In terms of my relationship with Donald Trump, I have been one of his most vocal supporters all throughout his presidency.
He was a very big piece of my transformation from the Left to the Right. He’s a big piece of my personal story and my personal awakening.
And it was also Trump who severed my belief in the mainstream media, because they were not honest in their assessments of him.
I was never going to be a person who voted for Trump, until the media went very radical. And in 2016, rather than saying he wasn’t qualified, they said he was a rapist and a sexist and a misogynist. And for me, that seemed like an overkill. So I thought to myself, OK, he can’t magically be all of these things. He’s been in the public sphere for a very long time.
I began to look beneath the surface and was shocked at what I found. I discovered that the mainstream media does routinely lie to us — in fact they’re basically always lying to us to protect their own interests.
I was a vocal supporter of Trump and I was hopeful that black America could see through the lies of the mainstream media. Ultimately, Blexit then came out of that.
So, I’m very grateful for Donald Trump and that he became president of the United States.
But something toward the end of his presidency shifted. It wasn’t necessarily his fault, either.
As the COVID scam began taking over the entire world, I was an early vocal critic.
I was the first one to speak on it consistently. In the beginning, I was the only one who thought there was something fishy about the lockdown. I was a vocal critic of Trump and said that it was the wrong move for him, as a sitting president, to go through with a federal shutdown.
When I said that, other prominent conservative friends messaged me saying, ‘I really agree with you on this, but, you know, we have to stand by Trump’s side at this time.’
Initially, I thought to myself, I agree with that sentiment. I agree that when one of us goes through something, it is good for us to be silent and to let it pass, because it’s not easy being in the public space, especially as Donald Trump was as the president of the United States.
Then, another side of me was like, wait a minute, I’m ‘America first.’ And that’s why I decided to speak out early. Because the implications were that if Trump shut down the government for two weeks — if it was a Republican president who did that first — then, when the Left came into power, they would always be able to look back and say, ‘well, you guys did it first.’
So now it is totally acceptable for the federal government to assume the power and the right to shut down businesses. I do not believe that the federal government — or any government — by the way, ever has the right to shut down our businesses and say you don’t have a right to earn a living.
I’m just so fundamentally opposed to that. And I spoke out against it.
Then I began speaking out against the vaccines. My stance has been very clear on vaccines from the beginning. I am not vaccinated against COVID. My children are not vaccinated at all. I made myself an enemy of the vaccine campaign.
Fast forward to my opportunity to sit down with Trump in 2021, and talk to him on camera about the vaccine. I wanted to see exactly what he was thinking.
Looking back on that interview now, basically everything he said — and maybe he wasn’t aware — was untrue. It was untrue to say that it was an effective vaccine. I understand he had some pride since he was the person who rushed to get a vaccine. But it wasn’t true. And he was not listening to the sentiments of his own base. The base felt like the vaccine was rushed. We didn’t know whether or not the vaccine worked. We now know that it didn’t work at all, and it doesn’t make you immune.
So why couldn’t Trump understand how we’re feeling about Big Pharma taking over our country? Instead, he took an opportunity to talk about how great it was that he gave us the vaccines.
So naturally, when this interview dropped, the regime media took a hold of it and said, ‘Ha, even Trump says, go get your vaccine.’ Which is exactly what his base feared.
When the regime media seized on this moment, it went viral. I was inundated with messages from people essentially saying to me, ‘Candace, Trump has turned his back on us. Trump is now shilling for Big Pharma. He’s sold us out.’
And me, being faithful to Trump, decided to do an Instagram Live to defend him and explain to them my honest assessment about this interview.
Because the truth is, I do not think that Trump sold out his base for vaccines, that’s a ridiculous assessment.
No, I believe it’s something else. People over the age of 60 are from a different time. They tend to believe all vaccines are good, no matter how many they get. So, they all just went and got their COVID vaccines.
As I said on Instagram Live, this is where the media successfully campaigns to that generation.
Since Donald Trump is in his 70s, I am convinced he does not get his information from Reddit. I know for a fact that there are people on his team that bring him the news headlines in the morning, which is totally normal for a sitting president.
So that’s why you would see so many tweets of him hitting back at The New York Times and The Washington Post. He sees the headlines and he responds to the headlines — live. Nothing wrong with that … except there was something wrong with it.
Apparently, Trump actually got upset with me because — and here’s the richest irony — The Daily Beast ran a headline regarding that Instagram Live post. And the headline was: “Candace Owen: Trump Is Pro-VAX Because He’s ‘Too Old’ To Understand The Internet”.
I never once called Trump ‘too old.’ I never once said that Trump could not understand the internet. And yet somehow he got that information and believed it to be true.
I’m telling you this personal story, because I think it’s something that made me, for the first time, question him as a person.
So you have an individual who has spent years defending you. And that individual gave you a completely kind and fair interview. In that interview you said something that your base didn’t like and you somehow transform that into something that I did wrong.
That’s unacceptable. And that is not being a leader. That is not owning things that you did wrong, that is not owning that you misunderstood something about your base.
But all of this made me question if he was becoming too angry. Why? When Trump went on the campaign trail for the election in 2016, he was having fun. He was naming people, giving them fun names, enjoying the base, and having a good time.
Even in 2020 you could feel the energy was electric. I think after the 2020 election, and because of the shock of all the things that happened and the sinking realization that we might be actually losing our country, it pushed him into an angry space.
Now it seems he doesn’t trust anybody. He’s almost likely to believe that everybody’s trying to turn their back on him. How could you suffer a defeat knowing in your heart that a lot of things were wrong? So, he has every right to be angry. But if you stay at a place of anger, you’re no longer looking and assessing things in a good way because you’re holding on to this vengeful spirit. That is the question I’ve had with Trump.
I also think the MAGA movement is reflecting Trump. There is a trepidation I’m sensing in Trump, evidenced by him taking a random swing at Ron DeSantis last week. I don’t think it was helpful, even though DeSantis won Florida handily. He’s not running against DeSantis right now.
I am not at all under any impression that Trump can’t win in 2024.
No, what I am saying is that Trump needs to take a good look in the mirror. He needs to take a good look around the room and he needs to read the room accurately. He needs to take a look at those who are inspiring this paranoia and making him believe that everyone is out to get him, including his friends.
And he needs to exercise a tiny bit more humility when he gets something wrong. Trump is not perfect. I’m not perfect. I get things wrong. I edit. I say, ‘Thank you guys for bringing me this new information, I hadn’t realized that.’
And there’s still a period where he could transform. But I think the results of last night’s election, which are still coming in, show that we aren’t sure. He’s not sure and therefore we aren’t sure.
