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US President Donald Trump said Friday he was pulling his endorsement for key ally Marjorie Taylor Greene after a string of disagreements, calling the hard-right representative from Georgia a “ranting lunatic.”
It marks an extraordinary rift in Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement a year before US midterm elections, with Trump facing growing criticism within the movement over the cost of living, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and his foreign policy, including support for Israel.
“I am withdrawing my support and Endorsement of ‘Congresswoman’ Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network.
“All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!”
Trump said he would be open to backing an opponent if Republicans in her state of Georgia decided to mount a primary challenge against Greene, saying people there were “fed up with her and her antics.”
“If the right person runs, they will have my Complete and Unyielding Support. She has gone Far Left,” Trump said.
Trump has, largely successfully, supported primary challenges against Republicans he considers insufficiently loyal in the past.
Greene responded quickly on X, saying, “I don’t worship or serve Donald Trump.”
She asserted that Trump was attacking her as punishment — and as a warning to other Republicans — because she supports efforts for the US Congress to demand the administration release the full Epstein probe files.
The split comes at a delicate time for Trump, following heavy off-year election losses earlier this month that have caused Republican jitters a year away from the 2026 midterms.
Firebrand Greene, 51, was until recently a diehard pro-Trump supporter — even wearing a “Trump Was Right About Everything” hat when he addressed Congress in March.
She has since broken with him on a host of issues, and Trump expressed frustration with her for the first time on Monday, saying she had “lost her way.”
An early sign of Greene’s rift with Trump came when she said Trump’s intervention on behalf of Israel in its 12-day war with Iran in June, during which the US bombed Iranian nuclear sites, was at odds with the president’s professed “America First” ideology.
Greene also broke with other Republicans over the summer by calling the war in Gaza a “genocide,” a charge Israel vehemently denies.
Greene has also been critical on health care and particularly the cost of living crisis, telling Trump to focus on the “home front” instead of foreign policy and peace deals.
Perhaps the most sensitive area of criticism has been Greene’s position on the Epstein scandal, which the White House has sought to cast as a hoax against Trump by Democrats.
The scandal ensnared Trump again in recent days after the US Congress released a trove of the disgraced financier sex trafficker’s emails indicating Trump “knew about the girls” and “spent hours” with one of Epstein’s victims at the home of the late pedophile, who died by suicide in prison during Trump’s first term, in 2019.
After becoming a leading voice calling for justice for victims of the notorious sex offender over the summer, Greene this week was one of a few MAGA rebels who backed a call by Democrats for a vote to push Trump to release files relating to the Epstein probe.
“And of course he’s coming after me hard to make an example to scare all the other Republicans before next week’s vote to release the Epstein files,” Greene said in her X post Friday night.
“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 added.
Greene’s sudden shift has prompted speculation that she is lining up for her own US presidential bid in 2028, although she has dismissed it as “baseless gossip.”
Famed for her scathing comments towards Democrats and journalists, Greene had previously made her name as a fierce defender of Trump’s policies.
She has also embraced QAnon conspiracy theories about a cabal of satanic child molesters running the US, suggested Israel was involved in assassinating former US President John F. Kennedy, and in 2018 asserted that California wildfires were ignited by a space laser controlled by the Jewish Rothschild banking dynasty.
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