President Donald Trump on Monday said that MAGA-aligned Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., had “lost her way” with her criticism of the administration’s focus on foreign policy.
“I don’t know what happened to Marjorie. She’s a nice woman, but I don’t know what happened. She’s lost her way, I think,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
“But I have to view the presidency as a worldwide situation, not locally. I mean, we could have a world that’s on fire, where wars come to our shores very easily, if you had a bad president,” he added.
Asked about Trump's comments, Greene said in a statement: “I haven’t lost my way. I’m 100% America first and only!”
Greene chastised the White House in a social media post Monday over the bilateral meeting with Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, a former jihadist, that was expected to center on a U.S.-led coalition to defeat the Islamic State militant group, two officials previously told NBC News.
"I pray the persecution ends, not only in Syria, but all around the world," Greene wrote on X. "However, I would really like to see nonstop meetings at the WH on domestic policy not foreign policy and foreign country’s leaders."
Trump has visited 14 countries so far during his second term, compared with 15 U.S. states in that same period. The president also went on a weeklong trip to Asia when the government shutdown entered its fourth week.
Greene has also publicly criticized her party over the shutdown, saying during an appearance on ABC's "The View" last week that it’s “an embarrassment” that the Republican-controlled House was not in session more than a month after the federal government shut down on Oct. 1.
Additionally, she told NBC News in an interview last week that she gives Trump “some credit” on inflation, “but people in my district are really struggling.”
A recent NBC News national poll found that roughly two-thirds of registered voters think Trump hasn’t fulfilled campaign promises tied to the economy and costs of living.
Trump also told reporters Monday that Greene is “now catering to the other side” and that he's "surprised at her."
“You know, it’s easy to say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about the world,’ but the world is turning out to be our biggest customer," he said. "The world was on fire, and we could have been in that fire very easily."
Trump has welcomed the international attention he's received during his travels abroad, as well as the economic concessions he's secured from trading partners, including renewed soybean purchases from China and a pledge of $350 billion in U.S. investments from South Korea.
