Trump shifts message on tariffs and taxation
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Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
MTG reveals why she's defying Trump on Gaza
By Marjorie Taylor Greene has not been afraid to speak her mind to her millions of followers online, even if it means going against Republican leadership. These days, she frequently airs her populist opinions and conservative hot takes online and, like Trump, takes the feedback it generates into consideration. Her posts can, at times, cut against what others in the GOP are saying. MTG has also been known for going after lawmakers on her side of the aisle. But in doing so she's carved out a unique position as a top female voice in the party. 'When people, innocent people, are systematically being killed for who they are, is that not the definition of genocide?' Greene told the Daily Mail of the Israel-Gaza war. 'I don't know why I'm the only Republican saying it.' Greene caught headlines this week for being the first Republican lawmaker to liken the conflict to a genocide. The term carries heavy diplomatic implications. President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson have shied away from using the language to describe the war. They also have close ties to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The conflict has killed more than 1,100 Israelis and over 60,000 Palestinians, according to local authorities. As Israel has pushed deeper into Gaza , a hunger crisis has broken out. Dozens, including many children, have died of malnutrition. In a phone call with the Daily Mail Greene expressed surprise that her conservative colleagues were not speaking out more. 'So many Republicans believe in supporting Israel in any kind of war they want to wage and I don't agree with that.' 'I don't I don't think that's our biblical mandate to fund, pay for support and participate, and it's not just offense, it's murder of innocent people,' she told the Daily Mail. 'I can say I support Israel and I don't want to see Jewish people killed because they're Jewish.' 'But I can also say the same thing about I don't want to have to witness and have our country pay for the systematic genocide of an entire people group for the crimes of Hamas.' It's a crisis that Trump has even softened on in recent days. 'She [Melania] thinks it's terrible,' Trump told reporters of the conflict on Tuesday, noting his wife's heartbreak for the Palestinian children. 'She sees the same pictures that you see. And that we all see. And I think everybody - unless they're pretty cold-hearted or, worse than that, nuts.' 'There's nothing you can say other than it's terrible,' the president continued. 'When you see the kids. And those are kids - whether they talk [about] starvation or not - those are kids that are starving. They are starving.' Greene criticized her Jewish colleague Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., for posting a trite message to Hamas urging them to release the hostages, adding 'until then, starve away.' 'I can only imagine how Florida's 6th district feels now that their Representative, that they were told to vote for, openly calls for starving innocent people and children,' the Georgian hit back. Greene is also ramping up her political operation as the race for South Carolina governor gets into stride. Although she's not aiming for governor or for a Senate spot, for now, her millions of devoted followers may still prove handy. The MAGA firebrand and Trump ally still thinks she'd win her state with or without the president's - or the Republican establishment's - blessing. Which points to why she's been so brazen in recent comments critical of Trump. 'One day, I might just run without the blessing from the good 'ole boys club or the out of state consulting leaches or even without the blessing of my favorite President,' the 51-year-old wrote on X. 'One day, I might just run purely out of the blessing of the wonderful people of Georgia, my family and friends, but it won't be in 2026.' She added that she has a 'different perspective of the entire 2026 campaign cycle ahead and the fragile state of Republican control in Georgia.' Greene, a congresswoman first elected in 2021 to her northwest Georgia district, boasts a combined 7.4 million followers across her Instagram and X accounts. She has frequently used that following to sounds concern to what she calls 'the base,' what can be considered the core MAGA voters. In May, she sounded alarm about 'the base' not supporting U.S. military action with Iran. She warned that neocons were convincing Trump to get involved abroad and she pleaded for the president not to get involved in the Middle East. The strange X post raised some eyebrows at the time, but after the U.S. bombed Iran in June that warning now rings prescient. The Republican similarly stood against Trump's domestic policy agenda, the 'Big, Beautiful Bill' for AI policies it contained, loudly decrying the challenges they pose online. After raising concerns about the AI provision online, a group of legislators drafted a new rule to change the rule, and Greene's outcry ultimately resulted in the law being changed.
New Statesman
6 hours ago
- New Statesman
Maga zealots want to redraft the Civil Rights Act
Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images Donald Trump hoards attention like a preening gorilla at Washington's National Zoo, obscuring what his administration is actually doing. When asked in Scotland whether he would force Israel to give food to starving Gazans, for instance, he whined about not getting thank you cards for American aid and then offered up a Trumpian non-sequitur about how the stock market was booming. Such showboating is partly responsible for the growing view that Trump's style masks his real substance: that beneath the bombast lies a traditional Republican. Several of his predecessors, including Ronald Reagan, also wanted to expand executive power, abolish the Department of Education and rein in the administrative state. Trump's military build-up and raid on Iran have recast him as the heir to the Republican tradition of waging war abroad and cutting taxes and regulations at home. There is some truth to this. But away from the spectacle, Trump's Maga acolytes are undertaking a revolutionary redrafting of the purpose of the American government unlike what has come before. In Room 226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building on 23 July, across the road from the Capitol, his congressional loyalists were prosecuting their case to remake the state. Eric Schmitt, chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, opened a hearing on ending diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) with a tirade against the civil rights infrastructure established in the Sixties. He said the Civil Rights Act had led to 'a new racial caste system sanctioned and enforced by the administrative state'. Nevermind that an actual racial caste system existed before the Civil Rights Act. The Ur-text for Trump's most revolutionary followers is Christopher Caldwell's 2020 The Age of Entitlement. In it, Caldwell argues that the civil rights reforms formed 'a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible'. This regime, Caldwell thinks, elevated a new social contract centred around anti-racism. 'I take the Caldwellian view,' the chief Maga influencer Charlie Kirk told the New York Times earlier this year, 'that we went through a new founding in the Sixties and that the Civil Rights Act has actually superseded the US Constitution.' Trump's disciples, in other words, are pursuing something more radical than Reagan or the Bushes ever conceived: the overthrow of the civil rights settlement that was erected in 1964. In his first week Trump overturned affirmative action and then went on to root out DEI programmes across the government and, by proxy, in those companies the state works with. (Reagan's team once drafted an executive order to overturn affirmative action but he never signed it.) The assault has also been fought by Trump's appointed judges: by overturning Roe vs Wade in 2022 and then affirmative action the following year. A month after the election Caldwell wrote in these pages that Trump's victory, like those of 1992 and 2008, was as much a social revolution as a political one. Put simply, Caldwell thought the age of woke was coming to an end. The irony, however, is that according to critics like Caldwell, some of Trump's most extreme supporters are no longer interested in scrapping the civil rights reforms they loathe – and are instead using them to pursue their own ends. In simpler terms, as Caldwell and others would see it, parts of the right have gone woke. Trump's assault on universities uses accusations of anti-Semitism, for instance, as a bludgeon with which to bully progressive institutions into submission. The administration's campaign has led Columbia University to adopt a much more expansive definition of anti-Semitism in order to curry favour with the administration. Caldwell thinks this is a mirror image of progressive attempts to compel conservatives into obedience under Democratic administrations. 'The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gives tremendous power to the executive branch to both override congressional and local democratic legislation and really bring pressure to bear, including financial pressure, on all sorts of institutions, not just government institutions, but also private universities,' Caldwell told me. Caldwell thinks Trump is not interested in scrapping 'this incredibly powerful tool' but wants to 'use it for himself and from what we know about Trump, it shouldn't surprise us. He has a tremendous instinct for power.' This power grab is happening as a new, overtly white identitarian politics is asserting itself in Washington. Jeremy Carl, who was a senior official in Trump's first term and has been nominated for a State Department role this time, wrote in his 2024 book The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart that white people needed to start seeing themselves as white in order to fight apparent discrimination against them, which he and others argue began in the Sixties. Carl's book is not a plea for America to return to the ideals of a 'colour-blind' or classically liberal society, but a manual for one in which racial groups compete for power. He wants to co-opt the language of woke. He writes that ''No justice, no peace' applies to white people as well'. Those on the right who dislike positive discrimination because it treats people differently based on their skin colour are now being outflanked by parts of the movement that want to vivify the concept of whiteness. Tribal white politics has once again found a place at the heart of American power. Away from Trump's pyrotechnic gaggles with reporters, he sits astride forces far outside of his control. [See also: Donald Trump, the king of Scotland] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
The Guardian
7 hours ago
- The Guardian
Stephen Colbert on Trump's Scotland trip: ‘A grift for the whole family'
Late-night hosts recap Donald Trump using his taxpayer-funded time to open up a golf course in Scotland and an effort to rename the Kennedy Center after him. 'Folks, I read once that if you're a passenger in an auto accident, it helps if you're just a little drunk,' said Stephen Colbert on Tuesday evening. 'Because – and the science backs this up – a drunk passenger is a little loose. And if you're a little loose, you're less likely to get severely injured than if you tense up right before impact.' 'Which brings me to our president,' the Late Show host continued. 'I think at this point, it would help if we were all just a little drunk. Because maybe then it wouldn't be so painful when he drives the world into a telephone pole. 'We all know that he's crazy,' he added, 'but some of the crazy stuff is just to distract us from the crazier stuff. And maybe we should stop trying to stop every crazy, because stopping some of crazy makes the crazy stuff seem less crazy than he could possibly craze. And let's face it – if you think we're going to stop all the crazy, you cray-cray.' The latest 'case of cuckoo' came courtesy of a Republican lawmaker who introduced a bill to rename the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to the Donald J Trump Center for the Performing Arts. The bill's sponsor claimed that 'Trump is a patron of the arts and a staple of the pop-culture landscape'. 'I'm sorry, but it's true: Trump is a staple of pop culture. Just last week, he was great on South Park,' Colbert quipped, referring to the Comedy Central animated program whose latest season premiere showed a naked Trump in bed with Satan. The center was originally named for Kennedy just months after his assassination, as a living memorial for the slain president. 'You know what they say about those who forget the past: they name stuff after Donald Trump,' Colbert joked. In other presidential news, Trump spent the past few days in Scotland, 'to negotiate trade golf over his golf tariffs on European golf, because he went there to play golf,' Colbert explained. 'He spent your tax dollars to open his new course in Aberdeen', designed by his middle son, Eric – an occasion, as Colbert put it, that celebrated 'a grift for the whole family'. On Late Night, Seth Meyers recapped a recent JD Vance event in Ohio, where the vice-president was asked about the Jeffrey Epstein files still dogging Trump. Vance said Trump has been 'incredibly transparent about that stuff'. 'And I agree – we can absolutely see right through him,' said Meyers. On Monday, Trump said that the baseline tariff rate for the world would be between 15-20%, and added: 'You can't sit down and make 200 deals.' 'I mean, come on, where would he find the time?' Meyers joked. In a post over the weekend on Truth Social, Trump suggested that NBC – Late Night's network – should lose its broadcasting license. 'Oh, come on, the show wasn't that bad,' said Meyers next to an old still from Trump's NBC reality program The Apprentice. And during a media appearance over the weekend, Trump was asked whether he rushed to finish a trade deal with the European Union to 'knock the Jeffrey Epstein story out'. 'Oh yeah, I'm sure all the conspiracy theorists in Maga will stop talking about Epstein now that there's a new trade deal,' Meyers joked. ''So you think Trump was on the list or what?' 'Who cares! We can get cheaper sardines from Portugal!'' It's starting to seem like being president of the United States is Trump's side hustle 'Trump is in Scotland right now, seeing as his favorite island destination has been shut down,' said Daily Show guest host Desi Lydic next to a photo of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein. 'When a president is overseas, it's important for them to project strength and dignity, although an uninvited insect made that a little harder for President Trump,' Lydic said before a clip of Trump freaking out about an apparent bug in his shirt. 'Feels like Trump's accidental dance moves are way more impressive than his intentional ones.' 'I do understand why he was so frantic: that mosquito was also asking Trump about Jeffrey Epstein,' Lydic quipped. 'Now, Trump was not just wasting time playing golf,' she continued. 'He was also wasting time profiting off golf,' as he opened his latest golf course in Aberdeen. Lydic was not impressed. 'Just a reminder, this man is still the president of the United States,' she said. 'There's a lot going on in the world, and he's at a ribbon-cutting ceremony to promote his golf course? Is this his side hustle, or is America his side hustle?' 'We're just used to this now,' she added, 'but imagine if when Obama was still in office, he kept flying on Air Force One to open up Pizza Hut/Taco Bell franchises.'
