Donald Trump’s MAGA coalition cracks show as key ally Marjorie Taylor Greene launches attack
She showed up for her first swearing-in on Capitol Hill days before the January 6 riot in 2021 wearing a mask that said “Trump Won”. She became the most vocal defender of the effort to overturn the 2020 election, calling the Trump supporters convicted of offences that day “political prisoners of war”.
A month before last year’s election she accused Joe Biden’s administration of using weather technology to steer a hurricane towards Republican-heavy communities in North Carolina to deliberately suppress the party’s voter turnout.
On issue after issue, from immigration to prosecuting Trump’s political enemies, to woke culture, trade and NATO, she has been a reliable loyalist. Her only flaw for the more sober members of MAGA-world has been a tendency towards excessive zealotry born of a conspiratorial mindset, such as when she once speculated whether space-based lasers operated by certain companies with Jewish-sounding names might have been responsible for California wildfires.
But something strange has come over MTG, as she is known. She criticised Trump over the US strikes on Iran this summer, and again over his support for Israel’s actions in Gaza. She has been among those denouncing the administration for failing to release the Justice Department’s “Epstein files”, the documents purported to show the extent of Jeffrey Epstein’s vast web of connections with political, business and other leaders. (These are different from, and said to be more scandalous than, the slew of documents released by Congress this week.)
On Wednesday she launched her most full-throated attack on the president yet. In a post on X she took aim at a succession of things Trump had said and done in the past week and suggested he had abandoned the principles on which he was elected. “I am America First and America Only,” the post concluded. “This is my way and there is no other way to be.”
That creaking you hear from Washington and Palm Beach is the sound of the MAGA coalition cracking. MTG’s improbable heresy is as sure a sign as any that the unique political movement built by, for and around Trump is fracturing.
The drubbing Republicans took in last week’s off-year elections has prompted a renewed focus on what comes next for the party – not only in next year’s midterm elections but beyond that, to the future of Maga itself in a post-Trump era. Several developments in the past few weeks have highlighted the underlying frailties in the Trump coalition.
The most high-profile has been a fight over who belongs in the movement at all. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host turned mass audience podcaster, and a kind of expensively educated, euphonious version of MTG’s foghorn, has been the source of much of the trouble. On his digital media channel he regularly hosts provocateurs and extremists to challenge all kinds of political mainstream ideas. Last month’s interview with Nick Fuentes, a grinning anti-Semite who has claimed he belongs to “Team Hitler”, jokes about the Holocaust and thinks black people should be in prison (“for the most part”), was too much for some leading lights in MAGA. It sparked an intramural eruption, with some supporters saying the movement should adopt the old left’s maxim and have “no enemies on the right” and others insisting that tolerance of neofascists was beyond the pale.
At the Heritage Foundation, the think tank that has become the ideas laboratory for MAGA, a large number of staff revolted when its leader initially refused to distance himself from Carlson. Protagonists at the top of the Republican Party included Ted Cruz, the Texas senator eyeing a run for the presidency in 2028, who called the failure to deal with rising antisemitism on the right “horrifying”, and JD Vance, the vice-president and current favourite for the nomination, who dismissed the controversy as “infighting” and conspicuously declined to condemn Carlson.
The MAGA crack-up has been evident too in reactions to last week’s election defeats, with a number of Republican leaders saying the party failed to focus on the economy and persistently high prices, for which voters blame Trump. But most striking has been, for the first time, direct criticism of the president himself amid fears that he has lost touch with the voters whose concerns he has articulated for the past ten years.
The cause of MTG’s outburst this week was an interview Trump gave to Laura Ingraham of Fox News. He dismissed criticism of his economic policies as a “con-job by Democrats”, defended a policy to permit up to 600,000 Chinese students to attend American universities and, in a desecration of the holy grail of populism, insisted the US needed to continue to import tens of thousands of skilled workers because it did not have enough homegrown “talent” to do the most important jobs.
It was an extraordinary moment that drew denunciation from across the spectrum of Trump supporters, and that response revealed that something critical has changed in US politics. While the roots of American populism lie in genuine popular discontent over immigration, the economy, culture and the US role in the world, for the past decade MAGA was essentially whatever Trump said it was. Inconsistencies would always take second place to the sheer force of the man’s personality and the fear that any criticism of him would invite retribution from his supporters.
That phase is now ending. No one can say with confidence what comes next. But it looks like what some have suspected all along for MAGA: after him, the deluge.
The Times
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It takes a creative imagination, or an unusual feel for the centre of political gravity, to consider Marjorie Taylor Greene a bellwether. The congresswoman from northwest Georgia has, in less than five years in national politics, established herself as among the truest of true Donald Trump believers, the Joan of Arc of Maga, the Boudica of America Firsters, the Madam Mao of Trumpian populism.