President Donald Trump took to Truth Social on Friday to deliver his bluntest public rebuke yet of conservative commentator Candace Owens, calling her claims about French First Lady Brigitte Macron "despicable" and sharing a mocked-up Time magazine cover labeling Owens "Vile Person of the Year." The post marks the latest, and most personal, volley in a dispute that has widened from a policy disagreement over Iran into a full-blown public rupture between the president and one of the right's most visible media personalities.
Trump wrote that Owens' "stock, which was never very high, has fallen a long way." In a separate post, he called her claims about Macron baseless and sided explicitly with the French first couple, who filed a 218-page defamation lawsuit against Owens in Delaware on July 23, 2025.
The dispute matters because it exposes a real fault line on the American right, not over ideology in the abstract, but over the basic question of whether prominent conservative voices will be held to the same standards of factual accuracy they demand of the left. Owens has spent months pushing the claim that Brigitte Macron was born male, a conspiracy theory that originated with a French blogger named Natacha Rey. The Macrons say they gave Owens repeated opportunities to retract. She refused. Now a court will sort it out.
The president's Friday posts went well beyond a generic brush-off. The Daily Mail reported that Trump shared an image of the mocked-up Time cover bearing an unflattering photo of Owens, with the tagline "0% fact check ratio on all credible fact checking sites." In the accompanying text, he wrote:
"Her attack on the First Lady of France is despicable. I believe, in this case, without verification, she is an extremely low IQ individual!"
A second post went further still, referring to Owens as "Crazy" and asserting that Brigitte Macron "is not" a man. Trump expressed hope that the Macrons "will hopefully win lots of money in the ongoing lawsuit." He then added a personal comparison:
"Actually, to me, the First Lady of France is a far more beautiful woman than Candace, in fact, it's not even close!"
The Daily Mail said it reached out to Owens, the White House, and the Macrons for comment. No responses were reported.
The legal backdrop is substantial. French President Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte Macron filed their 218-page complaint in Delaware, seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. A statement shared with the Daily Mail described Owens' conduct in sharp terms, saying she had "promoted a preposterous narrative about the Macrons, including incendiary and verifiably false accusations of identity theft, incest, violent crimes, and mind control."
The couple said in their statement that they had exhausted other options before going to court:
"Because Ms Owens systematically reaffirmed these falsehoods in response to each of our attorneys' repeated requests for a retraction, we ultimately concluded that referring the matter to a court of law was the only remaining avenue for remedy."
They added that Owens' "campaign of defamation was plainly designed to harass and cause pain to us and our families and to garner attention and notoriety." Rather than back down, Owens announced in September of last year that the lawsuit would be escalated so that Macron undergoes what she called a "third-party examination", a move that doubled down on the underlying conspiracy claim rather than engaging with the legal substance.
The president's willingness to side publicly with the Macrons against a figure who was once a prominent Trump ally is itself telling. Trump has shown repeatedly that he prizes loyalty, but he also prizes discipline, and Owens' conduct over the past year appears to have crossed a line the president was no longer willing to ignore.
The Owens feud did not start with Brigitte Macron. The relationship between Trump and Owens soured over the past year, driven in large part by Owens' criticism of the president's handling of the situation with Iran. That dispute pulled in some of the biggest names in right-wing media.
Trump used a lengthy Truth Social post to denounce not just Owens but also Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Alex Jones after they criticized the Iran conflict. The New York Post reported that Trump argued these commentators were not representative of MAGA and were motivated by publicity rather than principle. "MAGA is about WINNING and STRENGTH in not allowing Iran to have Nuclear Weapons," Trump wrote.
The Iran backdrop is important context. Trump had declared the Iran conflict "very close to over" and announced a cease-fire to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But as National Review noted, the results were mixed: Hezbollah and Israel were still exchanging fire two days after the announcement, traffic through the Strait remained minimal, and Trump himself complained on Truth Social that "Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have!"
That frustration with the cease-fire's slow progress coincided with the media criticism from Carlson, Kelly, Owens, and Jones, and Trump responded with force. Newsmax reported that the dispute underscored a divide on the political right over Iran that could pose a risk for Republicans heading into the November midterm elections.
The president's earlier diplomatic moves on Iran, including pulling envoys from a Pakistan trip and pressing Tehran to negotiate directly, reflected a broader strategy of applying maximum pressure while keeping channels open. The conservative media backlash complicated that effort by giving opponents a narrative of internal GOP fracture.
Owens, 36, did not simply disagree with the president on Iran and leave it there. Just days before Trump's Friday broadside, she questioned on her show whether the president was "gay", a remark reported by Mediaite. She also said she was "embarrassed" to have supported him. Earlier, she had claimed Trump called her personally to ask her to stop targeting Brigitte Macron, a claim she used not as a reason to comply but as a talking point.
On the Macron front, Owens told her millions of social media followers that she had conducted a "thorough investigation" into claims about Brigitte Macron's identity, claims the Macrons' legal filing describes as fabricated. Owens cited the French blogger Natacha Rey as the origin of the allegations, then built an extended media campaign around them, including references to Macron "when he was a man."
The pattern is worth examining. Owens took a fringe conspiracy theory, amplified it to a massive audience, refused multiple retraction requests from the Macrons' attorneys, and then escalated by demanding a physical examination of the French first lady. When the lawsuit arrived, she escalated further. When Trump weighed in against her, she escalated again by questioning his sexuality on air.
That trajectory illustrates something broader about the incentive structure in political media. Owens built her brand on confrontation and contrarianism. Those instincts served her well when the targets were progressive institutions and left-wing orthodoxy. But the same instincts, unchecked by factual discipline, led her into a legal and public-relations position that even her most prominent former ally now calls "despicable."
Conservative media is not a monolith, and disagreement is healthy. The right benefits when its commentators push back on policy, challenge assumptions, and hold leaders accountable. That is different from what happened here. Owens did not challenge a policy or expose a failure. She promoted a conspiracy theory about a foreign head of state's wife, refused to back down when confronted with its falsehood, and then turned her fire on the president himself when he objected.
Trump's response, while characteristically blunt, reflects a reasonable position: public figures on the right should not be in the business of spreading claims that cannot withstand basic scrutiny. The president has shown a willingness to call out conduct he finds unacceptable regardless of partisan affiliation. In this case, the target happened to be someone who once stood firmly in his corner.
The Macrons' lawsuit will proceed through the courts. It is a 218-page filing with specific allegations of defamation, and it seeks real damages. Owens will have every opportunity to mount a defense. But the fact that a sitting U.S. president publicly sided with the plaintiffs against a member of his own media ecosystem tells you how far this has gone.
The administration's broader governing agenda, from domestic policy initiatives to foreign affairs, moves forward regardless of media feuds. But the Owens episode is a reminder that credibility, once squandered, is not easily rebuilt.
Conspiracy theories are the left's accusation against the right. When a prominent conservative commentator makes the accusation stick, the damage falls on everyone who shares a platform with her, and the people who pay the price are the millions of right-of-center Americans who deserve better from the voices that claim to speak for them.
