After we recorded this episode, Trump erupted in a long, angry tirade yet again at Greene and many other critics.
Donald Trump is really angry at Marjorie Taylor Greene right now, and it’s because of this. In an improbable turn of events, Greene has emerged as a very effective critic of the president. A remarkable new CNN interview demonstrates why. In it, Greene said that Trump is mentally unfit for the presidency, that the people around Trump really need to rein him in, and that Trump is catastrophically failing. This is the watershed moment. Trump’s disastrous Iran war and his threat to obliterate Iranian civilization are clearly pushing Republicans to look past him. Salon’s Amanda Marcotte had a good piece arguing that in some basic sense, Iran is breaking Trump. So we’re talking to her about this obvious sunsetting that we’re seeing in the president. Amanda, always nice to have you on.
Sargent: So Trump had this really stupid and juvenile tweet about Greene. He called her “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown” because Greene turns to Brown under stress, he said. Trump claimed she’s deranged and even suggested that she smells. On CNN, Greene was asked to respond to this. Listen.
Sargent: Amanda, I think the kill shot there is that Trump is failing. Everybody knows this is the case. At this point, Trump is making Marjorie Taylor Greene look like a stateswoman, which I didn’t see coming. What did you think of all that?
Sargent: Yes. And I think she’s a business person herself. And so I think she probably speaks to these certain elements in the Trump coalition that aren’t MAGA, that are business owners, the reactionary car dealer owner, for instance, small business people—they clearly got the brunt of the tariffs and are really getting clobbered by inflation under Trump. And I think she kind of crystallizes a sense among those demographics that this guy is just fundamentally unfit, that this is just a failure. The whole enterprise is a failure. Does that seem right to you?
Sargent: Absolutely. Well, let’s check out a little bit more of Greene. After Trump tweeted his threat to obliterate a nation of 93 million people, Greene called for his removal via the 25th Amendment. She was asked on CNN why that was the final straw. Listen to this.
Sargent: Amanda, we’ve been talking about how unfit Trump is for years, but there’s something in both the Iran war and in his threat to obliterate Iranian civilization that I really think caused something to snap in a lot of his allies. I think it’s that they finally realized that this man is unfit to have the American military at his fingertips. And here’s the critical part—that there’s really no barrier of any kind to the unthinkable. He’s got to be reined in. Your thoughts on all that?
I’ve been fascinated by conspiracy theories for my whole career. And I can say what’s interesting about them is the people that engage in them nonetheless still often have limits and they will shun somebody who has crossed the line. Like, for instance, when Alex Jones went full Sandy Hook truther, there were a lot of other conspiracy theorists who were here for his 9/11 conspiracy theories and moon landing or whatever—they were like, these are little kids that were shot to death, do we really have to go there? And I think that there is—and it is a moral limit, is not, you could probably dig deep into the psychology of conspiracy theorists—how wide is it? It’s about morality and not factuality that they set their limits.
Sargent: Well, I have a piece up at TNR.com—I’m just going to take this occasion to plug it—which gets into some of what you’re talking about there, that there’s actually a major psychic cost to the American people in seeing Donald Trump threaten genocide like this. And critically, I think there’s an even deeper psychic cost to suddenly realizing that we don’t have any mechanism to stop this guy if he decides to do that stuff. Is that right to you?
Marcotte: I think so. I think that certainly the people in my life, my coworkers, my friends, have been struggling mentally and psychologically with the situation in a way that’s very hard to wrap your mind around—like lost sleep, lots of stress, lost appetite. It’s actually affecting people on a really profound level.
But it’s clear that some of the key MAGA people don’t want the movement to be tainted by this catastrophe and recognize extreme peril for its longer-term prospects and the GOP’s longer-term prospects and being associated with this war. What’s your reading of the MAGA landscape and do you think they can get out from under that problem or not?
I wish that they were doing this for moral reasons, but I think it is mostly that, like, most of them do remember the Iraq War and just the very long-term damage to the Republican brand that it had. And I would say Donald Trump won because of that damage, because so many Republicans—I know it’s hard for people to wrap their minds around, but even in 2016, so many Republicans were still feeling kind of shame and failure from Iraq. And Donald Trump seemed to be a different kind of Republican, a way to get away from that history. And now he’s just doing it again. So obviously, like, they’re just like, what are our options here? It weighs them down, the American people hate it. You know, that said, I don’t think they can escape it. I mean, who out of the Bush administration was able to escape that vortex, you know?
Marcotte: No, not at all. I mean, everyone I knew who backed Obama—and I backed Obama in 2008—we all explicitly said it was because it was a rebuke to the Democrats who went along with the Iraq War. And I think we could see that happen again. One of the reasons—if not the number one reason—that Kamala Harris lost in 2024 was she was so associated with Biden’s backing of Israel in the war against Gaza. Like, these become hard red lines.
Sargent: Another key tell that Trump knows how lethal this whole thing is for him is that he erupted a few times on Truth Social over Iran. In one case, he raged that if Iran doesn’t comply with the “REAL AGREEMENT,” then “the shooting starts bigger and better and stronger than anyone has ever seen before.” He also tweeted that the U.S. military is “looking forward to its next conquest, America is back.” And in another tweet, he lashed out at the media for reporting on a “FAKE 10 POINT PLAN” as the basis for talks with Iran.
Marcotte: I mean, it’s going to fail. It’s destined to fail. Like, his ideology and Pete Hegseth’s ideology is very obvious and very straightforward and it’s fascistic, right? It’s this notion that the only power that actually matters in the world is violence. And that everything else is some BS that stupid liberals—the idea of like soft power, diplomatic power, the power of persuasion, the power of diplomacy, that even to a certain extent, economic power—are all illusions and that the only thing that matters is breaking kneecaps, right?
Marjorie Taylor Greene (voiceover): The polling that I have seen is it’s mainly the baby boomers, Republicans that watch Fox News all day, every day, are the ones that are primarily, mostly supporting this war in Iran. However, it’s the majority of Americans, especially 50 and under, that do not support this war in Iran. And I would argue that the baby boomer generation—my parents’ generation, whom I love very much—needs to think clearly about how a war in Iran could have long-term implications for their children and their grandchildren.
Marcotte: I mean, I wouldn’t say she’s going so far as to say that, but she’s definitely saying that the boomers are not the future, for sure. I was struck by that comment too, because I literally was just watching Franklin Graham for a piece that’s going up at Salon tomorrow. I was rewatching Franklin Graham’s speech at CPAC a couple of weeks ago, and he was basically justifying the Iran war by citing the hostage crisis of 1979. And I think that to a large extent, that’s probably true for Donald Trump too, that he sees this as revenge for the hostage crisis, which was experienced by baby boomers who were in their twenties and thirties at that time, as this great humiliation. But it doesn’t mean anything to everyone who was born after that or was a child at that time.
Sargent: Just to tie this all together, where does this leave us? Marjorie Taylor Greene—it turns out that her America First version of anti-war politics seems to have some actual substance to it, which is a real surprise to me. I didn’t expect that. And I think probably JD Vance is sort of in that camp as well, but he’s under the thumb of Donald Trump. And a lot of Republicans are still under the thumb of Donald Trump.
Marcotte: I don’t think so in the near term. I will say that historically parties are pretty good at reinventing themselves—I mean, obviously the MAGA movement is a reinvention of the GOP after the debacle of the Iraq War, I think that’s how history will remember it. And it’s not like Democrats are doing a much better job of redefining themselves right now.
Sargent: It occurs to me there’s sort of a deep irony to this, which is that JD Vance wanted to be that person. He wanted to be the standard bearer for a form of populist Republicanism that was in some sense genuinely opposed to foreign interventions and the toll that takes on Americans. And because he decided that Donald Trump was the hammer to smash the liberal establishment into—you know, prevent Western civilization from succumbing to the hordes and the demons and all that—he’s kind of screwed. He can’t be that person.
Sargent: Well, I sure hope you’re right. Amanda Marcotte, pleasure to talk to you as always. Thanks so much for all those insights.
Marcotte: Thank you so much for having me. Always a fun time here.
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