Transcript: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Midterm Bombshell: GOP Is Toast

As Marjorie Taylor Greene offers a dire prediction for the GOP, a skilled decoder of the right’s pathologies explains why Trump’s worsening travails are causing MAGA extreme cognitive dissonance.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 21 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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, who’s very angry over the Iran war, just unleashed more crazed threats at a host of new targets. He vowed economic warfare against anyone that helps Iran, but news organizations are struggling to figure out what on earth this is supposed to accomplish. This comes as Marjorie Taylor Greene just issued a stark warning to Republicans, claiming that Trump’s coalition is imploding, portending a GOP disaster in the midterms.

These things are linked. Probably nothing is wrecking the MAGA coalition more than his inability to find a way out of the war. You can see other signs that MAGA media is completely lost on how to deal with Trump’s total impotence. None of this was supposed to happen. So we’re trying to parse where MAGA goes now with New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan, who’s been writing really well on the MAGA crack-up. Virginia, thanks for coming on.

Virginia Heffernan: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: So Marjorie Taylor Greene is almost like a MAGA oracle at this point, or maybe like MAGA’s Greek chorus or something. She posted this video on TikTok about the midterms. Listen to this.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (voiceover): Let me explain to you guys how this is actually going to work. ‘26 midterms and the ‘28 presidential race is not going to be anything like 2024, where there was so much support for MAGA. The coalition came in. You want to know why ‘26 and ‘28 is going to be different? Because Donald Trump broke his big, big campaign promise of no more foreign wars, and actually has got us embroiled in a war with Iran, a war that should not be happening, and he’s not backing off of it. And it will probably get worse. So that has fed the affordability crisis. That’s why people can’t afford gasoline. That’s why people’s bills keep going up. Food prices are still going up. Beef is at all-time high. It’s ridiculous. You know what you should have done? You should have stuck to your campaign promises, and you should have delivered for the people that put you in office, not the ones writing you the big fat checks.

Sargent: When Marjorie Taylor Greene says the coalition is falling apart, all these voters feel betrayed by you, Mr. President—she isn’t just making a prediction. She’s essentially saying to these voters, you know, you shouldn’t show up for this guy because he fucked you, right? That’s what she’s really saying. And it’s true. She’s right about it.

Heffernan: She is absolutely right. And I think she also mentioned a tweet of Trump’s, where he said, sometime around the Epstein files, when she and Thomas Massie were agitating for the release of them—Trump is quoted as saying he doesn’t care about his old voters. And she and lots of people took that very personally.

And the way she describes those earlier voters, so his, like, diehard supporters in both 2020 and 2024—she says that they are basically the people that she’s often standing with. Women who care about affordability, but these are the women who may have been anti-vax, who may have been open to RFK, who may have even supported QAnon, the Marjorie Taylor Greene stuff. But then, on the more sane side of things, also really don’t want war.

War is never very popular with women, going back to times when women were worried about their sons being killed. They don’t like this idea of a deployment. They don’t like the idea that we don’t really know the number of American casualties in Iran. And women are keeping that issue top of mind, and connecting it to the Epstein class’s exploitation of children.

And then the........

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