Finally, MAGA figured out who the real Donald Trump is 

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) may be on the outs with President Trump and the MAGA movement she once championed, but that hasn’t dimmed her passion for wild conspiracy theories.  

Greene has spent the past few weeks amplifying the baseless conspiracy theory that Trump faked his own assassination attempt back in July 2024. Of course, Greene won’t say that’s what he’s doing. In her mind — and the minds of a growing number of MAGA influencers — she’s just asking questions.  

“I’m not calling the Butler assassination a hoax,” Greene posted to X on Sunday. “But there are a lot of questions that deserve public answers. I’m asking why won’t Trump release the information about Matthew Crooks … why the cover up??” 

Greene isn’t alone in raising “questions” about the attempt on Trump’s life. Disgraced Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed the “FBI lied” about crucial details of Crooks’s life. On Tuesday, Carlson went even further, when he formally apologized for ever aligning himself with Trump’s movement. 

“We’re implicated in this, for sure … we’ll be tormented by it for a long time, I will be,” Carlson said during an interview with his brother, Buckley Carlson, who also renounced his support for Trump. “I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.” 

That was enough to kick the MAGA ecosystem’s conspiracy-minded influencers into overdrive. Prominent right-wing influencer accounts like Red Pill USA and ThePatrioticBlonde rushed to provide “proof” that the Butler shooting was, in fact, nothing more than a Trumpian marketing stunt. 

Anyone with a few minutes of free time and an appetite for the absurd can research how a MAGA movement steeped in Alex Jones’s industrial-strength conspiracy theories got to this point.

Plenty of Trump loyalists have also grown used to the idea that their president takes a certain joy in staging all manner of public events to maximize ratings. Last week’s much-publicized DoorDash delivery to the Oval Office, for example, involved MAGA activist Sharon Simmons cosplaying as an unassuming DoorDash Grandma.

Most Americans know that the MAGA right is crazy. What’s more interesting is what motivated so many former Trump cronies to turn on him with such unexpected venom.

Many clearly believed Trump’s claim that his second term would bring about an economic “golden age” that withdrew America from the dreaded lefty specter of “globalism.” Instead, he has delivered sky-high consumer prices and the worst job market since the Great Recession, while miring himself in a war against Iran that cost taxpayers more than $11 billion in just the first six days alone.  

Die-hard MAGA supporters also believe Trump is a man with something to hide. A Navigator Research poll published last month found that over a quarter of Republicans (28 percent) and about one in five MAGA voters disapprove of how Trump has handled the release of the Epstein files. Worse still, nearly half of MAGA Republicans (49 percent) think the White House is covering up wrongdoing in relation to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship to Trump and other powerful figures.

Millions of Americans were willing to ignore Trump’s destructive personality and growing authoritarianism when they thought his policies would make them rich. In the end, those policies did little more than pick their pockets while enriching Trump’s inner circle of family and friends. The voters who elected him are left to pick up the pieces of their derailed lives as they come to terms with the fact that they were the rubes all along.

It’s no wonder his biggest supporters feel duped. If Trump could so easily lie about so many things, including his relationship to the nation’s most notorious child sex trafficker, why wouldn’t he lie about an assassination attempt? Trump’s team is belatedly realizing that the supporters they encouraged to distrust authority figures and public institutions now distrust him, too.

MAGA voters have long believed in taking Trump “seriously but not literally.” This is just another way of saying Trump might lie to other people to advance his own interests, but he would never lie to the supporters who power his political movement. At least some of those faithful Trump supporters are finally ready to admit that they’ve been conned, and there’s no way back to believing the fairy tale. 

Greene and Carlson’s awakenings are just the beginning of an exodus from the MAGA movement, which just a year ago seemed to be reaching new heights of power. After a decade of chaos and disruption, Trump’s transactional politics is finally catching up with him. It’s just a shame that it took so long.  

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.

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