LEMON DROP | The Rats Are Jumping From the MAGA Ship!

The Don Lemon Show

18Hundred LLC.

News, Society & Culture

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2026

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Don sits down with political analyst and friend of the show Mike Nellis to break down the growing wave of high-profile defections from Trump’s orbit. Voices like Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, once some of his most vocal supporters, are now publicly distancing themselves from Trump and his policies. So what changed? Is this a temporary break, or the beginning of a deeper fracture within MAGA? And when the loudest supporters start walking away, what does that mean for Trump’s grip on the movement? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Mike Nellis, let's talk about all the rats jumping ship.
0:04.5	Are you surprised by all of the influencers and people who really carried the water for
0:10.5	a MAGA movement in Donald Trump?
0:11.9	Are you surprised at their jumping ship right now?
0:14.1	No, because there's no real true believers over there.
0:17.3	Like, they don't believe in anything, just like they're king.
0:20.2	Donald Trump doesn't believe in anything other than himself.
0:22.8	So when you see Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly and Candace Owens and Alex Jones departing
0:27.9	from the president, it's about where their audiences are because Trump has lost the plot,
0:32.2	lost the American people.
0:33.3	He's underwater, according to CNN this week, with non-college educated white voters, which is insane to me. It'd be like Kamala losing black women, basically. I don't even, I can't even imagine how that would happen. So it's just, it's a bad situation. And then the people who are still sticking with him, it's all out of self-interest, too. It's because they're being paid by MAGA Inc. it's because they're being paid by a foreign government like Benny Johnson to post-Pro Trump shit.
0:56.0	It's because they're inside the administration and they're getting to do favors for their friends and they know they're going to get a pardon at the end. So it's all self-interest over there. So you think it's all a grift. I think it's all a grift. Yeah. They literally named their super PAC MAGA, Inc. I can't think of any like, you know, greater exclamation point on the grift than that.
1:14.6	Um, you know, greater exclamation point on the Gryft than that.
1:14.6	It's interesting because I saw a soundbite of Ilhan Omar.
1:19.8	Did you see that?
1:20.5	Where she said that you have to give Marjor Taylor Green some credit and allow her in for because she and she said people like Candace Owens were at least admitting that Donald Trump is flawed and you know
1:32.6	off of his rocker yeah and people are torn about that it's I think it's easy to say
1:38.8	come on in but it's tough when those very people are saying that you shouldn't exist, that I shouldn't be able to get married.
1:51.5	And after all the racist things, yeah, look, I believe that people can change, but you got to show me first.
1:57.4	I don't know.
1:57.9	I don't know how you feel about it.
1:59.0	No, I'm really torn on it too. And it's
	...

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