With all the policy conflicts and a brewing civil war among Republicans right now, the advice from the pundits and the pollsters is: “Don’t Punch Right!” Yes, a political party needs political and policy unity to succeed, as much as possible, but let’s not fool ourselves that consensus will be complete. It never is.
And what do you do when someone on the right is punching right? Do we just let them get away with it? I say no to that.
If someone is muddying the waters or mucking up the agenda because of hurt feelings or personal spats, you have to say something. Right now, one of the most disappointing examples fostering this division is Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. At one point, MAGA rapper Forgiato Blow celebrated the Congresswoman with “MTG, MAGA’S MVP!” She looked stilted and out of place in that video, and her actions today confirm that she has lost her way. She actively criticizes the Republican conference and fraternizes with the left. She should offer her colleagues solutions, trash the Democrats, and promote the MAGA agenda.
This denunciation cuts particularly deep for me, because she worked with MassResistance, the international pro-family organization that I have worked for since 2018. She had helped shut down a drag queen story hour program in Alpharetta, a suburb of Atlanta, before she began campaigning for Congress. She would move into northeastern Georgia, a more Republican district, and the rest was history. As a pro-Trump outsider, she prevailed in a contentious Republican primary that advanced into a runoff. By then, her would-be Democrat challenger left the state, forfeiting the district by default.
During her first term, Congresswoman Greene took a bold stand on many issues, unafraid to speak her mind. People mocked her and condemned her with unjust attacks about her so-called anti-Semitism and rantings about “Jewish space lasers”. She prevailed again in Election 2022, dispatching a mass of GOP primary challengers.
Problems emerged when she supported Kevin McCarthy for Speaker in 2023.
I chalked up this bad political calculation to the fact that she was looking for some help from leadership. She had faced unprecedented challenges, including multiple lawsuits to remove her from the ballot, as well as the contentious 2022 GOP primary. Republicans like U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy donated to her primary opponents!
Despite the McCarthy stumble, she maintained the America First agenda. We should not be spending foreign aid, end all illegal immigration, and put American workers and children first. We have to fight for all constitutional freedoms at all costs.
Her recent choices have started undermining the MAGA movement.
She resisted the motion to vacate to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Former Congressman Gaetz’s successful motion warned Washington’s GOP leadership that grassroots Republicans demanded real change. Greene was part of the problem.
Then she started accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. That is patently untrue. You cannot accuse a country of committing genocide when the nation is consistently allowing civilians, especially children, to leave the very war zone so they can go to hospitals in Israel or to another country. Such bold-faced lies damaged her credibility.
The biggest betrayal occurred when Marjorie Taylor Green stated on the Tim Dillon show that we shouldn't try to deport all the illegal aliens, because businesses need the labor. She also commiserated with the illegal children getting deported (as though we should ignore lawbreakers). That is as anti-MAGA as it gets. Voters expect President Trump to deport every illegal alien in this country. No more cheap labor, no more putting foreign nationals ahead of American citizens.
What happened to you, MTG?
And now she's talking about undermining the Republicans’ clean CR and capitulating to the Democrats’ Obamacare demands. This is not the time for any capitulation. In fact, Republicans (in a sense) already capitulated when they passed the same CR as in March. And yet I think that was a winning strategy, to the extent that it made the Democrats the bad guys for shutting down the government to give healthcare to illegal aliens and to make Americans more dependent on the federal government.
MTG has recently tried to remake her image with a cross-the-aisle maneuver on The View. She played into the DEI talking points, gabbing about how Republican Congressmen are engaging in a “pissing contest.” She clearly forgot that those women have repeatedly savaged President Trump and MAGA voters. Now she's fraternizing with the enemy.
The View co-host Sonny Hostin exploited her (as expected) and continued to attack her, bringing up the defamatory attacks about QAnon and other past controversial statements. Hostin’s rude hosting goes to show that every time Republicans try to make inroads with Democrats, they will simply face more slings and arrows. The View exploited Greene, and she deserved it.
It's also unsettling for her to castigate Republican leadership over the Epstein files. If Trump’s new law enforcement leadership is telling us that there is no “there” there, then it is time to move on. Yes indeed, we need to make sure that all of the pimps, the Johns, the madams are brought to justice. But I don't see how it helps to actively frustrate and attack your own party over this.
And now she’s praising Nancy Pelosi. She even described her as a great leader. I can't believe I'm hearing this nonsense! The last thing a purported MAGA Republican should be doing is praising Pelosi. President Trump did not withhold his outrage and disgust with the former Speaker, and his lack of political candor was actually refreshing. There was a time when Greene had called Pelosi a “b—tch,” and didn’t think twice about it. Now, she wants to read her political eulogy?!
Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene turning on her own colleagues and starting to undermine the MAGA agenda? One report suggests that she's bitter because President Trump didn't support her US Senate bid to challenge John Ossoff. Frankly, she needs to understand that her campaign of Republican populism that propelled her to victory in the Northeast corner of Georgia was not going to make her a bankable candidate across the state of Georgia. Now there are reports that she wants to run for president. I don't know how she can take up the Trump mantle when she announced that she doesn't want to deport all the illegals, she unjustly attacks Israel, and she joins with Democrats to criticize Republicans.
Steve Bannon had suggested that MTG needed to face a primary over Kevin McCarthy. Now she's giving other reasons why. It's time for her to go, and it's time to refine and sharpen the true definition of MAGA and the Trump agenda. The Republican Party needs to focus on winning issues and cleaning up any disagreements. There’s nothing wrong with Greene criticizing leadership, but how about offering solutions? And why rail against GOP colleagues on enemy territory? You don't make progress by arbitrarily attacking the leadership because you're bitter and didn’t get your way on a campaign or a bill, either. You certainly aren’t helping the cause when you claim to take the high ground against your peers, call yourself a true caretaker for the people, yet advocate positions and policies undermining the cause.