Crazy

Apparently in the wake of Trump's post calling out Tucker, Megyn, Candace, and Alex, commentators are beginning to weigh in on what those people are actually saying. Rich Lowry at The National Review, which has never been especially favorable to Trump, has the following to say in the video embedded above:

I think first factor is the isolationist Right, overlap with a lot of these people, thought they controlled Donald Trump. They thought Trump was an isolationist the way they are isolationists. And it was never true, he was never an isolationist, and also, in his second term, he's actually been hyperactive in terms of foreign policy. So this led to extreme disappointment, which led on the one hand to a massive reevaluation of Donald Trump. Now yes, Donald Trump made wild threats in the runup to the cease fire with Iran. Are we really shocked by that? Do we not remember fire and fury with North Korea in the first term? And also, he dropped an f-bomb in that post on Easter morning. Bad! Shouldn't have done it! But also, we're shocked? We think he's polite in all his communications and observes all of the norms? No!

. . . Now, Tucker Carlson sounds like a member of the Committee to Save the World during the first term. This was the establishment type that considered Trump a danger and thought he had to be controlled. . . . Here he was, calling on people around Trump to get the nuclear codes and stop potential nuclear conflict. [inserts clip of Carlson] Now, there's another way to deal with disappointment with Trump, not mutually exclusive to the one we just talked about, which is to believe he's being controlled by shadowy forces that happen to be Jews. . . . This is why it's such a key part of the world view of a Tucker Carlson, or of Candace Owens, that the United States government killed JFK.

. . . And Tucker Carolson sees these kinds of conspiracies everywhere, right? The USS Liberty, the spy ship that was accidentally and tragically shot up by Israeli forces during the Six Day War, was a deliberate attack, and the US government was in on it and is still covering it up. Chemtrails, the US government is using commercial aviation to spread these chemicals in the atmosphere for dastardly reasons. The government might be covering up the real killer of Charlie Kirk. . . .

So Tucker Carlson is suggesting Donald Trump might be part of some Satanic project. Now, what country around the world considers the United Ststes the Great Satan? Right? Iran. And now you put on top of this that a lot of these people think Israel is the main problem in the Middle East and perhaps in the international system broadly, and here, our domestic politics as well.

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse also weighed in following Trump's post, specifically referencing Alex Jones:

When President Trump responded to the goofball diatribe of Alex Jones, what he apparently was referencing was a segment Jones put out on his podcast when he first requested the administration to intervene and use the 25th amendment to remove Trump. Mr. Jones followed that call for the 25th amendment, by saying he wanted administration officials to conduct a soft-coup against the President of the United States, because Trump wasn’t following his advice.

He then embedded this clip from Jones's podcast:

🚨 Alex Jones and Robert Barnes call for an internal coup of President Trump.

Jones "How do we 25th amendment his ass?"

Barnes "Tackle Trump and let him pretend he is President"

These are the people telling you you're not America First 🤡 pic.twitter.com/vjJO553vj5

— J (@JayTC53) April 7, 2026

Robert Barnes, who as I've noted frequently appears on these Woke Right podcasts, gives his inchoate solution to the obstacles posed by the 25th Amendment:

Tackle Trump and let him pretend he's president, and publicly report that he's going through a health issue, and they have to take over.

In other words. just don't bother following the 25th Amendment, don't involve the cabinet and Congress, just lock him up and proceed. Sundance concludes,

Folks, these characters are not psychologically stable people. This is a level of weird only evident now because Trump decided to address it.

But let's look a little farther into Candace Owens and her allegations against the Macrons. According to a defamation suit filed against Owens by the Macrons,

These outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions included that Mrs. Macron was born a man, stole another person’s [her brother] identity, and transitioned to become Brigitte; Mrs. Macron and President Macron are blood relatives committing incest; President Macron was chosen to be the President of France as part of the CIA-operated MKUltra program or a similar mind-control program; and Mrs. Macron and President Macron are committing forgery, fraud, and abuses of power to conceal these secrets.

. . . she makes absurd claims that Mrs. Macron (as Jean-Michel) participated in the Stanford Prison Experiment, which Owens claims is somehow linked to her later “transition.” Owens has also gone so far as to suggest that the Macrons are involved in an alleged conspiracy to distract Owens from investigating Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

I think Rich Lowry's explanation is the most generous: some people, even given what Trump revealed about himself in his first term, somehow sincerely thought he'd always agreed with them, not necessarily just in foreign policy, but over a whole range of other issues. But Trump has been remarkably consistent in his views on Iran, dating back to before he entered politics. These people are sincere, if mistaken, but they need to be careful not to be drawn into the craziness. I suspect Edward Feser is in this group.

There's a second group that's disappointed, assorted conspiracy theorists like Candace Owens, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, and Michael "Lionel" LeBron, who have always believed in one or another widely held conspiracy theory, and they apparently thought Trump believed in those theories as well. Trump has turned out to be more grounded and hard-headed than they thought.

A separate issue is Trump as Jacksonian. I think I must have missed school the day they taught Andrew Jackson in history class -- they maybe might have mentioned the Battle of New Orleans and the Bank of the United States, but for whatever reason, they leave out the business of him invading and seizing Florida without authorization in 1818. Walter Russell Mead promoted the parlor version of Andrew Jackson when he called Dubya, a Yale Bonesman, a "Jacksonian". Dubya would have been on the board of directors of the Bank of the United States. Part of the Trump problem is Walter Russell Mead's fantasy of Andrew Jackson.

Andrew Jackson probably said the f-word on Easter morning himself, just he didn't do it on Truth Social. Nobody seems to have thought very hard about what "Jacksonian" really means. I'm sure Trump hasn't, because he's never needed to. That's at the heart of the bigger problem.