Transcript: Trump Rages as MTG Wrecks Him on CNN with Perfect Epithet

As Marjorie Taylor Greene savages Trump as “failing,” a sharp observer of Trumpworld explains why the Iran fiasco has unleashed urgency within MAGA to move past him—and why it’s a breaking point for the rest of us.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 10 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

After we recorded this episode, Trump erupted in a long, angry tirade yet again at Greene and many other critics.

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 really angry at Marjorie Taylor Greene right now, and it’s because of this. In an improbable turn of events, Greene has emerged as a very effective critic of the president. A remarkable new CNN interview demonstrates why. In it, Greene said that Trump is mentally unfit for the presidency, that the people around Trump really need to rein him in, and that Trump is catastrophically failing. This is the watershed moment. Trump’s disastrous Iran war and his threat to obliterate Iranian civilization are clearly pushing Republicans to look past him. Salon’s Amanda Marcotte had a good piece arguing that in some basic sense, Iran is breaking Trump. So we’re talking to her about this obvious sunsetting that we’re seeing in the president. Amanda, always nice to have you on.

Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So Trump had this really stupid and juvenile tweet about Greene. He called her “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown” because Greene turns to Brown under stress, he said. Trump claimed she’s deranged and even suggested that she smells. On CNN, Greene was asked to respond to this. Listen.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (voiceover): You don’t respond to bullies and you don’t pay attention to people when they’re failing. And President Trump is failing right now. And so he’s the man that’s lashing out. I mean, after all, this is the man that threatened to wipe out an entire civilization of people. You can’t respond to someone like that. They’re mentally unstable.

Sargent: Amanda, I think the kill shot there is that Trump is failing. Everybody knows this is the case. At this point, Trump is making Marjorie Taylor Greene look like a stateswoman, which I didn’t see coming. What did you think of all that?

Marcotte: Yeah, what’s funny is like the very thing that made her such a thorn in people’s side before is kind of what’s her superpower right now, which is she is in a lot of ways kind of a normal person. Like she was before—when she was a conspiracy theorist whose mind got a little deranged by the pandemic—when she was in Congress, she was channeling, I think, a lot of low-information, normal people’s reaction, you know, on the right, but nonetheless, normal people’s kind of unhinged reaction to those set of events. And now that things have normalized a little and she’s gotten a little better educated about politics, she is channeling a very different kind of normal person reaction. But at the end of the day, like, she is not coming from an elite point of view.

Sargent: Yes. And I think she’s a business person herself. And so I think she probably speaks to these certain elements in the Trump coalition that aren’t MAGA, that are business owners, the reactionary car dealer owner, for instance, small business people—they clearly got the brunt of the tariffs and are really getting clobbered by inflation under Trump. And I think she kind of crystallizes a sense among those demographics that this guy is just fundamentally unfit, that this is just a failure. The whole enterprise is a failure. Does that seem right to you?

Marcotte: I think that’s really insightful. I think that he always connected with what Marxists would call the petit bourgeoisie, right? But yeah, like that, the small business owner types, because they actually kind of mistakenly saw themselves in him. He presented himself as an entrepreneur. That was always untrue. He was actually just a nepo baby living off of his dad’s money. But I think they therefore thought that he would at least have their best interests in mind. And now it’s very clear that he has nothing but contempt for the actual entrepreneur because he does not do anything to support them.

Sargent: Absolutely. Well, let’s check out a little bit more of Greene. After Trump tweeted his threat to obliterate a........

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