are in your nature, then I highly suggest that you combine them with silence. You can be what you are, but I would advise you to do it quietly, Trump, because MAGA is no longer committed to you, and you know it.”
Owens also went after what she characterised as Trump’s priorities in the final stretch of his political life.
“You made that trade. You chose money above respect, and what an absolute shame that you chose to do that toward the end of your life, because you can’t take money and things and stuff with you when you go, just your soul, and you sold yours, for what? Another gilded ballroom?”
The break between Owens and Trump has been building for over a year.
The first major crack came in April 2025 when she called his targeting of Harvard funding an attack on free speech, saying “I don’t recognize this administration right now.”
The Iran war accelerated the rupture sharply. Following US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in the summer of 2025, Owens appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored and said: “He’s been a chronic disappointment, and I feel embarrassed that I told people to go vote for him. This is not the candidate that I voted for.”
In March 2026, she went further still, urging US troops to reconsider military service given the direction of the conflict.
The April 8 post that appears to have triggered Trump’s overnight attack directly connected the two things Owens has been most vocal about. She posted that Trump was “willing to sacrifice Charlie Kirk and every American life for Greater Israel,” tying Kirk’s assassination in September 2025, which she has linked without firm evidence to Israeli foreign policy, directly to the president’s Iran strategy.
Trump called the 25th Amendment calls from Owens and others an attempt to side with the enemy.
“This is nothing more than an attempt by the anti-war left and the MAGA traitors to stop us from completing America’s mission,” the White House said.
Owens has since moved her podcast operations to a new independent studio and announced plans for what she called a “full exposure” of conservative influencers she says have “sold out” the American worker.
The episode is a data point in a broader pattern of fracture on the right. Carlson, Kelly, Jones, Owens and Marjorie Taylor Greene have all publicly broken with Trump over the Iran war in the past month, representing a slice of the media and political infrastructure that built the modern MAGA coalition, now in open opposition to the president who built it.
