Pulling Apart

By Michael Warren

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

What could Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right former congresswoman from Georgia, say to a room full of middle-aged, tote-bag-toting liberals that would make them uncross their arms, turn to each other in amazement, and break into a raucous round of applause?

 

“I think MAGA is dead,” Greene said last week at the First Baptist Church in Austin, where she was participating in the keynote conversation on the first day of the Texas Tribune Festival.

 

Despite the cheers from the lefty audience, Greene was voicing her disappointment and disillusionment with Donald Trump’s political movement because of how it failed to live up to her hopes and expectations. On everything from avoiding foreign wars to exposing government cover-ups and conspiracies, she said, Trump’s second term has been a failure.

 

Her change of heart about the president began, she told Robert Draper of the New York Times while on stage, when she opposed a bill establishing specific regulatory frameworks for a type of cryptocurrency—a bill that Trump wanted to see passed. Greene said she told the president that if her amendment to the bill could get a vote and pass, she’d support the legislation; otherwise, she couldn’t vote for a bill she believed was a “backdoor for central bank digital currency.”

 

“He was furious at me,” she said. “They put a little chair up in front of the Resolute Desk. Imagine sitting in a chair in front of the president of the United States, where I proceeded to get yelled at for not voting for his bill.”

 

But the true break came when Greene tried to force transparency on the federal government’s evidence file on the late convicted felon Jeffrey Epstein. What she got in return was Trump calling her a traitor in public and yelling at her in private, she said. Since she resigned from Congress at the beginning of this year, Greene has been outspoken in her opposition to the war in Iran and to American support for Israel, which she calls a “murderous regime.” She has argued for invoking the 25^th Amendment to remove Trump from office and said the GOP should be “burned to the ground.” So whether or not MAGA is dead, it’s obviously dead to her.

 

In Austin last week, Greene argued there’s a distinction between the broader MAGA movement, which is still behind Trump, and “America First” proponents like herself that the president’s actions have isolated.

 

“They’re completely against foreign wars, against our hard-earned tax dollars being sent to foreign countries, and supporting killing children in places like Gaza, and sending our military to fight constantly,” she said. “That’s what we call America First.” MAGA, on the other hand, has “grotesquely changed into something I can no longer support.”

 

One of the pressing questions about Greene’s attention-grabbing divorce from MAGA and Trump is how many voters she and her fellow America First, disaffected cranks (including soon-to-be-former Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, former Trump administration intelligence official Joe Kent, and Tucker Carlson) could conceivably pull away from the GOP into a third party—or if that’s even the honest goal of Carlson’s effort to build some kind of political movement based on the idea that real MAGA hasn’t been tried. Watching the liberal TribFest attendees applaud Greene’s every word of opprobrium directed at Trump, I had the nagging sense that she isn’t the herald for a great exodus of Republicans.

 

But then I think about Kevin Stitt, the two-term governor of Oklahoma, who spoke just a couple of hours before Greene took the stage at TribFest. Stitt comes from a different wing of the GOP—business-oriented, pragmatic, and conservative but not conspiratorial—but has been expressing his own brand of independence from Trump. Last year, he criticized Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in states where governors objected, said Trump was getting “bad advice” in his draconian approach to interior immigration enforcement, and even got into a dispute with the president in his capacity as chairman of the National Governors Association. (Trump declined to invite two Democratic governors to a traditionally bipartisan meeting at the White House during the NGA’s annual gathering. Stitt said the meeting could therefore not be organized by the NGA, prompting Trump to post on social media that Stitt was a RINO. It was a whole thing, but relations are better now.)

 

I spoke with Stitt after his onstage interview in Austin about a number of economic issues and heard less disillusionment and more exasperation with a conservative party he views as having lost its way by doing a pale imitation of liberal economic policy.

 

“We need to get back to the Republican Party of getting our fiscal house in order, and I really believe that will bring prices down,” Stitt told me. “Deregulation, free markets: That’s what brings prices down. Not free grocery stores, not mandating 25 percent less beef on imports.”

 

That last reference, to beef imports, reflects the most recent area where Stitt, who was first elected in 2018, has directly challenged the Trump administration. In an attempt to lower beef prices, the president last month issued an executive order to increase certain beef imports and require this foreign beef to be sold at 25 percent below domestic market value. Stitt responded by urging “free market solutions” and the removal of government barriers to increase the supply of domestic beef.

 

The benefits of free markets and smaller government used to be almost an article of faith among Republicans, but since Trump’s ascension the party seems to have lost that understanding. I asked Stitt what’s changed. “I don’t know. I don’t know if we’re populist now or what the deal is,” Stitt said. “The farmers and ranchers that I’ve talked to in Oklahoma, they’re not worried about the competition and exports and imports because … as long as there’s been freezers, we’ve been importing beef. Where they had a huge concern was importing beef and demanding it [be] sold 25 percent lower. Like, that’s what we thought was weird.”

 

The word “weird” jumped out at me. It’s been more than 10 years since George W. Bush declared Trump’s first inaugural address “some weird s—–t,” but there’s always been a contingent of loyal Republicans who have tolerated, or learned to tolerate, the president’s unusual approach, priorities, and interests in governance. But these deviations in ideas and policies are harder to swallow when they’re not boosting the economy, solving problems, or helping Republicans win elections. For this certain class of Republicans, the weird stuff starts to be a problem.

 

During our conversation, Stitt indicated he wasn’t comfortable with the direction of the right on a number of issues. He agreed that the outright anti-immigrant position of people like Bo French is a problem for the GOP and argued for his interesting (but constitutionally questionable) proposal for giving states the authority to issue workforce permits to foreigners. He balked at the idea of the federal government taking ownership stakes in companies, something the Trump administration has embraced. (“That’s like Russian oligarch-type stuff, right?” Stitt said.) And he shook his head at the president’s proposal to write every American adult a $5,000 check if Republicans retain control of Congress after the midterms.

 

“I think it’s not good. It just doesn’t feel right to, you know, it feels like you’re trying to buy votes,” Stitt said. “It doesn’t feel good.”

 

My takeaway from the one-two punch of Stitt and Greene in Austin is that the MAGA coalition is breaking apart in ways that make it difficult to predict how the Republican Party will reconstitute itself ahead of 2028. Trump’s tent was big enough to include reluctant chamber-of-commerce types, QAnon conspiracy theorists, and everyone in between, but his second term is giving those folks fewer reasons to stay inside the tent.

 

Greene told the TribFest crowd that she has no interest in ever running for office again, and Stitt is term-limited and will be leaving his office in January, so both of these very different Republicans have more license than your average GOP official to criticize their standard-bearer out loud. But if things go as badly for the party in November as the polls keep suggesting, get ready for more and more Republicans, including those with ambitions of higher office, to start getting louder about what’s really gone wrong, bad, and weird with MAGA. Those who won’t be on the ballot for several more years, such as reliable Trump ally Sen. Jim Justice of West Virginia, are already beginning to hedge their bets.