Candace Owens and Jessica Reed Kraus Are In A Massive MAGA World Spat—And the Party Fissures Are Showing

When even Donald Trump’s loyal footsoldiers aren’t obediently falling into line, pay attention. Two of MAGA’s most strident non-elected voices, Candace Owens and Jessica Reed Kraus, are at one another’s online throats over what appears to be some she said-she said nonsense, firing off dozens of Instagram Stories apiece that can be summed up as “how dare she.” But the context is not necessarily important. What they reveal to outsiders are the first visible cracks in the moral desert of the MAGA base,.

And it appears to be right on schedule: In late February, Democratic strategist James Carville predicted a “massive collapse” within MAGA factions, “particularly in public opinion.”

“It’s gonna be easy pickings here in six weeks. Just lay back,” he said. “It’s collapsing right now, we’re in the midst of a collapse.”

Trump’s approval ratings are slightly better than they were at this point during his first term, but are still underwater, and there isn’t a single issue that Americans think he’s doing well on. Elon Musk’s name is mud, and people are so mad at him that they’re putting dog feces on strangers’ Teslas. Hell, even Trump’s top military and intelligence brass are dropping the bag, accidentally inviting the editor in chief of The Atlantic to their group chat about bombing Yemen. These dudes have shown that they can’t be trusted to keep a Venmo transaction private.

Now, the head cheerleader and the student body president (I don’t know who’s who in this scenario) are fighting and the vibe in the cafeteria getting awkward.

Kraus, you’ll recall, is a mommy blogger-turned-self-described “independent media making politics fun again,” who frequently shares political “reporting” in the form of Instagram Stories of herself watching network news from a hotel bed, or begging favors for access to events like the confirmation hearings for her number one boy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Owens, meanwhile, is a far-right commentator formerly of the ultra-conservative Daily Wire. She now hosts a podcast and posts many, many Instagram Stories. She is still friends with Kanye West and will make sure that you know that.

Both Kraus and Owens discuss not just politics in their content, but also fancy themselves investigative journalists with a special interest in celebrity gossip and lawsuits. This appears to be where the public e-screaming match began, with Kraus insisting, essentially, that Owens copied her by repeatedly talking about the ongoing Justin Baldoni/Blake Lively legal mess. (Vanity Fair has verified that conservatives especially love this particular Hollywood saga.)

In a March 22 substack newsletter, Kraus began by bemoaning male dominance in media. She declared her younger self “enchanted” by “clever and intuitive women telling the story behind the story, with prose sharp enough to cut glass.” She lashed out at several male conservative commentators by name and by gesture, and even accused Tucker Carlson of being “on a weird bender.”

Then she pivoted to calling out the women who she deems not-great for a new set of reasons, attempting to paint herself as a champion for both female newsmakers and largely female audiences and their desires, while also slamming her own cohort of female news voices and victim-shaming women like Harvey Weinstein’s accusers. Here’s where she invokes Owens:

“Candace Owens, too, seems to be floundering—re-examining #MeToo through the Weinstein lens as if she just discovered politicized trials. I tried to watch, but I had to turn it off,” Kraus wrote. “Nothing will make me tune into Harvey again. I lived through that trial. No one cared then—when it was actually happening. Because Hollywood is seeded by perversities and morally handicapped people in power. This isn’t news. It’s the status quo. Always has been. The final take was that he was as gross as the victims who showed up to testify after decades of seeking him out in hotel rooms to ‘pitch a script’ in bathrobes next to champagne buckets at midnight.”

Megyn Kelly catches strays in Kraus’s missive too, pissing her off by virtue of, apparently, not being Here For The Right Reasons. There is one person who can speak to a female audience, and that is Kraus.

Days after dousing herself in media haterade, in a newsletter sent March 26, Kraus congratulates “two of my favorite men in the business”—Mark Halperin and former Kennedy aide Link Lauren—on the announcement that they were joining Kelly’s media venture. It appears to be an earnest high-five.

Owens, meanwhile, took offense to Kraus’s burns. The Insta-wars commence. Owens posts text-only slides saying that all of Kraus’s friends hate her. Kraus posts back saying, oops, sorry, couldn’t hear you, too busy touring the White House. Owens responds by saying, what was that, couldn’t hear you, too busy being pregnant and parenting my children. Who’s the better conservative? Who’s the better mother? Who’s winning? Who cares?

Both Kraus and Owens are mothers. Both use that status as a shield against potential criticism, within and without the MAGA faction. Have something to say? You must hate women and not value mothers. That’s one thing they agree on. Neither influencer immediately responded to Vanity Fair.

Between the entertaining—if absolutely mystifying—infighting amongst MAGA’s citizen boosters, Kraus openly questioning how the Signal debacle should have been handled, seeming to vacillate between “nbd” and “decidedly bd,” Owens offering her hot takes on the newly declassified JFK assassination files, and more, there’s plenty of extracurricular gossip and ideological tug-of-wars to distract from that whole making-great-happen thing, let alone again.

Yes, it’s a petty skirmish between the two, but it’s also a portent of the fracturing of MAGA, personal attacks chipping away at the already-flimsy foundation of Trump’s base. As Carville said, they’ll do the work of tearing one another down.