“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.
