Marjorie Taylor Greene v Donald Trump

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1:14One of the most interesting aspects of the furore over the Epstein files is the way it has pitched some of Donald Trump's usually fervently loyal supporters against them on this issue. And it has really thrown a spotlight on one of them, Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, or MTG as she gets called. She is now in a very public fight with Donald Trump over the release of the Epstein files, but also on other things as well. She's broken with them over a number of policy issues and is creating a real question around who does represent the Make America Great Again or MAGA movement. Who is it who's really putting America first?

1:55And during this bat, Donald Trump's actually started calling Marjorie Taylor Greene a traitor and a lunatic. And she hit back at that this week as she was standing next to some of the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's abuse on Capitol Hill. I was called a traitor by a man that I fought for five, no, actually six years for and I gave him my loyalty for free. I won my first election without his endorsement beating eight men in a primary and I've never owed him anything but I fought for him for the policies and for America first and he called me a traitor for standing with these women and refusing to take my name off the discharge petition.

2:40Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is a is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves. A patriot is an American that serves the United States of America and Americans like the women standing behind me. So who exactly is Marjorie Taylor Greene? How important is she to the MAGA movement and to American politics? We're going to tell you everything you need to know about her. Welcome to AmeriCast. americast americast from bbc news when donald trump calls they say yes sir right away sir happy to lick your boot sir we are the sickest country in the world oh dear are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry of course the president supports peaceful protests what a stupid question are you still talking about jeffrey epstein

3:37Hello, it's Sarah here in the BBC's Bureau in Washington. And it is Mariana in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London. And it's Anthony in Nashville, Tennessee, Music City, USA. There's actually a congressional race here, a contested seat, a special election in about a week and a half. It's the only show when you're into elected politics in town. But we'll come back to that towards the end of our podcast. Yeah, let's start, Anthony Mariana, with a question that's been sent in from Zach in Scotland, who's asking us, with the fallout between MTG and Trump over the ongoing demand for the full release of the Epstein files, we've seen MTG side with the Democrats in the House of Representatives to push for their complete publication.

4:17And he goes on to say he was recently watching an interview with former Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, where he discussed how the Republican Party has been led astray by Trump. Could MTG deepen this divide within the Republican Party? And good question. Could she realistically be a contender for the 2028 presidential election? So these are a lot of the questions that we're going to unpack during this episode. But we should remind everybody why she has been so much in the spotlight this week. Anthony, what is it that's attracted so much attention? Well, it's the Epstein vote, first and foremost.

4:52Marjorie Taylor Greene was one of the Republicans who was most out in front on this issue and has been for a while. I mean, she does kind of have a penchant for conspiracy theories and she has been talking about the Epstein case for a while. But she was one of the people in the House of Representatives, one of the few Republicans in the House of Representatives who sided with the Democrats to bring this, to force a release of the Epstein file vote in that chamber over the objections of the House Republican leadership, over the objections of Donald Trump. So she had been pushing for this. She had signed that discharge petition.

5:30She had been standing with Epstein's victims. And she didn't back down. And actually, she became not just critical of Donald Trump on that, but she has stepped up her criticism of Trump in other areas, on his trade policy, on his health care policy. So she's gone from a very vocal supporter of Donald Trump's to one of his more prominent critics within the Republican Party in the House of Representatives. Yeah. And with some of her criticism, it sounds to me, Anthony, as though she's sort of saying that she's actually adhering to real MAGA principles. And she's the one putting America first, for instance, and that she feels that it's Donald Trump who has veered off and is spending too much time looking at foreign policy or not concentrating on what what real MAGA voters are interested in.

6:16And she was talking to CNN's Caitlin Collins recently about the cost of living, for instance. Yeah, when the president says there's virtually no inflation and that grocery prices are going down, do you agree with him on that? No, I go to the grocery store myself. Grocery prices remain high. Energy prices are high. My electricity bills are higher here in Washington, D.C. at my apartment. And they're also higher at my house in Rome, Georgia, higher than they were a year ago. So affordability is a problem. So that's notable because Marjorie Taylor Greene is directly contradicting Donald Trump. Donald Trump has been saying time and time again that costs are coming down, the economy is getting better, things are bright and shiny, and this is the golden age, a new golden age for America.

7:02And here Taylor Greene is saying, no, things are actually getting worse. And the administration, Republicans, need to do more to help those working class voters who delivered the White House to Donald Trump. And then the other thing that Marjorie Taylor Greene has been talking about a lot over the course of the past week and has made quite a lot of headlines about is when she spoke about how Donald Trump's called her a traitor and she's had lots of threats on social media. It's caused a moment of reflection, not least because she herself has been accused of sort of stoking division on social media on quite a few occasions.

7:35And she actually apologized for what she calls toxic politics when she was speaking to Dana Bash on CNN last Sunday. We have seen these kinds of attacks or criticism from the president at other people. It's not new. And with respect, I haven't heard you speak out about it until it was directed at you. Dana, I think that's fair criticism. And I would like to say humbly, I'm sorry for taking part in the toxic politics. It's very bad for our country. And it's been something I've thought about a lot, especially since Charlie Kirk was assassinated, is that I'm only responsible for myself and my own words and actions.

8:19And I am committed, and I've been working on this a lot lately, to put down the knives in politics. I really just want to see people be kind to one another. and we need to figure out a new path forward that is focused on the American people because as Americans, no matter what side of the aisle we're on, we have far more in common than we have differences and we need to be able to respect each other with our disagreements. Now that's a real turnaround from Marjorie Taylor Greene because she's not just now disagreeing with the president on policy, but on approach as well. And she has been one of the most vehement proponents of MAGA, I think it's fair to say, Anthony.

9:06I mean, this is not somebody who has sounded as though she wanted to agreeably disagree in the past, is it? This is somebody who put forward her own views, shall we say, forcefully? Right, exactly. I mean, she made her name for herself even before she ran for Congress, where she would show up on Capitol Hill and chase Democratic Congress people around, berating them with questions, yelling at them as they walked from the Capitol building to their office buildings. I mean, she was in people's face and she was extremely hostile towards them. And also, this is her campaign video from 2020 when she's getting ready to run for Congress.

9:41I've never run for office before, but I've made all the right enemies. The fake news media hates me. Big tech censors me. The D.C. swamp fears me. And George Soros and the Democrats are trying to take me down. But they don't scare me. Socialism does. That's why I'm running and approve this message. President Trump needs bold, fearless allies as he fights to save America and stop socialism. Now, Marjorie Taylor Greene is not only very good at, and that video is an example of it, very good at what I would often call kind of gaming the algorithms. She's good at creating content that sparks a reaction, whether it's people loving her or hating her.

10:23And therefore it gets likes and views and clicks and it gets out to more people, which is what has made her sort of so visible, I'd say, certainly in the social media world. And quite a core bit of that, and it was hinted at in some of the comments she was making there about people like George Soros, for example, has been some of the very extreme conspiracy theories she has shared. And we shouldn't sort of go over these too lightly, really, because they're not, there are some kind of theories, unproven theories that people might consider or engage in. But, you know, where there's a kernel of truth and a bit of it ends up being true and then some of it's false.

10:58But some of the stuff that she has posted about and shared her views on has been really out there. Take, for example, the idea of staging school shootings. So before she was elected to Congress, she interacted with a Facebook post that was falsely suggesting that the Parkland school shooting that happened in 2018 in Florida was staged in some way. You know, shootings, I mean, I've spent quite a lot of time investigating false conspiracy theories that suggest terror attacks or school shootings have been staged in some way. And they are incredibly distressing for the people who survived those attacks or for the people who, the families of people who lost their lives.

11:35You know, in that Parkland shooting, 17 people were killed. And then she also has been a huge, huge, huge advocate for, if that's the right word, QAnon. So QAnon, we've spoken about on AmeriCast before, is this really wide ranging, unfounded conspiracy theory. It says Donald Trump is waging a secret war against Satan worshipping paedophiles in government, business and media. And it goes beyond real examples of powerful people doing bad things. And she has explicitly in videos, including a YouTube video, praised Q, which is the pseudonym for this figure who would do these Q drops, they were called.

12:11So they would be sort of little bits of information that would help you to kind of further the conspiracy theory. And the followers would then start posting about, you know, whatever the Q drop was or the name that had been revealed or that sort of thing. And she said that Q is a patriot, a word that she uses a lot. It is worth saying with QAnon, she has actually tried more recently to distance herself a little bit from it. You know, she has said that she stumbled across QAnon. She sort of got involved in it in 2017, became interested in the theory because she was upset about things. And actually, when we think about what an advocate she's been for the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, at the heart of QAnon really are concerns about abuse of power and child abuse, paedophilia, all of those things.

12:57So it would make sense that that is perhaps what drew her into the theory, but nonetheless, it obviously goes way beyond real examples like those relating to Jeffrey Epstein. So yeah, the conspiracy theory I always remember with Marjorie Taylor Greene was the one that Jewish controlled satellites with lasers were causing the forest fires in California. I mean, that was so patently absurd, but it did show Marjorie Taylor Greene was out there with these conspiracy theories and ones that were, I'd add, tinged with anti-Semitism. Yeah, and it's worth saying that in the original post where Marjorie Taylor Greene posted about these space lasers, she specifically spoke about the Rothschild banking family.

13:38Now, these kinds of conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds, for example, are widely viewed as anti-Semitic. They're talking about Jewish families and making allegations that are just completely unfounded, contrary to the truth. Marjorie Taylor Greene, after this was pointed out to her, and she was accused of spreading anti-Semitic theories, ideas, went on to say that she didn't know that the Rothschilds were Jewish and that was why she'd made those comments and so on and so forth. But she quite frequently has referenced these kinds of families and people in the theories she spreads. Do we think she really believed the QAnon or the famous business about the space lasers?

14:16Or, I mean, are there people who sincerely believe this stuff? I have actually been thinking more recently, particularly with everything around Jeffrey Epstein and what a sort of advocate she has been for survivors, that actually maybe she is a bit more of a true believer than I would have necessarily thought to begin with, mainly because she's benefited politically from sharing these ideas. And so I think probably both things can be true, that it's been useful to her to share these ideas. And therefore, she's kind of become a bit, she kind of does sort of believe them now. And if you're surrounded by this stuff all the time, it's kind of easy to understand how you start to believe it.

14:54And her willingness to go sort of toe-to-toe with Donald Trump perhaps is proof that she is a bit of a true believer in that sense, but also could be because she benefits from, again, being opposed to the sort of establishment and the elites. and Donald Trump has transformed to now being the kind of establishment that she's against because otherwise these kind of theories and ideas don't really work for her. And it's worth saying, actually, as you see her quite frequently giving press conferences and things with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's abuse, and you can tell she is genuinely angry about the idea that rich and powerful men are getting away with sex trafficking or abusing these women because their names are being covered up.

15:32I mean, you can see that she really does actively care about that. And that's why she's been campaigning so hard for the release of the Epstein files and being prepared to break with Donald Trump over it. I mean, I think there is genuine emotion there when you watch it. Yeah, I think so. We definitely see, you know, she cares about this issue and she was willing to put her neck on the line for for the victims. And that, as I mentioned before, may have opened the door for her starting to question some of the other things Donald Trump has done. Because if you remember before that, she was definitely, as she says, an avid advocate for Donald Trump.

16:08I mean, she was one of the people who who was out there in front in 2020 challenging the election results when Donald Trump was saying that he didn't actually lose that election to Joe Biden. She wore a Trump one mask in the House during the covid-19 pandemic. she was she was labeled a future Republican star by Donald Trump. I mean, this was a close relationship. This was one where it felt like Marjorie Taylor Greene in the House of Representatives was Donald Trump's person and was the person there who was the most most in touch with Donald Trump, what he wanted and what the incoming administration once they took power wanted.

16:49And now that's not the case. She established herself within the party before she came to Donald Trump's attention. She was, I mean, she was, she was a Trumper before Trump had backed her, wasn't she? Right. Well, it was, it was not Trump made her. I mean, she became a force, particularly online in the ways that Marianne has been talking about, you know, this, this really effective social media presence, effective mainstream media like Fox News, and some of the other conservative outlets, a presence there. Donald Trump recognized that she had this, this popularity and then boosted her that way and associated with her that way.

17:28Because Donald Trump has a very good sense for where where the base is and who the base likes and then likes to associate with them. Yeah, that's a really interesting thing to say, Anthony, because, of course, she thinks at the moment over all sorts of issues where she's criticizing Donald Trump, that she's the one who understands where the base is and that he's lost touch with all of the things that he was campaigning on. I mean, there's a list of things, isn't there? We heard her complaining about prices earlier and the affordability issue. But she's she's been angry that Donald Trump spends, she thinks, too much time on foreign policy and not enough putting America first.

18:05She's been critical of the ending of health care subsidies, money going to people who otherwise would struggle to afford health insurance. I mean, there's a whole list of things, isn't there, in which she's actually started to become really critical. Yeah, and that was a real break in the party line. During the shutdown, Republicans were were digging in and objecting to Democrats saying that the health care subsidies expiring at the end of this year was going to be a big issue. And there she was out there, not just on Fox News, but on CNN, some of the other major media outlets saying, no, these health care subsidies are things that my voters, my constituents, Trump voters really need.

18:45And they are going to get hit by these massive increase in their health care costs. And and and so that made her kind of a persona non grata among Republicans, too, because she was contradicting the messaging they were putting out. The first thing we need to do is focus hard on a serious health insurance plan for Americans. This is a crisis. It's like a building that is consumed in fire. The prices increased starting on January 1st and open enrollment started on November 1st. That should be number one. Number two, we need to dive into a very hard focused domestic policy that will reduce the cost of living for Americans.

19:26Donald Trump recently said, I made MAGA, make America great again. I'm the one who defines this movement. What I believe therefore becomes the movement, whereas the contrast is Marjorie Taylor Greene is kind of pointing to these are America first principles. These are MAGA principles Donald Trump has strayed from. Donald Trump doesn't essentially, she's implied this, Donald Trump doesn't make those principles. They exist. Donald Trump tapped into it. If that was a source of his success, when he's not in touch with them, then he needs to be called out. So it is kind of a debate about what MAGA means and the future of MAGA, because the reality is Donald Trump.

20:06And we talked about this on the podcast before. Donald Trump is only going to be in the White House for three more years. And the closer we get to 2028, the more we start thinking about and the more Republicans start thinking about what the movement is going to look like after he's gone. And I think Marjorie Taylor Greene, perhaps astutely, perhaps riskily also, but is trying to put her marker out there early, saying she's one of the first ones to start defining the movement after Trump. Looking at the coherence in the politics of it all, I think you can sum it up, can't you, by saying that Marjorie Taylor Greene believes she's speaking up for less well off Americans, the people who feel that they have been left behind over the last couple of decades, the people who did get very excited about Donald Trump because he was talking about how he could make their lives better.

20:54and she feels that he's strayed away from supporting them and she's going to carry on speaking up for them and the very kind of people who voted her in, of course, in Georgia in the first place. But, Anthony, have you got a sense, you're in Tennessee, of where the voters are going with this? The people who, you know, thought that they supported both Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump now have to choose, now that Mummy and Daddy are fighting, as I saw somebody putting it earlier. Do they see Marjorie Taylor Greene as speaking up for them and Donald Trump having lost his way? I've spoken to quite a few Republicans here in Tennessee over the past couple of days.

21:31And by and large, the feedback I get from them is that this is still Trump country. They don't necessarily agree with Donald Trump on everything. They actually have some issues with him on these H-1B immigration visas for skilled workers. They have some questions about the tariffs and how they're impacting the soybean farmers who work around here. They have some questions about affordability and cost of living and how much that's being addressed. But when it comes to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Trump and that feud, they side with Donald Trump. And I really haven't heard much support for Marjorie Taylor Greene kind of cutting away from him.

22:10One Republican I talked to a couple hours east of here out in the hill country of Tennessee, he said Marjorie Taylor Greene is having a midlife crisis. He's not sure what's going on with her, but she's lost her way. And they don't like that kind of outspoken criticism of Donald Trump. So maybe we'll see it start to filter here eventually, because there are some concerns about how Donald Trump is governing some of his policies right now, but it's not showing up in siding with her over Trump in this feud. Yeah, although in Georgia, I mean, I've heard a lot of voters there saying quite the opposite, and they do seem to support her.

22:49I guess that's probably not unusual in her own district that people would be supportive of her and pay more attention to her possibly than voters in other parts of the country. But I mean, we don't think she would struggle to get reelected next year, do we, Anthony? I think there'd have to be a credible Republican opponent to her in the primaries in that northern Georgia congressional district. And there's been some talk about Laura Loomer, who is an outspoken Trump supporter, probably, you know, even more outspoken, even more of a supporter of Trump than Marjorie Taylor Greene was at her height.

23:25But her coming in and running against her. But that doesn't seem like the kind of candidate that could unseat Greene. It would have to be someone who has connections to North Georgia who can run to her right and then beat her in the primary. And I haven't seen anyone coming forward like that yet, although it will be a test if Donald Trump really decides to put his weight behind her primary opponent, if there is one. But if Donald Trump can't unseat her, this becomes very interesting, doesn't it? Because that that's always been the threat that keeps a lot of Republicans in line in Congress. And the way that Donald Trump can get them to support his ideas and vote the way he wants them to is by saying, if you don't, if you break with me, I will back another Republican, a primary opponent and get you unseated.

24:07That's the ultimate threat he uses to control his congresspeople. So if he cannot do that, if she is allowed to get away with saying the things she has been and cruises to re-election, that's really going to take away quite a lot of his power over his own party, isn't it? Yeah, that's the fascinating thing about this is that Donald Trump typically has been able to marshal his base who will go out and support who he says to support or vote against who he targets in the primaries. But right now on the Epstein files in particular, but perhaps on some of these other issues like immigration, H-1B visas, on trade, on affordability, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republicans feel like they have a better feel for where the base is rather than Donald Trump.

24:55And when it comes to that question that Zach asked right at the start about could Marjorie Taylor Greene actually be someone who runs to be president? I mean, do we think that that is something that could happen? Because I, particularly when I heard her talking about the toxic politics thing and really changing her mind on that, it felt much more presidential, if that's the right adjective, than the way that she would normally speak. It felt like she actually and maybe that is one of the impacts of Charlie Kirk's killing, as she highlighted, that actually politicians like her do decide that they want to do politics in a bit of a different way.

25:28It's hard to imagine her surviving a presidential campaign and being taken seriously throughout it. But then again, you know, that's exactly what people said about Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016, isn't it? I mean, just to give you a sense, though, of what she can be like, admittedly before she started apologising for toxic politics, have a listen to this exchange with Sky reporter, Martha Kellner, when she was daring to ask Marjorie Taylor Greene some questions about that Signalgate scandal. Anybody else? Should the Defence Secretary and the Vice... Wait, what country are you from? From the UK.

26:03OK, we don't give a crap about your opinion and your reporting. Why don't you go back to your country where you have a major migrant problem? Okay, do you care? No, no, no, no, you should care about your own borders. Do you care about American lives being put at risk? Let me tell you something. Do you care about people from your country? What about all the women that are raped by migrants? Do you care about American lives being put at risk? About service members fighting for your country? I don't care about your vice president. And your defense secretary. This is an American journalist, thank you.