Losing My Religion – The Dispatch

To begin with, it’s a serious threat to the president’s previously unquestioned authority to define what is and isn’t MAGA orthodoxy.

Trump has invoked that authority repeatedly over the last six months to deflect criticism from his right flank. Last week, Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked him whether his support for H-1B visas for skilled immigrants contradicted MAGA dogma. “MAGA was my idea. MAGA was nobody else’s idea,” he replied. “I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else, and MAGA wants to see our country thrive.”

He gave a similar answer in June when The Atlantic pressed him to square his attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities with his “America First” commitment to avoiding foreign conflicts. “Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that,” the president said.

Trumpism has always been a moral project more so than a political one. It has its own internal moral code of ruthlessness and it demands from supporters a degree of devotion and obedience more common to religion than to politics. When Trump speaks of getting to decide what “MAGA” and “America First” mean, he’s claiming a quasi-papal prerogative to speak ex cathedra. As the founder of the faith, his pronouncements are necessarily infallible.

Not anymore, says Greene. The Epstein rebellion among House Republicans stands for the proposition that MAGA populism has discrete ideological content beyond the president’s whims and daily political needs and that, when those two conflict, loyalty is owed to the former, not the latter. That’s not just heretical, it’s schismatic.

Greene herself resorted to religious lingo in her first of three tweets responding to the president this weekend. “I don’t worship or serve Donald Trump,” she wrote, noting their disagreement over the Epstein files. “Most Americans wish he would fight this hard to help the forgotten men and women of America who are fed up with foreign wars and foreign causes, are going broke trying to feed their families, and are losing hope of ever achieving the American dream,” she added.

“America First” means something. That’s been the thrust of all of her criticism of him over the last few months, most notably when she broke with the GOP during the government shutdown by backing funding for Obamacare subsidies. “America First” means helping Americans struggling with insurance costs. “America First” evidently also means making sure Americans get the truth they’ve been seeking about Jeffrey Epstein—even if that makes life painful for the president.

Call it a populist Reformation if you like. Instead of letting a corrupt seat of authority dictate the tenets of the faith, Greene and the Epstein rebels want to devolve the power of deciding what MAGA means to the faithful. Or at least to more puritanical populists like Greene herself.

This is the first time in the Trump era, I believe, that the president’s supremacy as arbiter of populist orthodoxy has been successfully challenged. And success breeds success: Having just asserted themselves on Epstein, who’s to say whether emboldened populists won’t feel their oats and push back aggressively if the U.S. starts bombing Venezuela tomorrow? “Regime change is ‘America First!’” the president will bellow. Greene and her fans will answer: “Says who?”

I would not have guessed that Marjorie Taylor Greene, a notorious Trump-slobberer even by modern Republican standards, would lead the first meaningful right-wing rebellion against autocracy of this era.

The most interesting dimension of Greene’s response to Trump was only tangentially related to Epstein. As their dispute unfolded this weekend, she ended up making a traditional moral critique of the president’s behavior, which is unheard of for a prominent figure on his populist flank.

On Saturday, after he had publicly un-personed her as a member of MAGA, she alerted her millions of followers that his fans had begun threatening her life, sending pizzas to her home to let her know that they have her address and phoning in a bomb threat to her business. “As a Republican, who overwhelmingly votes for President Trump‘s bills and agenda, his aggression against me which also fuels the venomous nature of his radical internet trolls (many of whom are paid), this is completely shocking to everyone,” she complained.

It’s not shocking to anyone. Ask Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Liz Cheney, and Mitt Romney, to name a few examples, what happens when a Republican who agrees with Trump on most policies crosses him on a matter of personal “loyalty.” Intimidation is and will always be the stock-in-trade of populism because populists believe all political problems are ultimately tests of will. Simply apply enough pressure to break the will of whatever’s standing in your way, including death threats if necessary, and the problem is solved.

It is very late in the game for Marjorie Taylor Greene to suddenly be waking up to this, particularly given the occasional harassment and intimidation to which she stooped in her not-very-long-ago activist days. “I would like to say humbly I’m sorry for taking part in the toxic politics,” she told CNN in an interview when asked about that on Sunday. “It’s very bad for our country, and it’s been something I’ve thought about a lot, especially since Charlie Kirk was assassinated … I’m 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.”

I don’t believe a word of it. Her conscience was never bothered before (publicly, at least) when Trump put a Democrat or centrist Republican in MAGA’s crosshairs, which he does routinely. No one with earnest qualms about leopards eating people’s faces would wait until their own face was devoured to articulate them.

But the fact that she’s insincere shouldn’t blind us to the significance of her pretending otherwise. 

In a pseudo-religious movement like Trump’s, the only moral standard to which the president will be held by his disciples is the one he’s created for the movement. If he favors foreigners over Americans by supporting H-1B visas, that’s a moral betrayal. If he gives in to some Democratic demand instead of pulling out all the stops to “fight” back ruthlessly, that too is a moral failure.

He’ll never be held to traditional moral standards against, say, taking bribes or corrupting the government or sexually harassing women—or riling up his fans to menace someone who’s angered him—because to do that would lead inescapably to the conclusion that he’s unfit to lead. So right-wing populists have turned a blind eye to every bit of it, not wanting to admit the truth of his critics’ indictment of his character. “I don’t like the mean tweets” is as close as they’ve gotten to admitting that he shouldn’t be president, which isn’t very close at all.

Until now. “When the President of the United States irresponsibly calls a Member of Congress of his own party, traitor, he is signaling what must be done to a traitor,” Greene wrote in another tweet on Sunday, correctly. Trump is behaving immorally by inciting supporters to intimidate his enemies and she isn’t afraid to say so; if populists like her are suddenly willing to hold him to traditional moral standards like that one, maybe going forward they’ll be willing to speak out against some of his many, many other moral failings that have otherwise required Republican omerta since 2015.

Whether she’s sincere about it or just needling him opportunistically arguably doesn’t matter, in the same way that it arguably doesn’t matter whether Nick Fuentes is an earnest neo-Nazi or a clever troll targeting an underserved audience. Fuentes emboldens his admirers to speak up by using his platform to weaken the taboo against the beliefs they share. The same might go for Marge Greene with respect to calling out the president’s lousy behavior.

The most subversive thing about this episode, though, is her willingness to question Trump’s motives in resisting the release of the Epstein documents. Greene actually tiptoed up to the line in her tweets this weekend of wondering whether he might not be implicated in the matter after all. 

“It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out that he actually goes to this level,” she marveled on Friday, leaving the reader to wonder why. The next day, in her tweet about being threatened by Trump’s fans, she wrote pointedly, “I now have a small understanding of the fear and pressure the women, who are victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his cabal, must feel.” The insinuation was clear: Maybe Epstein’s old buddy Donald honed his craft at intimidating enemies as part of that “cabal.” 

That goes way beyond challenging Trump on who rightfully should decide what “America First” means. She’s calling the president’s populist credibility into question. And no wonder, as Jonathan Last notes: For once, he finds himself leading an establishment attempt to suppress the truth about a suspected conspiracy rather than leading an outsider insurgency to expose it.

When the pope is openly in league with Satan, the church is ripe for schism. In a populist us-and-them movement as feral as MAGA, Greene is implying that the leader no longer deserves an insuperable benefit of the doubt as to whether he’s more “us” than “them.”

And that matters, short-term and long-term. For one thing, it matters to how the Epstein saga will play out after tomorrow’s House vote. Lost in Trump’s call for House Republicans to release the files is the fact that he could call for the DOJ to release the files at any time. Normally his fans wouldn’t corner him by demanding that he be proactive and do so. But what happens now that he’s lost some of the benefit of the doubt?

What happens if Trump quietly encourages Senate Republicans to kill the House bill after it passes? That would be awkward given that he’s claiming “we have nothing to hide”; if that’s so, there’s no reason for the Senate not to pass the bill either. But let’s say they kill it at his behest, or they pass it and he vetoes the legislation. Will he get the benefit of the doubt about his good intentions from MAGA, as he’s always done before?

What if Trump signs the bill—and then Attorney General Pam Bondi declares that the DOJ can’t release the files on grounds that, conveniently, there’s now a criminal investigation pending into Epstein’s relationship with Democrats that the president ordered just a few days ago. (The House can have “whatever they are legally entitled to,” he said in his Truth Social post on Sunday, an important caveat.) Will populists accept that, or will they see it for what it is, a transparent attempt by Trump to create a “legitimate” pretext for continuing to suppress the files?

Never mind Epstein, though. What about 2026 and 2028?

Trump losing credibility among his base would make politics more volatile than it already is, transforming a pseudo-religious movement into something more like a traditional political movement. The president, hostile to accountability in any form, would yearn for the sense of impunity he’s enjoyed from having the right’s unconditional support since 2015 and would hunt for ways to restore it. Probably that means new us-and-them provocations designed to get Republicans to side with him tribalistically against the left.

I suspect he’s more likely to invoke the Insurrection Act at a moment when he fears he’s losing his base than when he’s riding high with them.

Meanwhile, the more he slides toward lame-duckery, the more anxious he’ll become about Democrats romping in next fall’s election and making his last two years in office miserable. His attempt to interfere in the midterms has already begun but will grow more aggressive as his political position weakens. At some point the 2020 playbook will be rolled out and Republicans will be told that another nefarious Democratic plot to steal power is afoot.

How will those Republicans react to a second “stop the steal” campaign led by a president who lacks the degree of credibility on the right that he had five years ago? How would the kinder, gentler Marjorie Taylor Greene react, now knowing firsthand what it’s like to be on the wrong side of the president’s wrath when the demagoguery is dialed up to 11? How would she react to Trump sending the regular military against American citizens under the Insurrection Act, for that matter? Do her misgivings about “toxic politics” include Trump’s fash-iest gambits?

They haven’t in the past, but do they now?

In time I wonder if we’ll view this episode as a momentous one for Trump’s presidency, not because it led to something incriminating being released in an Epstein document dump (Pam Bondi won’t let that happen) but because a disillusioned MAGA will probably be a less fanatic MAGA. The more reason Republicans have to look forward to a post-Trump era, the less obliged they should feel to support every corrupt thing he does to try to hold onto power.

Or so an optimist would say. A pessimist would say that The Big Rift will blow over the moment the Supreme Court strikes down his tariffs, sending figures like Greene into a frenzy about impeaching Amy Coney Barrett and packing the court or what not. Optimist or pessimist: Guess which one I am.