Right-Wing Media Starts Treating Trump Like a Lame Duck
The president isn’t ruling out a third term. But some in the MAGA media ecosystem are looking beyond him.
Right-wing media is moving on from Trump
Donald Trump proved his doubters wrong Tuesday by appearing at a press conference to demonstrate that he is still, in fact, alive.
But while the debate over whether the president has a pulse was firmly settled, a more consequential fight over his future relevance has been picking up steam. And it’s being waged most prominently in Austin, Texas, where InfoWars chief Alex Jones and his employee and surrogate son Owen Shroyer have turned on each other over how much their far-right, conspiracy-addled outlet should align itself with Trump.
The immediate cause of the surprising feud was Jones’s habit of interrupting Shroyer’s own show, War Room, and telling him what to cover. Last week, Jones stormed onto the set once again to loom over Shroyer and tell him, essentially, to cheer up about the state of the country under Trump.
The clip makes for uncomfortable viewing. Shroyer, probably InfoWars’s most famous host after Jones, looks at his boss like a barely tolerated drunk uncle. Bizarrely, as the pair glowered at each other, InfoWars production staff played videos on the backdrop behind them that included footage of dams exploding and an attractive Russian woman in heels getting stuck in the mud. That last video was apparently cribbed from YouTube account “Russian Girls Stuck,” which caters to some, shall we say, specific adult tastes.
The tension becomes too much and Shroyer storms off the set, after which Jones finishes the show and lies to the audience that Shroyer had a “medical emergency.”
On Monday, Shroyer announced that he was quitting InfoWars and launching his own online show. That set off a wave of the kind of explosions we’ve come to expect from Jones, who on Tuesday compared Shroyer to an ungrateful baby and himself to the mythical Roman wolf on which Romulus and Remus suckled. The quotes are equal parts vivid, disturbing, and remarkable: