Marjorie Taylor Greene attempted to drive a wedge between a MAGA voter bloc that once counted her as an adherent and President Donald Trump.The former Republican congresswoman posted a video Tuesday morning revealing the lengths taken by the Trump campaign to stifle QAnon conspiracists at campaign rallies, even as the 80-year-old president continues to court their support with social media posts winking and nodding in their direction."You know, I used to follow Q back in 2017, when those posts were actually made," Greene said. "The whole 'trust the plan' thing, the White House is posting Q propaganda on its social media accounts, and I want you guys to know something, I think you should know this.""Back during the 2020 campaign and the 2024 campaign, where, by the way, I spoke at more Trump campaign rallies than any other elected Republican," she added.Greene was one of Trump's strongest allies in Congress until she broke with him over the Jeffrey Epstein files and foreign policy, and she warned after retiring from the House that the president shows no loyalty to his allies. "The Trump team would throw out people, any rally attendee," Greene said, "if they had a Q shirt, QAnon, 'storm has arrived,' 'where we go one we go all' – if they were wearing a shirt, a hat, a button or had a flag or anything – they were kicked out or they were made to change their shirt, take off that hat. During a Trump speech in 2024, when it was the nation in decline part of the speech, with the really sad music, any time these attendees would put their finger, like, make a number one and they pointed it to the sky, security was sent around and they were forced to take their finger down and told not to do that. You want to know why?""Because Trump team didn't want to be associated with the QAnon crowd and they were embarrassed of the Q people and embarrassed of all of that, and that's how they treated them," Greene added. "But now flash forward to 2026, when it's Trump himself that has betrayed the America first wing of MAGA and turned MAGA into Israel first, and he has totally flipped on a bunch of his campaign promises, well, now they're trying to throw out the Q slop and propaganda to get you guys sucked back in, to get you guys sucked back in. Never forget how you were treated – never forget."
New York City's ethnic fault lines are on full display in the closing days of highly contested Democratic primaries across the Big Apple, with Zohran Mamdani and his fellow socialists taking heat for exploiting racial and religious divisions.
The post New York Democratic Primaries Get Ugly: Darializa Avila Chevalier and Adriano Espaillat Trade Blows Over ‘Vile Racism,’ Mamdani Slammed for ‘Monsters’ Slur appeared first on .
Monday, June 22nd on RealClearPolitics - Joined by Greg Swenson, Chairman of Republicans Overseas UK: 00:00 Mamdani Wades into NY Primaries17:05 What Keir St...
A pair of Democratic House primaries in New York City are pitting liberals against leftists as a pair of democratic socialists battle against progressive candidates Tuesday. Democratic socialist candidates Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, who are both endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, are running against liberal candidates Antonio Reynoso and Rep. Adriano…
Donald Trump’s renovation of the Reflecting Pool is a major fiasco, and it’s getting him angrier. In Truth Social posts, he raged at a journalist for covering the story. He fulminated that vandals had cut at 250-foot gash in the facade (which is entirely unverified). He hailed multiple arrests at the scene. He even angrily threatened 10 years in jail. Yet these arrests are only growing more questionable. One man detained is a 67-year-old former Olympian who said he just wanted to examine the peeling coating. Another person detained said she was merely pulling a piece of paint out of the water. These explanations, plus the tenuousness of Trump’s claims of vandalism, suggest a darker turn in the story. We talked to New Republic editor Michael Tomasky about his good piece on this whole mess. We discuss why Trump doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt on the arrests, why this story has deeper resonance for many ordinary people, and what it captures about Trump’s effort to destroy republican governance and turn Washington into an imperial capital, with himself in the role of “czar.” (After we recorded, Trump kept on raging.) Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump is growing angrier over the strange saga involving his plan to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which is beset with an algae problem and with peeling paint. In a series of posts, he’s raged at a journalist for reporting on it, fulminated that vandalism is the real problem, and hailed a series of arrests that have now taken place there, which are really bizarre and raise lots of unanswered questions.This whole sorry tale is taking on much broader significance than you might expect. It’s displaying many of the pathologies of this whole presidency and this broader moment in America—from the megalomania to the incompetence, to the corruption, to the sheer tinpot banana republic vibe that’s settled on our nation’s capital. Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic, has a good new piece digging into the subtext of this saga, so we’re working through all of it with him today. Mike, good to have you back on.Michael Tomasky: Nice to be with you, Greg. Thanks.Sargent: So before we get to the discussion of the arrests, can you quickly sum up one point for us? You argue in your piece that the Reflecting Pool saga is a real presidential scandal. I wondered if you could just recap the story up until the arrests—how we kind of went from having the Reflecting Pool as we’ve always known it to having one full of algae and peeling paint.Tomasky: Sure. Well, I gather that it did need work, drainage work, and that part of it is legitimate. And something was done under Obama that did cost a lot more, $35 million, and it didn’t fix the problem the way it was supposed to. So that may be part of Trump’s motivation. But his real motivation is his vanity and getting something, putting his stamp on Washington in advance of the America 250 celebrations, but just in general, for time immemorial.So he puts his name on the Kennedy Center, he puts his name on the Institute for Peace, and of course tearing down the East Wing and putting up that ballroom without any permits, without any of the normal processes that are supposed to come into play when you do something like that to a landmark historic building. And the arch in front of the Arlington Cemetery.So here we are. I don’t know why it had to be blue. Nobody really understands quite why it had to be blue. These people did a swimming pool for him in Virginia that was blue and he liked it, so it suddenly needed to be blue. It’s been green for a century. And now it’s become this disaster with the no-bid contracts and the massive cost overrun. He started out talking about $1.7, $1.8 million. It’s now nudging up against $15 million.And he said it was going to take a week and now—where is it?—six weeks, two months, and it’s going to go on and on.Sargent: And where did the algae come from? Can you just kind of take us up to the present? And I feel like that’s such a richly symbolic thing. He’s the “Drain the Swamp” president. He was talking about making this thing crystal clear, right? Making the water crystal clear, transparent, as it were. And he’s utterly failed at that. Now, I don’t know to what degree that’s his fault. Nature’s a complex thing, in fairness to Donald Trump. But it just seems perfectly symbolic in a way that it’s now filled with this infestation.Tomasky: Totally symbolic. And am I a marine horticulturalist? No, I am not. But I know this much just from reading about this. Until those Obama renovations, the source of the water for the Reflecting Pool, which is 18 inches deep around the edges and as deep as 30 inches in the middle, was Washington, D.C.’s drinking water supply. Then it changed, so that the source of water was the tidal basin. The tidal basin is the smallish body of water—it’s about the size of a lake, for people who don’t know Washington—and it’s where the Jefferson Memorial sits and where the cherry blossom trees surround it. So the water comes from the tidal basin. So there’s algae. There’s algae in water that comes from nature. Go figure.Sargent: OK, so Trump is getting angrier about the situation. In the last few days, he’s tweeted about the arrests we’ve seen at the Reflecting Pool. As of Saturday night, we’ve seen five people arrested and charged with vandalism. A number of others issued citations, according to the reporting. But what’s going on here is really murky, as it were. One of those detained is saying he reached into the pool to feel a piece of the liner that had become detached from the pool bottom. Another person was detained after taking a piece of paint out of the water.Mike, these don’t seem like Antifa vandals to me. Do we know anything more than this?