Candace Owens claims Trump warned her off specious Brigitte Macron trans claim: ‘I've seen her up close'
Speaking with Tucker Carlson on his podcast, Owens, who is being sued by the Macrons for pursuing the story — which is based on a debunked conspiracy theory — said she was called by Trump in February, shortly after French President Emmanuel Macron visited the White House.
Owens said the initial request to stop talking about the French first lady came from someone 'pretty high up' in the White House. She said she found the demand insulting and refused to comply.
Trump later phoned Owens directly about the issue, she told Carlson, saying that the president told her Macron had pulled him aside to ask if he knew Owens. Owens said she was shocked by the request and stated that Trump had been confused as to why he was being asked to intervene.
'Emmanuel Macron personally flew to D.C. and asked Trump to ask me to shut up, to just stop speaking about his wife,' she told Carlson.
'He sounded very confused,' she claimed of Trump. 'He said he was very confused when the leader of France took him aside during negotiations for Ukraine and Russia to inquire about whether or not he knew Candace Owens.'
Owens first spoke about the call from the president on her podcast, Becoming Brigitte, an eight-part documentary-style production about France's first lady. She said that Trump was very flattering toward her.
'You must be a very powerful person, Candace,' Owens said Trump had told her, before adding that her claims were distressing to Macron's wife.
'She's old and this is really, really impacting her,' she said the president had said.
Trump then added: 'I saw her up close and she looks like a woman to me, I had dinner with her at the top of the Eiffel Tower.'
Owens said she replied: 'Respectfully, Mr. President, it's not my fault that he married somebody with a penis,' repeating the type of false claim that has drawn the ire of the Macrons.
Trump allegedly countered that they were working to end the war in Ukraine, and it would be helpful if she stopped questioning the gender of Macron's wife.
Owens said she agreed to dial back on pushing the story for a while but would not agree to anything more than that.
Last month, the Macrons filed a defamation lawsuit against Owens over the far-right influencer's 'relentless and unjustified smear campaign' falsely accusing Brigitte of being born a man.
The 219-page defamation complaint, filed in Delaware state court, accuses Owens of proliferating 'demonstrably false' claims across her platforms, including in an eight-part podcast and on social media, designed to feed a 'frenzied fan base' in 'pursuit of fame'.
'These lies have caused tremendous damage to the Macrons,' according to the lawsuit, which names Owens as well as her business entities, which are incorporated in Delaware.
The false claims have subjected the Macrons to a 'campaign of global humiliation, turning their lives into fodder for profit-driven lies,' the complaint says.
'Owens has dissected their appearance, their marriage, their friends, their family, and their personal history — twisting it all into a grotesque narrative designed to inflame and degrade,' the complaint alleges. 'The result is relentless bullying on a worldwide scale. Every time the Macrons leave their home, they do so knowing that countless people have heard, and many believe, these vile fabrications. It is invasive, dehumanizing, and deeply unjust.'
The podcaster doubled down after the lawsuit was filed, outrageously claiming that Brigitte Macron's death would be faked before the case reached the discovery phase, claiming that the hypothetical staged killing of Macron would shut down all discussion 'about her being a man anymore.'
Brigitte Macron was previously awarded $9,149 in damages last year after two other far-right influencers falsely accused her of being a transgender woman.
In that case, Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey were ordered to pay damages to France's first lady as well as her brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux, after the women amplified bogus claims that Brigitte Macron had never existed and that her brother had changed gender and assumed that identity.
For years, baseless conspiracy theories have proliferated across social media accusing prominent women — from Former First Lady Michelle Obama to Taylor Swift — of secretly being transgender, so-called 'transvestigations' that thread anti-trans rhetoric into a web of far-right conspiracy theories.
The Macrons' lengthy complaint in Delaware connects the case to Owens's long history of far-right conspiracy theories — including debunked antisemitic tropes and attempts to minimize the Holocaust — to her attacks against the French first lady, which Owens has monetized on her YouTube channel, garnering millions of views.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
10 minutes ago
- The Independent
Trump says he'd like to run again, pushing back at ‘fake polls' in CNBC interview: Live updates
In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump said that while he would like to run again for another term in the White House, he added he probably wouldn't. Trump boasted about his 2024 election victory, claiming his numbers in Texas set a record that won't be surpassed unless he runs again. Asked if he would run for another term, Trump replied: 'No. Probably not. I'd like to. I have the best poll numbers I ever had.' The president pushed back when host Joe Kernen clarified that he has the best poll numbers among Republicans, while other polls show his numbers in the 30s. Trump countered: 'They're fake polls. You also have me in the 70s.' The phone interview with Squawk Box mainly focused on economic issues, including a threat to raise tariffs on India within 24 hours, other threats to the European Union, a 200% import tax on pharmaceuticals, and who he is considering to replace Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Trump also continued to criticize 'rigged' government jobs numbers, attacked Democratic lawmakers Rep. Jasmine Crockett and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker in reference to redistricting in Texas, and accused banks of discriminating against conservatives.
The Independent
10 minutes ago
- The Independent
‘One in, one out' is a realistic plan to deal with migration – let's give it a chance
The biggest problem with home secretary Yvette Cooper's plan to stop the boats is that it sounds unconvincing. One in, one out… how does that help? Especially when it is more like 17 in, one out? What kind of deterrent is that? But it is the start of a plan to tackle Britain's migration crisis – Home Office figures indicate that last Wednesday, almost 900 people arrived in boats in one day, bringing the total for 2025 to more than 25,000 – and one that could possibly work. It is, genuinely, the only policy that any government, Labour or Conservative, has devised so far that has a chance of doing so. The key to it is that the French government has accepted that Britain can send back some of the people crossing the Channel. The deal that has been published today is only a pilot scheme. It does not even say how many people will be returned, although the target is understood to be 50 a week, which is a small fraction of the average 850 arriving each week. But the point of a pilot scheme is that it allows the mechanics of a return scheme to be tested. It has already passed one test that the naysayers said it would fail: it has been approved by the European Commission. Now comes the hard part: showing that it is possible to detain and process arrivals, defeat the legal challenges and then put them on a plane and deliver them to France. Of those, the legal challenges are likely to be the bottleneck: hence Cooper's announcement of a fast-track asylum appeals procedure to try to ensure that migrants can be turned round within a few weeks. If that works, then the aim is to 'build', as Cooper put it on the Today programme this morning. If Britain can send back 50 a week, then there is no reason why we couldn't return all or nearly all arrivals. The Home Office estimates, and this seems about right, that if it can send back 80 per cent of arrivals, that will have a big deterrent effect, and few crossings will be attempted. Of course, there are reasons for doubting that this can be achieved. Will the French allow us to increase the numbers? Will the French even extend the scheme beyond the initial 11 months to which they have signed up? It is bound to take longer than that to start to get the numbers up. Maybe it will not work, but the point about a pilot scheme is that it allows Cooper the chance to try out, at a small scale, the elements of a scheme that plainly could work. No one else has even proposed a plausible and humane alternative. That said, the voters' frustration at the slow pace at which the government is moving is understandable. Labour has been in power for more than a year; the number of crossings is higher than last year; Cooper is only now announcing the plan; and the plan itself looks underwhelming. No wonder Nigel Farage carries all before him. But let us avoid the trap set by social-media bores of assuming that there are easy or quick solutions that two governments, desperate to escape the fury of the electorate, have wilfully refused to adopt. It took time for Keir Starmer to persuade Emmanuel Macron to accept the key that could unlock the solution: that France will take some migrants back. I didn't think it was possible, because the losses are more obvious than the gains for the French president. Yes, there is the distant prospect of clearing the tent cities in the Pas de Calais, but in the meantime what is France to do with the migrants who are sent back? I don't know what Macron got in return, but that was a negotiating triumph on the part of our prime minister. And it will take more time still to crank the British bureaucracy into action so that it is capable of taking the next, decisive step towards an effective deterrent. Meanwhile, Farage will score points by pretending the problem is simple and the solution is easy. His 'solution' is to destroy our relationship with France by trying to return migrants without French permission; to tear up not just the European Convention on Human Rights but the Refugee Convention and the Convention on the Law of the Sea; and to detain all arrivals indefinitely in huge prison camps at undisclosed locations. And still he wouldn't be able to deport migrants if other countries will not take them. If there is a better way, would it not be worth trying that first, even if it might take some time?
Daily Mirror
11 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
Russia arms race fears grow as country ends self-imposed ban on nuclear missiles
The Russian Foreign Ministry has said this week that it feels the moratorium no longer applies after US actions have created a "direct threat" to the country's security Russia has said that it no longer feels bound by a self-imposed moratorium on the deployment of nuclear -capable intermediate range missiles, sparking fears there could be a fresh arms race, particularly with the US. The Russian Foreign Ministry announced on Monday that the decision is linked to the efforts by the US and its allies to develop intermediate range weapons and preparations for their deployment in Europe. The declaration could indicate a possible new arms race. The ministry said that actions by the US, such as plans to deploy Typhoon and Dark Eagle missiles in Germany from next year, create "destabilizing missile potentials" near Russia. This, it explained, creates a "direct threat to the security of our country" and carries "significant harmful consequences for regional and global stability, including a dangerous escalation of tensions between nuclear powers." It comes after NATO scrambled warplanes as Russia shoots down West's F-16 fighter jet in Ukraine onslaught. President Putin had previously declared that Moscow was planning to deploy its new Oreshnik missiles on the territory of Belarus later this year. The ministry said: "Decisions on specific parameters of response measures will be made by the leadership of the Russian Federation based on an interdepartmental analysis of the scale of deployment of American and other Western land-based intermediate-range missiles, as well as the development of the overall situation in the area of international security and strategic stability.' At the end of last week, Donald Trump said that he would order the repositioning of two US nuclear submarines based on the 'highly provocative statements" of Dmitry Medvedev about the risk of war between the two countries. Medvedev had responded to Trump's deadline for Russia to accept a peace deal in Ukraine or face sanctions by warning him against "playing the ultimatum game with Russia". He had said that "each new ultimatum is a threat and a step toward war'. The Russian politician later wrote on social media that the statement on the withdrawal of the missile moratorium was a result of 'NATO countries' anti-Russian policy'. He added: 'This is a new reality all our opponents will have to reckon with. Expect further steps.' Intermediate-range missiles were banned under the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. In 2019, Washington and Moscow abandoned the pact, but Moscow declared its self-imposed moratorium on their deployment, until the US makes a move. The missiles can fly between 500 to 5,500 kilometers. Russia's missile forces chief claimed that the Oreshnik intermediate range missile has a range to reach all of Europe and can carry nuclear warheads. Putin said the weapon was so powerful that using several of the missiles could be as devastating as a nuclear strike. The president claimed last year that it was capable of destroying bunkers three, four or more floors down,' AP reported.
