Latest news with #NeverTrumpers
Buzz Feed
16-06-2025
- Politics
- Buzz Feed
MAGA Showdown: MTG Clashes With Fox News Host
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Fox News host Mark Levin got into a social media turf war Monday over which one is the most 'MAGA.' The turf war actually started Sunday night when the controversial Georgia Republican took to X to comment on the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran. In her post, Greene declared that 'Everyone is finding out who are real America First/MAGA and who were fake and just said it bc it was popular' and predicted that going to war against Iran would 'quickly engulf the Middle East, BRICS, and NATO.' Everyone is finding out who are real America First/MAGA and who were fake and just said it bc it was popular. Unfortunately the list of fakes are becoming quite long and exposed themselves quickly. Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war… — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) June 15, 2025 @RepMTG / Via He torched the congresswoman's post Monday with a bitter response that minimized her status: 'Who died and named Marjorie Taylor Greene the queen of MAGA? Trump is MAGA. He received 77 million votes. You're a little known politician from Georgia. Hate to break the news to you. We're Team Trump. Go Trump!' Who died and named Marjorie Taylor Greene the queen of MAGA? Trump is MAGA. He received 77 million votes. You're a little known politician from Georgia. Hate to break the news to you. We're Team Trump. Go Trump! — Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) June 16, 2025 @marklevinshow / Via Still, Levin escalated things with MTG by retweeting a post she made in 2023 in which she posed with the leftist protest group CodePink. When MTG (who?) teamed up with Communist China backed Code Pink anti-American Marxists. That's not MAGA. — Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) June 16, 2025 @marklevinshow / Via However, it seems as if many MAGA members are more in line with Greene's views. As of Monday afternoon, she hadn't directly responded to Levin's attack posts but did make a more generic attack against 'ALL the Never Trumpers who turned into FAKE America First/MAGA experts after the polls showed Trump winning.' To ALL the Never Trumpers who turned into FAKE America First/MAGA experts after the polls showed Trump winning: Are you demanding America go to war in Nigeria to save God's people from Islamic terrorists too? Or does that only apply to God's people in Israel? — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) June 16, 2025 @RepMTG / Via Although Greene often gets mocked for her social media posts ― such as the time she criticized a bill she voted for without reading it first ― Levin seemed to get most of the criticism this time around. You have one of the lowest rated shows on fox Moderate banger tweets have more views than any given episode of whatever your show is called. — Cassandra MacDonald (@CassandraRules) June 16, 2025 @CassandraRules / Via There is no "we" here. You're a backseat driver who keeps leaning forward, trying to grab the wheel and turn the car off road. — George Alexopoulos (@GPrime85) June 16, 2025 @GPrime85 / Via Mark, I hate to tell you this, but more people know MTG than they know you. As far as Israel, they can defend themselves. They don't need the US for this, nor should we spend billions more on another war. Btw, I am not a hater. I listen to your show all the time. God bless. — The Dibster (@TheDibsterX) June 16, 2025 @TheDibsterX / Via This is a problem with folks on our side. We assume the 77million who voted for Trump are all MAGA. That's no more true than all 77mil being Republican. I often don't agree with MTG but she's definitely MAGA and right on her anti-war position. — Melik Abdul (@MelikAbdul_) June 16, 2025 @MelikAbdul_ / Via
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Jonah Goldberg Distinguishes Conservatism From the Trump Right
In 2016, prominent conservatives warned fellow Republicans against backing Donald Trump in the GOP presidential primary. The billionaire real-estate mogul and reality TV star, Trumps conservative critics argued, was vain, vulgar, and mercurial; ignorant of public policy; and lacked commitment to conservative or any other principles. After Trump won his partys nomination, conservative Never Trumpers exhorted Republicans to vote in the general election for Democrat Hillary Clinton or a third-party candidate. To elect Trump, the Never Trumpers contended, would inflict long-term harm by legitimizing a rogue element within the conservative movement. Better to lance the boil early and suffer less pain later. During his first term, President Trump did much to please the conservatives who voted for him. Notwithstanding the drumbeat of accusations that he would destroy freedom and democracy in America and an onrush of his own over-the-top pronouncements on social media, Trump cut taxes and reduced regulations. He appointed conservative judges. He cracked down on illegal immigration. Until COVID-19 struck the world in the final year of his term, he presided over a growing, low-unemployment economy. His administration reoriented U.S. foreign policy around the overarching challenge to American freedom, playing out on every continent, presented by the Chinese Communist Party. And Trump accomplished all this despite a two-year special-counsel investigation that did not find evidence to vindicate the charge that he colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election, and an impeachment and Senate trial for improperly withholding aid from Ukraine that ended in acquittal. Trump then executed an astonishing political comeback - overcoming the Jan. 6 riots, a second impeachment, two civil lawsuits, four criminal indictments, and two assassination attempts - to win back the White House in 2024. The frenetic and tumultuous first four months of the second Trump administration have put the president and his teams still more at odds with traditional American conservatism. Whereas in 2017 he arrived in Washington accompanied by a small, largely inexperienced retinue, this time, no longer a political neophyte, he surrounded himself with an extensive network of officials, advisers, and assistants who share an overriding loyalty to the man and his agenda. Already, he has signed more than 150 executive orders that disrupt, scale back, or terminate long-established government programs. He has taken on the federal bureaucracy, illegal immigration, and elite universities. He has imposed, and then suspended or reduced, massive tariffs on Americas trading partners - friends and allies as well as China. He has scoffed at Americas promotion of freedom and democracy abroad while emphasizing the pursuit of peace and stability through commerce. And he has exploited social media not only to circumvent the press and communicate with the people directly but also to troll adversaries, including world-famous musicians. The second Trump administration seems to have thrown caution to the wind. Does it still make sense to characterize as conservative the president, his administrations shock-and-awe tactics, and the "New Right" for whom the president can seemingly do little wrong? In "Dont Call This Conservatism," a lengthy essay appearing mid-May in The Dispatch, Jonah Goldberg puts the matter starkly. "If being a principled defender of the constitutional order, limited government, free markets, traditional values, and an America-led world still makes you a conservative, are you still on 'the right when the loudest voices on the right reject most or all of those positions?" A prominent conservative voice for more than 20 years, the former National Review senior editor is editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Dispatch as well as the bestselling author of "Liberal Fascism" among other books, an AEI senior fellow, a Los Angeles Times columnist, and host of "The Remnant" podcast. Always entertaining and illuminating and as home in popular culture as in the classics of conservatism and the particulars of public policy, he insists that "[l]abels matter, because we use labels - terms, constructs, categories, words - to understand reality and chart our course through it, both individually and collectively." Goldberg credits the Catholic man of letters G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) with providing, in describing two reformers competing attitudes toward a fence or gate, a good first approximation of conservatism. "The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I dont see the use of this; let us clear it away," writes Chesterton. "To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If you dont see the use of it, I certainly wont let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." Whereas progressives are disposed to tear down to make way for the new, conservatives inclination is to preserve and improve what exists. Conservatism so understood designates both a temperament and an intellectual orientation. The 20th-century British thinker Michael Oakeshott, according to Goldberg, captures the conservative temperament: "To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss," Oakeshott observes. The conservative temperament cherishes the inherited, admires the beauty in the passing moment, and aims high while taking in stride the worlds rampant folly, perfidy, and ill fortune. A conservative in the intellectual sense brings such a temperament to life in the preservation and improvement of a particular tradition. An American conservative, for example, cultivates and transmits the nations fundamental beliefs, practices, and institutions. That starts with Americas founding principles and constitutional practices: individual rights, limited government grounded in the consent of the governed, equality under law, free markets, and robust civil society composed of families, faiths, and a multitude of civic associations. It includes the convictions and virtues that enable a free people to govern itself and pursue happiness. In the 1960s, National Review senior editor Frank Meyer gave the name "fusionism" to the blend of freedom and traditional morality that undergirds Americas constitutional inheritance, and which reflects the logic of free and democratic self-government. Trump and the New Right that has consolidated around him, Goldberg contends, pose a fatal threat to traditional conservatism in America - temperamental and intellectual. Under the guise of rethinking or reinventing conservatism, the Trump right panders to the people by repackaging as conservative policies that fit popular grievances, Goldberg maintains. The Trump right endorses an "apocalyptic politics," insisting that American institutions - including the conservative establishment as well as the progressive establishment - are crumbling and that the right ought to hasten their collapse. It regards the rule of law as an instrument to be used and not used as pursuit of the common good dictates. It embraces the statism of tariffs and industrial policy. It downplays the power of American principles in diplomacy and disparages long-standing American allies. It celebrates manliness, which it equates with bravado, brute strength, and conquest, and which it severs from honor, virtue, and justice. Much of the Trump right would agree with Goldberg that it and traditional American conservatism represent divergent and increasingly clashing political outlooks. Yet that leaves open the prudential question whether given the circumstances, a traditional American conservative might reasonably have preferred Trump in 2024, as in 2016 and 2020. Oddly, given the importance that traditional conservatism attaches to prudence, Goldberg overlooks the question. But a traditional conservative is obliged to take stock of the world as it is. By 2016 it had become incumbent on traditional American conservatives to recognize that American conservatism had lost its way. Traditional American conservatives stress realistic assessment of the nations capabilities, fiscally responsible governance, and the dependence of politics on culture and education. Yet during George W. Bushs two terms, conservatives conducted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that fell far short of their objectives. In addition, they oversaw reckless increases in government spending. And they offered little opposition to the progressive culture war, not least on campuses, against traditional morality. Traditional American conservatives emphasize the importance of character to statesmanship and citizenship. Such a conservative might have sensibly viewed as the worse option the corrupt and cynical Hillary Clinton in 2016, the obviously declining Joe Biden in 2020, and the often unintelligible and progressive-left-backed Kamala Harris in 2024. And while traditional American conservatives can never regard the peoples passing predilections as the supreme guide to politics, in the 2010s popular discontent with self-regarding and incompetent elites surged throughout the rights-protecting democracies of the West. Far from lancing a boil by keeping Trump out of the White House, a vote for Clinton or Harris - as a vote for Biden demonstrated - would have paved the way for more hard-left policies that would have further alienated red-state America and intensified the grievances that Trump rode to victory in 2016 and 2024. In these situations, traditional American conservatives might reasonably have chosen to moderate the Trump right rather than join the resistance against it. Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at and he can be followed on X @BerkowitzPeter.
Times
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Times
Team Trump risks fatally misunderstanding Iran
Travelling in America, I've encountered three different political groups. There are dyed-in-the-wool Donald Trump supporters who won't tolerate any criticism of their hero, who can do no wrong; there are perpetually apoplectic 'Never-Trumpers' who won't tolerate any praise for the arch-fiend in the White House, who can do nothing right; and there are those who suppressed their doubts about Trump to vote for him because they loathed and feared the Democratic Party. These queasy Trump voters are currently enduring something of a dark night of the soul. It's not buyers' remorse: they remain certain that the Democrats would have promoted an ever more radical agenda to wreck America through the injustices, disorder and social divisions of progressive shibboleths. So they approve of Trump's onslaught against
The Hill
09-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Loomer spars with Surgeon General nominee's brother on X
Conservative advocate Laura Loomer is sparring on social media with the brother of President Trump's new nominee to serve as U.S. surgeon general. Loomer, who is known to speak with Trump and was seen as a player in the administration's decision to dismiss several national security staff members, railed against Casey Means' qualifications to serve as surgeon general after Trump pulled his original pick and nominated her to the position. On Friday, she and Calley Means, Casey Means' brother, continued their battle on X. Calley Means serves as a special government employee of the Department of Health and Human services led by Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. Both of the Means siblings are allies of Kennedy. Calley Means on Friday said he'd obtained information that Loomer was 'taking money from industry to scuttle President Trump's agenda,' he wrote in a Friday post on X. If that was incorrect, he invited Loomer to sue him and go to 'discovery,' tagging her in the post. Loomer responded in a lengthy post that said Means was 'full of s—' and argued he was trying to use his background in public relations to negatively impact her relationship with the president and the public. It made a litany of allegations against both Means siblings. 'You are a PR spin master (funny how you never talk about your career in PR and crisis management) and you are threatened by my access to President Trump and the fact that White House officials called me to discuss the posts I made about your sister,' Loomer wrote in her post. She accused Means of paying right-wing podcasters to back Calley Means for surgeon general 'despite her lack of qualifications.' 'Maybe you should sue me and we will find out in discovery,' Loomer than wrote. 'You are lashing out because your lies have actually made their way to the President.' Loomer also argued that Calley Means is a 'never Trumper,' arguing she has been with Trump from day one. Means fired back that the only time he had uttered the words 'never Trump' was during an appearance two months before last year's election on Joe Rogan's podcast where he argued that Trump must win the election and Never Trumpers must vote for him. 'She used this quote to imply the opposite,' he said of Loomer. 'I explicitly said that I didn't support Trump in 2016 to make the case to voters who were still on the fence out Trump in 2024. After this episode, I urged Joe to have Trump on and gave his producer the campaign's contact info,' he wrote. 'Before going into this Rogan episode, Casey and I prayed that we could communicate the existential nature of the chronic disease crisis and convince Americans to vote for President Trump – which Casey and I believe was existential,' he added, saying Casey Means was 'integral in forming messaging that contributed to millions of new' Make America Healthy Again voters. 'The fact that you would take this quote and show it to the White House to seed doubt about us shows what type of operator you are,' he added. 'Any pharma company in DC knows the best way to squash a nominee is to seed doubt about Trump loyalty. You took a quote where I was advocating for Trump on the most popular podcast in the world (quoted in a WSJ article explaining how MAHA voters are coming to Trump) and used to seed doubt about my loyalty to Trump. 'Who is paying you?'
New York Times
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Stephen Colbert Would Like to Know Who's in Charge Here
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. Spatchcocked The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, continues to cut a swath through the Civil Service. Or as Stephen Colbert put it on Wednesday, 'our government is getting spatchcocked by Elon Musk and his post-pubescent pink slip troopers.' 'Naturally, the federal workers in their path of wanton destruction are experiencing anger, chaos and confusion, which, coincidentally, are also the Secret Service code names for Trump, Elon and Don Jr.' — STEPHEN COLBERT 'It turns out being an unelected donor running an unauthorized employee kill squad might get you sued at some point in the future. So in new legal filings, the White House claims that Elon Musk is not in charge at DOGE. What? It's literally named after his favorite meme!' — STEPHEN COLBERT 'This is the most confusing leadership structure since Ruth's Chris Steak House. Who is Chris? Why does he seem to belong to Ruth?' — STEPHEN COLBERT 'Elon and the DOGE-bags have fired so many people so quickly, in so many critical areas, with so little thought beforehand, that the government is now scrambling to rehire the nuclear staff it fired on Friday. These are folks involved with designing, building and overseeing the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile after concerns grew that their dismissal could jeopardize national security. I share those concerns.' — STEPHEN COLBERT 'But here's the wrinkle and the rub: The government has struggled to reach the people that were fired after they were locked out of their federal email accounts. So now we got a bunch of [expletive] people with a lot of time on their hands who know how to build nuclear weapons.' — STEPHEN COLBERT 'Rehiring people on Tuesday that you fired on Friday does not scream 'government efficiency.'' — STEPHEN COLBERT The Punchiest Punchlines (On Principle Edition) 'And with Trump doing so much so fast, leave it to the Never Trumpers to do what little they can to make a fast buck. An event called the Principles First Summit convenes this weekend in D.C. What are their principles? Well, judging by the lineup, cashing in on whatever's left of Trump envy.' — GREG GUTFELD 'The biggest and most bitterest names in the anti-Trump world will be there: Adam Kinzinger, Michael Steele, Bill Kristol and George Conway. All that was missing was Joy Behar.' — GREG GUTFELD 'There are a few Dems to shore up the list of yesterday's pundits who've seen their audiences flee like Tim Walz hearing a car backfire.' — GREG GUTFELD Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
