‘Our MAGA Civil War Is Spreading’
MAGA’s divide widens, Bari Weiss spikes a report on Trump sending people to CECOT, and the latest on the Epstein files.
On this day in 2010, former President Barack Obama signed into law a repeal of the homophobic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, ending a 17-year ban on gay people openly serving in the US military.
Good morning, ‘First Draft’ enthusiasts! It’s Swin again, filling in for Mehdi. Before we get to today’s news, I wanted to flag a video that I recently stumbled across; it fascinated me (a mediocre college student and creative-writing major) and told me things I probably should have already known: “What People Get Wrong About Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.”
Now let’s get started… In today’s ‘First Draft,’ cracks in the MAGA movement are on full display, Bari Weiss spikes a ‘60 Minutes’ story about one of Donald Trump’s most heinous acts, the Trump administration quietly deletes an incriminating photo from the Epstein files release, and Trump turns the US into a pirate nation.
MAGA Eats Itself
Here’s yet another small but petrifying indicator of how disastrously f***ed we are right now: I keep hearing from Trump administration officials about how much of a problem for them that Candace Owens has become.
“Our MAGA civil war is spreading,” one senior Trump administration appointee, who, like other sources, requests anonymity to speak candidly, tells me.
In the confines of their group chats and other private conversations, according to sources with direct knowledge of the situation, conservative influencers and their influential allies in MAGAville and Trump’s government have brainstormed various ways to neutralize the intra-movement threat from Owens, with many coming up empty in recent weeks. Others earnestly wonder to each other if she and her ilk will fracture the MAGA movement in a meaningful way – or hobble unity as the GOP faces an uphill battle in next year’s critical midterms.
“I have gotten so many texts asking: What are you guys gonna do about Candace Owens?” another senior Trump administration official says. “What can I do? Delete the Internet?”
In a sane political environment, the popular far-right YouTuber – who rose to MAGA-celebrity as a hardcore Trump ally and has since lashed out at the president as a disappointment – would not be capable of alarming significant chunks of the Republican Party elite. In the alt-universe, an independent media figure as deliriously conspiracy-theory-infected as Owens would get her views and her clicks, but she would not cause heavy hitters in the movement or government to sweat or engage in carefully manicured damage control.
But this is the second era of President Donald J. Trump, where far-right hysteria and conspiracy theories aren’t a fringe inconvenience to the national honchos.