Trump Condemns Marjorie Taylor Greene, Praises Mamdani
▻https://www.thenation.com/podcast/archive/sms-112525
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25.11.2015 by Jon Wiener -Last Friday Marjorie Taylor Greene announced that she was quitting after Trump excommunicated her from MAGA, while the same day Trump welcomed Zohran Mamdani to the White House with open arms and high praise. What’s going on in Washington? Harold Meyerson comments—he’s editor at large of The American Prospect.
Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the Hour: Alice Waters, the legendary chef who founded Chez Panisse in Berkeley, will talk about how to make school lunch delicious, affordable, organic, and beautiful – and locally sourced from regenerative farmers. Her new book is A School Lunch Revolution. But first: Majorie Taylor Greene is out – and Zorhan Mamdani is in? Harold Meyerson will comment – in a minute.
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We’re still thinking about the wild week where Marjorie Taylor Greene announced she was quitting after Trump excommunicated her from MAGA. While on the same day, Trump welcomed Zohran Mamdani to the White House with open arms and high praise. What the heck? For comment and analysis, we turn to Harold Meyerson. He’s editor at large of the American Prospect. Harold, welcome back.
Harold Meyerson: Always good to be here, Jon.
JW: Let’s start with Marjorie Taylor Greene. On Friday, even her closest associates were stunned when she posted a 10-minute video on X announcing she would be leaving office January 5th, one year before her term expires. She’s the one who talked about Jewish space lasers starting forest fires, taking antisemitism to new heights. She promoted Trump’s claims of election fraud that led to the Capitol riot of January 6th, 2021.
In the last few months, though, she split from Trump on at least three fundamental issues: She called Israel’s action in Gaza “genocide.” She said Trump was wrong to cut healthcare. And she defied Trump on release of the Epstein files. Trump responded by calling her “Marjorie Traitor Greene” and said he’d endorse a challenger to her in the next primary. So she quit. The simplest conclusion we can draw is that if you don’t agree with Trump, you can’t be in the Republican party. Is that the way you see it?
HM: To a certain degree, yes. Marjorie Taylor Greene, if she’s to be judged only by her last month or two, has been coming around to what we might term “reality,” and it’s always a welcome development. When people do that, we encourage such excursions into what may be terra incognita for that particular person.
But also a couple of points. First of all, by announcing she would leave on January 5th, her term in office would then include five years, which makes her eligible for the Congressional pension. I suspect she’s been thinking about this for a while, even though she wasn’t telling anyone about it — precisely because at some point it occurred to her she could leave on January 5th and still collect her pension.
That said, she probably has some kind of future in the post-Trump Republican party, which will really begin to take shape after the midterm elections, when Trump, despite his best efforts to completely flout the Constitution, will be the lamest of ducks.
JW: I want to talk a little bit more about her critique in her 10-minute video, the kind of talk you hardly ever hear from elected officials: She said “during the longest shutdown in our nation’s history, I raged against my own party for refusing to pass a plan to save American healthcare and protect Americans from outrageous, overpriced, and unaffordable health insurance policies. The House should have been in session every working day to fix this disaster, but instead America was force fed disgusting political drama once again from both sides of the aisle.
“People know,” she said, “how much credit card debt they have. They know food costs too much. They know their rent has increasingly gone up, that the college degree they were told to earn only left them in debt and with no big six figure salary. They can’t afford health insurance or practically any insurance. And they just aren’t stupid.” Doesn’t that sound a bit like Bernie?
HM: Yeah, but for the reference to sharing on a bipartisan basis the blame for the shutdown, that could have been said by any mainstream to left-of-mainstream Democrat, and that obviously comes as a surprise. But as I said in my previous remark, we’ve got to welcome anyone who begins to grapple with what is the reality that most Americans have to live through today.
JW: Are you suggesting that she should or could become a Democrat?
HM: I think there’s still too many issues that would keep her from doing that — on the social side of the spectrum. But we have to acknowledge, and she’s apart from this, but we have to acknowledge sort of the Josh Hawley tendency within the Republican party to attempt to begin to grapple with the immense economic inequality in the United States. Josh Hawley is becoming what Thomas Paine would’ve called “a sunshine soldier” for some unions. This is all related to the Republican party increasingly seen as having a working-class base and the realization therefore of a number of Republican elected officials, not a lot, but some, that the working class is not making out at all well, and that traditional Republican economic policy is complicit in the sort of dismal state of economic affairs for the American working class.
JW: Yeah. What seemed to rankle her the most was being called a traitor. She said she had been loyal to Trump except for “standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich, powerful men.” She said, “that should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States who I fought for.”
HM: Well, she has a very good point. I find nothing there to argue with a single syllable of. Trump’s criteria for traitor boils down to are you sufficiently pro-Trump today? So it’s actually a very low bar to clear, and as far as Trump was concerned, she had cleared it.
JW: Well, she’s in some ways a step ahead of most people. She said “Republicans will likely lose the midterms. Then I’ll be expected to defend the president against impeachment after he hatefully dumped tens of millions of dollars against me and tried to destroy me.” Well, that’s a good reason to quit.
HM: Yeah, you would think. I mean, if this were a legal brief based on facts, never mind legal precedents, there would be very little to quibble with.
JW: Then she went on CNN and said, quote, “I’m sorry for taking part in the toxic politics.” I have to say there’s some skepticism among some of our friends that she is really intent on pursuing a kinder, gentler politics. Do you share that?
HM: Well, I don’t really go into the prophecy business. If she runs for higher office, either statewide in Georgia or nationally in 2028, she still has to win votes from what is essentially the MAGA base. And so that will require her not to jettison all of her past customs.
JW: Yeah, the local Republican party in her district, this is north of Atlanta, issued a statement affirming its “unwavering support for her” and praised her for “working tirelessly to support the needs and views of her constituents.” But the same group declared in the same statement, “our support of Representative Greene does not in any way diminish our total support for President Trump.”
HM: Right. And if she runs for any other office, that’s still the electorate she has to grapple with.
JW: So she joins Liz Cheney and a actually pretty distinguished group of people — Senator Thom Tillis from North Carolina, who came to the same conclusion; there’s lots of others on this list.
HM: And of course, all of the old Bush neocons, most of them have long since bailed. Many of the Reaganites. Yeah, this is a different Republican party. It’s really a cult of Trump, and if you don’t want to be in the cult of Trump, odds are you will either find your own way or be booted out of the Republican party.
JW: The same afternoon, Mamdani went to the Oval Office. This is just after Trump called Marjorie Taylor Greene a traitor. Trump treated Mamdani in a warm and friendly way, expressed hope that Mamdani would be a “really great mayor” and that he was “confident that he can do a very good job.” The two of them agreed that cost of living issues were key in American politics today. And as for the police, the Republicans have been trying to paint Mamdani as anti-police. Trump said he would feel safe living in New York with Mamdani as mayor. He said he had no plans to send federal troops to New York City, which is a huge thing for Mamdani as he prepares to take office. Nothing about Mamdani being a communist lunatic or a stupid person, and nothing about withholding billions in federal funding from New York City. Instead, Trump said he’d “feel very comfortable” living in New York City with Mamdani as mayor. Trump told reporters, “we agree on a lot more than I thought. I want him to do a great job and we’ll help him do a great job.” Well, that’s a surprise.
HM: It is a surprise. Several observations. First, at kind of a fundamental level, Trump is sub- ideological. Trump’s value system is based on “what can you do and what have you done for me?” Now admittedly, Mamdani has not really done anything for Trump, but I think there are a lot of CEOs and Wall Street types who live in New York who understand that, if Trump does to New York what he tried to do to Los Angeles, what he’s doing in Chicago and now Charlotte, in a city as densely populated as New York, that could just lead to all hell breaking loose — or just perpetual gridlock, metaphoric and literal. And I think a number of those folks have spoken to Trump probably about all of that.
Also, from Mamdani’s point of view, look, Mamdani, I think historically quite correctly, cites Fiorello La Guardia as the greatest mayor of New York. But Fiorello La Guardia had the closest relationship with the president of the United States probably of any mayor of any city in American history. Much of what he was able to do in New York City was based on his personal conversations with Franklin Roosevelt and Roosevelt’s appropriation of lots of funds to New York City. And Mamdani completely understands that Trump has the power to really screw up New York. There are boats he does not need to rock.
And Trump loves a winner. That’s the other side of this, so, and Trump understands when someone runs a smart campaign. Trump valorizes winning above anything else, I mean, this is the flip side of his doing things like denigrating Americans captured in wars as prisoners of war, they were “losers,” therefore, and he’s expressed that opinion. So this was the weirdest of convergences. But weird is in addition to other through lines of the Trump administration. Weirdness is certainly one of ’em.
JW: The weirdest moment for a lot of us came when a reporter asked Mamdani about his having called Trump a fascist, and Mamdani kind of paused, and Trump jumped in and said, “You can just say it. That’s easier. It’s easier than explaining it. I don’t mind.” He says publicly, he doesn’t mind being called a fascist by the mayor of New York. What is going on?
HM: [LAUGHTER] Well, just as Mamdani admires fear Fiorello La Guardia, Trump may admire Bonito Mussolini. Choose your favorite person of Italian extraction. Like I said, weird is definitely au courant.
JW: And this post-ideological thing of Trump’s returns dramatically here.
HM: Trump has had the government buy or get a controlling share de facto in any number of corporations. That’s either called state capitalism or some version of socialism or whatever. He’s not really hemmed in, for better and worse, mainly worse, by the usual ideological constraints that have hemmed in every previous president of the United States and most of the people who go into politics.
JW: So where does this leave the Republican party? They had been planning to run a midterm national campaign that would put Mamdani at the center of their picture of the Democrats: Mamdani the Communist, Mamdani the Jihadist, Mamdani the Muslim radical, as the face of the Democratic party; anti-police, anti-capitalism, anti-Israel. Has Trump wrecked all that?
HM: Well, he sure has for now. I mean, I think, look, Republicans are going to need a theme at the moment. The economy is their enemy. They’ve tried to distract the gubernatorial campaign in Virginia. The Republican had, I think someone calculated, 50% of her ads were about trans people in women’s sports, and that had no effect. The Democrat won that race by 15%. And so what Trump with Mamdani certainly leaves the Republicans sort of desperately groping for themes.
I mean, this is a time-honored Republican tradition. A friend of mine showed me a little like one-minute video that Mamdani turned out in praise of a member of Congress in New York’s historic past named Vito Marcantonio, who was a protege of Fiorello La Guardia and represented East Harlem in the 1940s in Congress, but also was pretty close to the Communist Party in that he kind of followed what the American Communist Party did vis-a-vis foreign policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.
Well, the Republicans eventually tried to run against every Democratic member of Congress by pointing out, “look, he voted on the same side as Vito Marcantonio.” That is like voting to set up a post office in Omaha, Nebraska. But it was on the same side as Vito Marcantonio, and the Republicans clearly would like to have done this with Mamdani. I suspect they still will find a way to do it, but Trump sure gave them a major obstacle in the middle of that road.
JW: Of course, Mamdani doesn’t take office until January 1st, which is what, five weeks from now. Five weeks is a long time in Trump world.
HM: Trump may discover some ties to Satan himself that Mamdani has between now and January 1st. Or he may have discovered them on January 10th. So everything with Trump is provisional.
JW: One last thing this weekend: there’s a big consumer boycott being organized, a pause on shopping at three major corporations that have supported Trump, sponsored now by Indivisible, the Working Families Party, Black Voters Matter, and more. Together they issued a collective call for a boycott this weekend titled, “We Ain’t Buying It.” From Thanksgiving black Friday to Cyber Monday, they say, don’t buy anything from Home Depot, from Target, or from Amazon. Those are the three targets, because Home Depot has allowed its parking lots to become ground zero for ICE raid on immigrant day laborers and its billionaire co-founder Bernie Marcus has funneled millions into Trump’s campaigns.
They’re saying, don’t buy anything this weekend, black Friday through Cyber Monday, from Target. Target once branded itself as afriendly, inclusive big box store. Now it has scrapped its DEI goal, and scaled back its LGBTQ offerings to avoid angering Trump.
And don’t buy anything this weekend, black Friday through Cyber Monday, from Amazon. Amazon didn’t just shower Trump’s inauguration with cash. Jeff Bezos’ company pitched facial recognition tools to ICE, and Amazon Cloud services, powers, the Palantir system ICE uses to track and deport immigrants.
People say, “well, three companies — aren’t there lots of other companies that have supported Trump and contributed to his inauguration?” Ezra Levin of Indivisible explained it: “We want to concentrate our focus on Home Depot, Target and Amazon because we’ve seen that organizing is far more effective when it is concentrated, when it is easy to join. Doesn’t mean they’re the only three. They’re the ones, but they’re the ones we’re going to focus on this weekend.”
I wonder what you think about consumer boycotts. I myself was skeptical until the boycott of ABC and Disney actually brought back Jimmy Kimmel.
HM: Yes. Well, that was a particular incident which got sort of universal recognition. It was so much in the news that it produced a real backlash. I’m not sure this will produce that, a backlash on that scale, because there’s no precipitating one event that is dominating the news as the temporary sacking, we didn’t know was temporary at the time, of Jimmy Kimmel.
That said, Amazon controls just such a high share of American consuming, of American buying, that if you just really got something going at Amazon, that would be huge. But then again, of course, Amazon shopping is done on your phone or on your home laptop or what have you. So that’s kind of hard to mobilize as well. But I’m for whatever works. You and I are old enough to go back to the old grape boycott of the United Farm workers around 1970. So these things can have long-term and short-term effects, and Indivisible is certainly right that they really only work when you focus on just a handful of companies or a single company.
JW: So “We Ain’t Buying It” – from black Friday to Cyber Monday, not from Home Depot, not from Target, not from Amazon. More information online at weaintbuyingit.com.
Harold Meyerson — read him @prospect.org. Thank you, Harold.
HM: Always good to be here, Jon.