WASHINGTON — Ten months into Donald Trump’s second term, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has positioned herself as a surprising critic of the administration’s policies — and as a torchbearer for the “America First” agenda that she believes the president has drifted from, she told NBC News in recent interviews.
Greene, who has long been one of his most outspoken allies, said that Trump personally inspired her run for Congress in Georgia in 2022 and described her political identity as rooted in his promise to represent what she calls “the forgotten man and woman of America.”
“That was me,” she told Tucker Carlson recently, recalling how she saw Trump’s campaign as a “referendum to the Republican Party on behalf of the American people … that were just so sick of Washington, D.C.”
Now, Greene finds herself at the center of a divide inside the Republican Party over how deeply the U.S. should involve itself abroad, as surveys show the state of the economy is top of mind for many Americans and following a round of elections that focused on affordability.
“No one cares about the foreign countries. No one cares about the never-ending amount of foreign leaders coming to the White House every single week,” Greene told NBC News.
The dispute underscores a broader rift over whether Trump’s presidency still reflects the populist message that powered his rise. And it reflects a MAGA movement preparing for a future without Trump at the top of the ticket, with the next generation of leaders figuring out where to take the base he built.
On Friday night, just hours after this article published, Trump decided he had had enough. He went on social media and said he was withdrawing his endorsement of her.
He said while the U.S. is now the "'HOTTEST' Country anywhere in the World...all I see 'Wacky' Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!"
Trump also accused her of going "Far Left" and suggested that her criticism of him was personal, because he didn't think she should run for senator or governor. He also said he was open to supporting another Republican primary challenger to Greene.
Since taking office in January, Trump has made 14 foreign trips, with stops in Italy, the Middle East, Canada, Asia and the U.K., among others, according to an NBC News analysis. In the same period, he’s visited 15 U.S. states. That includes a trip to Alaska to meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. By the same point in Trump’s first term, he had visited 27 states. Trump also said that he expects to travel to China early next year to meet with President Xi Jinping. And Bloomberg reported Thursday that he may attend the World Economic Forum, a gathering of the political and business elite, next year in Davos, Switzerland.
“We didn’t elect the president to go out there and travel the world and end the foreign wars,” Greene said. “We elected the president to stop sending tax dollars and weapons for the foreign wars — to completely not engage anymore. Watching the foreign leaders come to the White House through a revolving door is not helping Americans.”
“One of the big campaign issues is Americans were fed up with foreign wars,” she added. “It’s like, get us out of this.”
While Trump did promise on the campaign trail to quickly end the wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, the latest national NBC News poll shows Republicans overwhelmingly believe he has lived up to their expectations on foreign policy (82%), including 66% of Republicans who do not identify with the MAGA movement.
But for Greene and others, it’s a matter of priorities; they argue that the economy should be the clear focus.
“It’s not that I want a very different foreign policy,” said one Trump ally with a lens on foreign policy, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “He just needs to be messaging more aggressively that his focus is on young Americans, and the things that they are still having trouble getting, and the problems they’re having.”
Greene has escalated her criticism as the foreign visits have continued, saying Trump’s attention abroad is “doing nothing to solve the problems that are really plaguing vulnerable segments of our population, especially young people.”
She has slammed meetings with leaders such as Argentina’s Javier Milei, whom she described as seeking “a bailout,” and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who she said arrived “with his hands out begging for more.”
In response to Trump's repudiation of her Friday night, Greene tweeted that she wished Trump would put more energy into addressing economic issues and less into fighting the release of files related the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
"It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out that he actually goes to this level," she wrote. "But really most Americans wish he would fight this hard to help the forgotten men and women of America who are fed up with foreign wars and foreign causes, are going broke trying to feed their families, and are losing hope of ever achieving the American dream."
Ryan Girdusky, a Republican consultant who helped run a pro-JD Vance super PAC in the 2022 Ohio Senate race, said it’s not surprising that the president has shown interest in cementing his global legacy.
“When presidents don’t have to run again, they do a lot of foreign policy trips,” Girdusky said. “They do a lot of things for the legacy. And Trump’s Middle East stuff is probably the most important of any president since Nixon.”
The Trump ally said that while he supports Trump raising awareness of, say, Christians being persecuted in Nigeria, “if we get to the point at which we really start talking about doing military action there, then I think we’ve lost the plot.”
Conservatives have also questioned recent U.S. strikes in the Pacific and Caribbean and whether Trump risks the U.S. drifting into deeper conflict. The president, in October, denied that he is considering strikes inside Venezuela.
In an article last month, the conservative journalist Christopher Caldwell questioned the buildup of U.S. military forces and weaponry off the coast of Venezuela, asking, “What does Trump think he’s doing?”
Carlson, in the recent show featuring Greene, outlined what he said were MAGA’s five pillars, or the founding principles of the Trump administration. The first, he said, is putting America first, describing this as the idea “that the country operates on behalf of its owners, the citizens of that country.” Other pillars have a similar focus on the homeland, including a secure border, ending foreign wars, and a “real” domestic economy not dependent on globalization. A fifth calls for protecting free speech.
“You can’t have a global country,” Carlson said, arguing that this is “a point Trump made again and again.”
Asked about Greene’s recent comments following a meeting that morning with Syrian interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa, Trump said Monday he has to “view the presidency as a worldwide situation, not locally.”
“When you’re president, you really sort of have to watch over the world, because you’re going to be dragged into it — otherwise, you’re going to be dragged into a world war,” Trump said.
“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 continued. “The world is — the world was on fire, and we could have been in that fire very easily if you didn’t have a president that knew what he was doing.”
Of Greene, a longtime ally, he said, “She’s lost her way, I think.”
Responding to Trump's comments, Greene told NBC News this week: “I’m America First, America Only. Hardcore.”
Asked if she had spoken to him to hash things out, she said, “No, I haven’t talked to him. 100% haven’t changed.”
The clash comes against the backdrop of a difficult housing market and rising costs of living. Only about 1 in 5 homes sold in the year ending in June was purchased by a first-time buyer, according to a new report by the National Association of Realtors. Greene pointed to her own adult children — ages 22, 26 and 28 — as examples of what she views as a generation facing diminishing prospects.
“They don’t think they’re ever really going to be able to buy a home,” she said. “They were promised, you go to college, you’re going to get a great job. That doesn’t exist. That’s not reality.”
In a recent Fox News interview, Trump discussed affordability but seemed to downplay Americans’ concerns around economic anxiety, calling the issue a “con job by the Democrats” and suggesting that polling showing it was top of mind for voters was “fake.”
Greene’s message has resonated with others in the party, particularly after a string of disappointing GOP election results this month. And she has drawn applause across the political aisle for her willingness to take direct aim at her own party, including during a recent appearance on “The View.”
Greene dismissed speculation that she is positioning for a 2028 presidential bid, saying she is focused on her district.
Analysts say the tension reflects the broader evolution of the Trump movement.
Justin Logan, a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute, said that so long as Americans do not feel direct costs from the foreign engagements, dissent inside the movement may remain limited. “If they can win on the argument that they’ve been successful and cheap, they’ll be able to push back their critics,” he said of the administration.
