WASHINGTON — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., slammed the Trump administration’s capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, saying on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” Sunday that the operation was part of “the same Washington playbook that we are so sick and tired of that doesn’t serve the American people.”
Greene argued that President Donald Trump and his administration “campaigned on Make America Great Again, that we thought was putting America first.”
“I want to see domestic policy be the priority that helps Americans afford life after four disastrous years of the Biden administration,” she told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker, pointing to policies to prioritize jobs, housing and health care.
Her comments come as lawmakers grapple with the operation that captured Maduro and his wife and brought them to the U.S., with lawmakers’ support largely falling along party lines. Greene has previously opposed Trump administration policies that she argued contradicted “America First” principles.
In Sunday’s interview, she said that “we don’t consider Venezuela our neighborhood.”
“Our neighborhood is right here in the 50 United States, not in the Southern Hemisphere,” she said.
On Saturday, Trump was asked by a reporter how running Venezuela aligns with his “America First” agenda, after he said earlier that the U.S. would “run the country” until there was a transition to new leadership.
“I think it is because we want to surround ourselves with good neighbors,” Trump told the reporter. “We want to surround ourselves with stability. We want to surround ourselves with energy. We have tremendous energy in that country. It’s very important that we protect it. We need that for ourselves. We need that for the world.”
Greene publicly spoke against the Maduro operation on Saturday as well. The congresswoman said in a post to X that Americans’ “disgust with our own government’s never-ending military aggression and support of foreign wars is justified because we are forced to pay for it.”
“This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end,” she said in the post. “Boy were we wrong.”
Greene’s last day in Congress will be on Monday. She announced her resignation in November after a public falling-out with Trump, despite having previously been a loyal backer.
Throughout the public fights leading up to Greene’s resignation announcement, the congresswoman broke with him on issues including international relations, Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case and Obamacare subsidies.
She has argued that Trump has not focused enough on domestic policy, saying later in a CBS News “60 Minutes” interview that “for an ‘America First’ president, the No. 1 focus should have been domestic policy, and it wasn’t.”
