The emerging rift between Donald Trump and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is turning out to be one of the most consequential political developments of the President’s second term. This is not so much because it threatens the administration’s position or the balance of power in Congress (that may come later), but because it points to something more significant: the existence of a larger MAGA narrative outside of the terms set by Trump himself.

On Friday, Trump publicly called his former GOP ally “wacky” and a “lunatic”, and suggested that she should be removed in next year’s elections. The following day, he labeled her a “traitor” and a “disgrace” over her criticism of the White House’s response to the Epstein files. A decision on whether to release more documents is set for a Congressional vote next week.

This is only the most spectacular disagreement between MTG and Trump, as it speaks to the very heart of the radical anti-elite narrative that animates so much of MAGA’s base. But the dispute encompasses more than just Epstein; in recent months, Greene has been offering up a series of increasingly focused critiques of the administration’s performance from a populist perspective.

On grocery prices, she has accused Trump of “gaslighting the people and trying to tell them that prices have come down”, even as she credits him for falling inflation. She holds that the President is not focused enough on domestic affairs, saying that “no one cares about the never-ending amount of foreign leaders coming to the White House every single week.” She is proposing an end to the infamous H-1B visas just as Trump makes the case for bringing in more skilled students from China, seemingly in contradiction to his earlier messaging. In July, she became the first Republican to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, breaking with the White House’s stance. And even on Obamacare, Greene has split with her party to preserve subsidies that help working-class Americans better afford healthcare.

These individual disagreements are less important than the overall effect of Greene’s rhetoric. They are exactly the kinds of broad but emotionally visceral criticisms which Trump himself made of the bipartisan establishment when he first ran in 2016, based on raw political instinct rather than either reasoned arguments or party orthodoxies.

Trump is right to respond that he needs to meet with foreign leaders to make deals. But the impression of too much time spent hobnobbing with heads of state in the newly gilded Oval Office while Americans are dealing with affordability issues is more likely to resonate with the populist base than not. Similarly, his pragmatic instinct to retain foreign expertise may make sense for those interested in advanced manufacturing, but the image of this president in particular seeming to sign off on giving yet more economic or educational opportunities to those from outside the United States will be particularly hard to swallow.

The same goes for those who criticize Israel’s influence on American policy. MTG’s defense of Obamacare also echoes the earlier post-2016 instincts of Trumpworld, which had been at least theoretically open to building on Democratic programs if it meant constituents received cheaper access to medical treatments.

In Greene’s public breaks with Trump, the contours of an alternative MAGA agenda can be discerned. The question is how much traction she could get first in her own district, where she must resist a Trump-backed primary challenger, and then in the wider voting base, which recent polling suggests is growing restive in its reception of the administration’s policies, especially concerning apparent modifications to its line on immigration.

Whether Trump supporters stay home or even turn on the President will have major ripples for the 2026 midterms, but the long-term stakes are even starker. It opens the path for an openly Trump-critical candidate in the 2028 presidential primaries, who could attack the incumbent from the Right and complicate any effort to crown Vice President JD Vance as the successor. Whether that challenger ends up being Greene herself is an open but not implausible question.

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Michael Cuenco is a writer on policy and politics. He is Senior Editor at American Affairs.

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