Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) may be out with President Trump and the MAGA movement she once championed, but that hasn’t dampened her passion for wild conspiracy theories.
Greene has spent the past few weeks expanding the baseless conspiracy theory that Trump faked his own assassination attempt in July 2024. Of course, Green won’t say what he’s doing. In her mind — and in the minds of a growing number of MAGA influencers — she’s just asking questions.
“I’m not calling Butler’s murder a hoax,” Green posted on X on Sunday. “But there are so many questions that deserve public answers. I’m asking why Trump won’t release information about Matthew Crooks … why the cover-up??”
Green is not alone in raising “questions” about the attempt on Trump’s life. Disgraced Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed that “the FBI lied about important details of Crooks’ life”. On Tuesday, Carlson went even further, when he formally apologized for aligning himself with Trump’s movement.
“We’re stuck with it, for sure … we’re going to be haunted by it for a long time, I will be,” Carlson said in an interview with his brother, Buckley Carlson, who also renounced his support for Trump. “I want to say I’m sorry for confusing people.”
That was enough to kick the conspiracy-minded influencers of the MAGA ecosystem into overdrive. Prominent right-wing influencer accounts like Red Pill USA and ThePatrioticBlonde were quick to provide “proof” that Butler’s firing was in fact no more than a Trumpian marketing stunt.
Anyone with a few minutes of spare time and an appetite for the absurd can investigate how the MAGA movement arose from Alex Jones’s industrial-power conspiracy theories.
Many Trump loyalists have also grown accustomed to the idea that their president takes a certain pleasure in staging all kinds of public events to maximize ratings. Last week’s much-publicized DoorDash Oval Office delivery, for example, featured MAGA activist Sharon Simmons playing a humble DoorDash grandma.
Most Americans know that MAGA rights are crazy. What’s even more interesting is that such unexpected venom has motivated many former Trump friends to turn on him.
Many apparently believed Trump’s claims that a second term would bring the economy “Golden Age” Which has taken America back from the dreaded lefty specter “Globalism.” Instead, he has delivered sky-high consumer prices and the worst job market since the Great Depression, immersing himself in a war against Iran that cost taxpayers more than $11 billion in the first six days alone.
Even die-hard MAGA supporters believe that Trump is a man to hide. A Navigator Research poll published last month found that more than a quarter (28 percent) of Republicans and one in five MAGA voters disapprove of how Trump has handled the release of the Epstein files. Even worse, nearly half (49 percent) of MAGA Republicans think the White House is covering up wrongdoing regarding convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Trump and other powerful people.
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 Enriching Trump’s inner circle of family and friends. The voters who elected him have stopped picking up the pieces of their derailed lives because they come to terms with the fact that they were rubes all along.
It’s no wonder his biggest supporters feel betrayed. If Trump can lie so easily about so many things, including his relationship with the nation’s most notorious child sex trafficker, why wouldn’t he lie about an assassination attempt? Trump’s team is slowly realizing that the supporters they encouraged to distrust authority figures and public institutions now distrust him as well.
MAGA voters have long believed in taking on Trump “Seriously but not literally.” This is another way of saying that Trump may lie to other people to further his own interests, but he never lies to the supporters who power his political movement. At least some of those loyal Trump supporters are finally ready to admit that they have been conned, and that there is no way to believe in a fairy tale.
Green and Carlson’s awakenings are just the beginning of an exodus from the MAGA movement, which appears to have reached new heights of power a year ago. After a decade of chaos and disruption, Trump’s transactional politics are finally catching up with him. It’s a shame it’s taking so long.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategy.
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