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Donald Trump and his once fervent supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, appear to have had a falling out over the release of the Epstein files, a disagreement where Greene emerged victorious.
However, their rift runs much deeper than this single issue.
In fact, it touches on the fundamental divisions that are increasingly evident within the MAGA movement.
Greene’s decision to break away from Trump and announce her departure from representing Georgia’s 14th district in the House in January is rooted in a different concern, unrelated to Epstein:
“All our country does,” she recently lamented, “is fund foreign countries and foreign wars, and never does anything to help the American people.”
Now you can dismiss this as the typical overstatement of a woman who’s been prone to promote too many ridiculous conspiracy theories in her time — and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
Remember the anti-Semitic nonsense about ‘Jewish space lasers’ causing the deadly 2018 Camp Fire in California – or the baseless drivel about a pedophile and satanic child trafficking ring run by Democratic and Hollywood elites?
But it’s also representative of a strong and growing strand of MAGA opinion which thinks Trump is spending too much time and treasure in his second term on foreign stuff and not enough on domestic concerns.
It’s also representative of a strong and growing strand of MAGA opinion which thinks Trump is spending too much time and treasure in his second term on foreign stuff and not enough on domestic concerns
‘All our country does,’ she recently complained, ‘is fund foreign countries and foreign wars, and never does anything to help the American people’
His MAGA critics see this as especially foolhardy at a time of an ‘affordability crisis’ on the home front which is already costing Republicans elections yet on which Trump seems to have trouble focusing.
‘This is a telling argument with the MAGA base,’ an experienced Republican strategist tells me, ‘because cost of living pressures are felt most by blue-collar families. And that is the MAGA base.’
Until very recently MAGA stood for whatever Trump said it stood for. No longer.
There is now a growing fissure in the MAGA movement between what one White House aide described to me as ‘America First versus Trump First.’
The president is seen as too wrapped up in Ukraine, the Middle East (especially Israel), Venezuela and various foreign initiatives which he claims have ended seven (or is it eight?) wars — all for his own greater glory and legacy (he still hankers after a Nobel Peace Prize) — when he should be concentrating on what ails America at home.
Greene even told him to park Air Force One and stay in America.
There are rumblings of discontent in the MAGA base about the open-ended bankrolling of Israel (Greene was the first congressional Republican to describe what was happening in Gaza as ‘genocide’), continued support for Ukraine (the money would be better spent in America, they say), soaring health insurance premiums and crippling grocery bills at the check-out counter.
The president is not unaware of this discontent. Indeed, I’m told by one confidant close to Trump that the reason he’s prepared to dress up as a ‘peace plan’ what is essentially a Russian-drafted blueprint for Ukraine’s capitulation is that he thinks speedily disentangling America from Ukraine — whatever the reputational cost to the USA — would help assuage unrest in the MAGA base.
The cracks in the MAGA edifice are happening at a time when even more destructive forces are at work. The outer reaches of the movement are now staking out ever more bizarre positions — and fighting with former ideological soulmates like rats in a sack.
Staunch but mainstream conservatives are falling out of love with the Heritage Foundation think tank, which has been seen to embrace some of MAGA’s loonier tunes.
Candace Owen is at daggers drawn with her old stable, Turning Point USA. Steve Bannon picks fights with anyone that will keep him noticed. Ben Shapiro rounds sharply on Tucker Carlson. While Carlson continues on a relentless trek to his very own La La Land.
As a result, the MAGA extremities are espousing some very strange positions for a right-wing movement, further adding to the sense of division and confusion. Again, Greene has been in the vanguard of this debilitating trend.
‘If I am cast aside by the president and the MAGA political machine,’ she says, ‘and replaced by neocons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Military Industrial War Complex, foreign leaders and the elite donor class that can never, ever relate to real Americans, then many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well.’
And there you have it — the Right morphing into the Left.
The hard Left has long hated big business, the US military, foreign intervention, the political donations of the wealthy and disruptive technological change. Now it seems they are all enemies of the Right, too. Greene’s words could come straight from the playbooks of Bernie Sanders and AOC.
Parts of the supposedly MAGA Right are even more Left than the Democratic Left.
Carlson and his acolytes are now anti-Israel, pro-Kremlin, pro-Maduro, even sympathetic to the Mad Mullahs of Tehran. In their view, the West in general and the USA in particular are the cause of the injustices of the world.
Everybody else, no matter how evil, is a victim. Not so much MAGA as BAF — Blame America First.
This is the worldview of the Far Left now being embraced, incredibly, by the MAGA Right. It would be hard to slip a playing card these days between Tucker Carlson and Noam Chomsky or any other hard-Left pseudo-intellectual proselytizer.
Carlson has even started to promote the conspiracy theory nonsense that 9/11 was an inside job (without, of course, offering a shred of evidence).
There was a time when he dismissed such peddlers of lies as ‘parasites.’ Now, he touts a line which involves America being so evil it was prepared to bring down the Twin Towers for its own nefarious purposes.
The combination of growing divisions and an outer fringe adopting the nonsense nostrums of the nutjobs is a toxic brew which, if allowed to get out of hand, could herald an incipient crisis for the MAGA movement.
It is a reckless development at a time when next year’s mid-terms will be grim enough for Republicans without more self-inflicted wounds.
Vice President JD Vance, for the moment the most likely inheritor of the Trump mantle, has worked hard to keep the Greenes, Carlsons and their like onside. But they have a tendency to become ever-more extreme and, if they find a true-believer to rally behind, Vance could soon find himself on their wrong side.
The Left’s penchant, even relish, for internal disputes has often kept it from power. The risk for the Right is that it now goes down the same path, while ending up with policy positions that are beyond the pale.
You don’t have to buy into the hardline isolationist tendencies of his MAGA critics to realise that, if Trump wants a lasting legacy, then he really will have to spend more time tending to his own backyard.