At last, Trump is coming for the crank right

So President Trump did not unleash ‘hell’ on Iran after all. Instead he saved it for the crank right. He might have fired off threats against the ‘crazy bastards’ of Tehran, but he saved his spiciest invective for the ‘crazy’ ex-MAGA mob. He’s turned his guns – his linguistic ones – on Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones and other right-wingers who once liked him but who have now disappeared so far up the fundament of batshit Israelophobia that they think he’s a marionette of the Satanic Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s been glorious to watch.

He took to Truth Social to slam them all. They have one thing in common, he said: ‘Low IQs.’ ‘They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it too!’ Tucker ‘couldn’t even finish college’. ‘Bankrupt Alex Jones’ says ‘the dumbest things’. What’s more, he ‘lost his entire fortune, as he should have, for his horrendous attack on the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, ridiculously claiming it was a hoax’. As for ‘Crazy Candace Owens’, she accuses Brigitte Macron ‘of being a man, when she is not’, Trump writes. The much-maligned ‘post-truth president’ strikes a blow for truth.

They’re ‘NUT JOBS’ with ‘Third Rate Podcasts’, he thunders. Poor Tucker ‘was a broken man when he got fired from Fox’ – ‘perhaps he should see a good psychiatrist!’. He ridicules their America-bashing over the past 40 days of war with Iran. These ‘LOSERS’ are so dumb they think it would be ‘wonderful for Iran, the Number One State Sponsor of Terror, to have a Nuclear Weapon’. He lands some low blows. All these MAGA apostates were ‘thrown off Television [and] lost their Shows’. They’re bitter, he says. ‘The First Lady of France is a far more beautiful woman than Candace… it’s not even close!’ Mean Girls shit and reparatory diplomacy with Élysée Palace all in one tasty jibe? I’m here for it.

There are few more deserving targets of Trump’s ire than these one-time MAGA-heads who now suffer from a deadly strain of internet brain. All have fallen, to varying degrees, into that vortex of conspiracism that swirls around all of us every time we log on. Carlson flirts with the idea that Churchill, not Hitler, was the true bad guy of the 1940s. He interviewed a toothless crackhead who said he shagged Barack Obama. He’s turned so sourly against America, against the West in fact, that he even sings the praises of Saudi Arabia, madly insisting it’s a more morally switched-on place than that modern Gomorrah of NYC.

As for Candace Owens, we could all happily retire if we got a penny every time she barks: ‘JEW!’ She promotes virulently anti-Semitic tomes like The Talmudic Jew by August Rohling. She feverishly hawks the libel that Jews were behind the transatlantic slave trade. She whispers ominously about the ‘secret Jewish gangs’ that do ‘horrific things’ in Hollywood. The less said about Alex Jones the better. Pertinent here, though, is his belief that a ‘Jewish mafia’ is running riot in the US and that the Jewish State is the secret puppetmaster of Hamas, al-Qaeda and ISIS. Oh those wily Zionists.

People will say Trump has only turned on these ‘NUT JOBS’ because they’ve slammed the Iran War. But to me, these individuals sum up what a hot mess of swirling conspiracism the so-called anti-war position has become. There are many principled criticisms one might make of the Iran War. Yet all that the Very Online right serves up is a rancid feast of Israelophobia and West-bashing, where the Islamist death cult in Tehran is reimagined as the poor little victim of those marauding Zionists and their poodles in Washington. That isn’t ‘anti-war’ – it’s the dark, digital animus for You Know Who dolled up in the thin finery of pacifism.

This brings us to the most striking part of Trump’s outburst against the turncoat rightists. He clocks that, ‘for the first time in their lives’, they are getting ‘positive press’ from ‘Fake News CNN, The Failing New York Times, and all of the other Radical Left “News” Organisations’. He’s dead right. Many of us have noticed this. That almost overnight, the likes of Tucker Carlson have gone from being moral untouchables in the eyes of the woke left to being interesting commentators whose video clips can now be safely shared. Some on the Very Online left are even sharing clips of ‘Crazy Candace Owens’ and literal nut job Alex Jones.

Isn’t that fascinating, that as Trump turns against fruitcake right-wingers, sections of the liberal and left establishment start to warm to them? They called Trump ‘the new Hitler’ for years, yet now they nod along to Tucker ‘Was Churchill The Bad Guy?’ Carlson, and in some cases even Candace ‘THE JEWS’ Owens. Nothing better confirms the curdling of anti-war politics into a morass of infantile anti-Western cynicism than this coming together of the digital right and the digital left around the ugly idea that the Jewish State is leading the witless West by the nose into war after war after war.

It’s high time Trump cut loose these ‘LOSERS’. Maybe it’s because I once watched the left be consumed by insane ideologies that I feel an affinity with Trump’s efforts to shave these monstrous carbuncles off the ship called MAGA. Indeed, the moral overlap between the post-class left and the post-reason right is undeniable now. Both have lost the plot on gender, with Owens insisting Brigitte Macron is a fella and the left saying the 6’2” dick in a dress is a woman. Both giddily rewrite history, with a special distaste for Churchill. Both are turning Islamo-sympathetic, from Carlson’s fanboying over the tyrants of Riyadh to the left’s love of Hamas and Hezbollah. And both have landed, like every other conspiratorially minded person before them, on the idea that the Jews are behind everything. Oh, I’m sorry – the Jewish State. Totally different. Not the same thing at all. Oh no.

Trump’s blasting of the ‘NUTJOBS’ is more than a bitch-fest. It’s more than a fraying of old friendships. It’s a quite valiant effort to rescue populism from conspiracism, to draw a bright line between the good, normal folk who voted for him in their millions and these cliques of influencers who talk shit for a living. Others – not least the left and liberals – might learn a thing or two from this attempt to liberate a movement from its idiot outgrowths.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.