There are feuds, and then there is whatever is happening between Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene right now.
This week, Greene went on CNN and called the president a traitor. Directly. On camera. “I’m saying exactly that,” she told anchor Kaitlan Collins, who had asked whether she was including Trump himself in her description of people covering up crimes. Greene did not waver.
The backstory is specific. Greene spent months pushing for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, the documents relating to the late financier and sex offender whose client list has been a source of ongoing speculation. Trump’s administration declined to release them. Trump then called Greene a traitor, per Fox News, and posted on Truth Social calling her “Marjorie Traitor Greene,” a renaming that combined his two most reliable instincts: nicknames and loyalty tests.
Greene’s response on CNN was to reverse the accusation entirely. “The man who campaigned claiming he would drain the swamp is the very man who fought to keep the Epstein files from being released,” she said. “Then he called me the traitor.” She added that Trump had sent her a text message telling her she “deserved it” after she said his attacks on her amounted to a “dog whistle to dangerous radicals” that had resulted in bomb threats to her family’s properties.
CNN reached out to a senior White House staffer. The staffer said Greene’s opinions were of no importance.
This is the distilled product of a movement built on the promise of exposing a corrupt elite. Trump was going to drain the swamp. The swamp turned out to include, per his most loyal former congressional ally, the president’s personal phone contacts and the decision to bury the files that might name them. The accusation is either true or it is not. What it is, regardless, is a former MAGA congresswoman calling the MAGA president a traitor on the most-watched liberal cable news network, while Breitbart covers it straight.
When the movement’s most reliable loyalists end up on CNN delivering the exact argument the movement was built to discredit, who exactly is winning?
Sources
Breitbart: Marjorie Taylor Greene: President Donald Trump Is a ‘Traitor’
Fox News: Trump continues hammering MTG after she labels his attacks a ‘dog whistle to dangerous radicals’
Fox News: Marjorie Taylor Greene: Marjorie Greene says Trump’s ‘traitor’ label could put her life in danger
