The Trump/MTG Break Isn’t Just About the Epstein Files

A broader fight for the GOP’s future, as Trump’s lame-duck era begins.

Today’s newsletter is about the future of the Republican Party. If you want to hear about the future of the Democratic Party, tune into NPR’s “1A” from 10-11 a.m. ET here or on the radio, where I’ll be on for the whole hour discussing that topic.

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I.

Last week, the White House played host to one of the less likely meetings in it history, as President Trump met with Ahmed al-Shara, the president of Syria, in the Oval Office.

Not so long ago, al-Shara was considered an American enemy: he was imprisoned by U.S. forces in Iraq from 2006 to 2011, when he was a fighter for Al Qaeda. Al-Shara then went on to found the group’s Syrian affiliate, at which point the U.S. placed a $10 million bounty on his head and designated him a terrorist. (Since toppling Bashar al-Assad last year, al-Shara has been working to moderate his image. At the White House, he joined the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS.)

The meeting generated relatively little news coverage — in fairness, the government shutdown was coming to an end at the same time — and Trump, who usually loves to parade visiting leaders in front of the cameras, didn’t give it his usual theatrics. Al-Shara entered through a side door (instead of Trump greeting him in front of the White House, as he often does); reporters were not invited into the Oval for a photo-op or Q&A session, as has also become Trump’s norm.

That was probably for the best: the al-Shara meeting was practically designed in a lab to frustrate almost every member of Trump’s governing coalition. The hawkish interventionists in the GOP fold are skeptical of al-Shara’s reinvention as a statesman and generally suspicious of letting the U.S. guard down. Republican isolationists, meanwhile, see no role for the U.S. to play in Syria; they don’t want these meetings, friendly or otherwise — they want out of the Middle East entirely. (Also, members of both groups, like Trump himself, have spent years railing against “radical Islamic terrorism,” a label which surely would have been brought up if Barack Obama or Joe Biden were the ones playing host to an ex-jihadist.)

And yet, there was barely a peep from Republican lawmakers (of the internationalist or isolationist variety) when al-Shara was brought to the White House.

I’ve been wondering recently whether, to be a successful American president, you simply need to have a cult of personality around you. Our two-party system is probably inescapable, but it does lead to some awkward coalitions, creating a need for two “big tents,” which really just comprise a bunch of smaller mini-parties.

The policies that unite, say, Joe Manchin and Bernie Sanders, or Susan Collins and Lauren Boebert, aren’t always so apparent. And, so, maybe policies can’t do it; only a person can. The only way to stop everyone from complaining about your every move is to spring up a cult of personality, like a Trump or an Obama. Joe Biden, a party functionary, tried mightily to smooth the gaps within his party, but they ended up swallowing him whole; he was so terrified to lose any members of his fragile coalition that he ended up taking deeply unpopular positions and was, ultimately, defenestrated.

Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t worry about bothering previously important interest groups before changing party orthodoxy on. He spies a more poplar position, he takes it, and he expects the party to follow. Imagine if Joe Biden had said to Democratic immigration doves what Trump has said to pro-life groups (basically, screw you). It wouldn’t have gone well, because there was no Joe Biden Cult of Personality. The story of Trump’s second term, though, has been one of doing this repeatedly, and it largely working well for him: Republicans hate to raise the debt ceiling, but they do it when Trump asks. A less domineering GOP administration might meet Ahmed al-Shara, or Hamas officials, and immediately wade into a thicket of internal backbiting, but Trump’s team does it, and nothing can be said.

II.

There was one Republican lawmaker who did raise concerns about the al-Shara meeting when it took place last Monday.

“The new leader of Syria is a former Al Qaeda terrorist wanted by our government who is meeting with President Trump today at the White House on the U.S. Marine’s 250th anniversary,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wrote on X.

“I would really like to see nonstop meetings at the WH on domestic policy not foreign policy and foreign country’s leaders,” she added, urging Trump to move his focus to health care.

A reporter asked Trump about Greene’s post later in the day, which led to Trump offering his first-ever criticism of the Georgia congresswoman, who had been a close ally since she exploded onto the political scene in 2020. “Yeah, so, uh, I don’t know what happened to Marjorie,” Trump said. “Nice woman, but I don’t know what happened. She’s lost her way, I think.”

And then: “I have 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’s comments didn’t quell Greene’s various critiques of Trump 2.0, which she’s been airing since the summer: over foreign policy, health care, immigration, and — of course — the Jeffrey Epstein files. Then, on Friday night, he dropped a bomb and severed their political ties: “I am withdrawing my support and Endorsement of ‘Congresswoman’ Marjorie Taylor Greene, of the Great State of Georgia,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!” he said.

Last night, Trump wrote that “nobody cares about this Traitor to our Country,” referring to Greene, a claim belied by his social media activity this weekend. After posting his un-endorsement, Trump spent the rest of Friday night posting screenshots of other people’s tweets bashing Greene (“Your political future just ended”), then tried out two nicknames for the congresswoman in posts on Saturday (“Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Green” and “Marjorie Taylor Brown,” because “Green grass turns Brown when it begins to ROT!”), before putting them together (“Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown”) in his post on Sunday. Somebody does, in fact, seem to care about the congresswoman.

I opened with the Syria backstory because, now that a close MAGA alliance has suddenly imploded, many observers are likely to tie the break-up to the Epstein Files, the story of the moment. It is true that Greene was one of the four House Republicans to sign a discharge petition which will force a vote on releasing the files this week, despite Trump’s vociferous lobbying urging the quartet to change their minds.

But the Trump/Greene split is larger than the Epstein Files, and actually hinges on a set of much more substantial issues, which can tell us a lot about the future of the Republican Party.

At the center of it is foreign policy, a divide which can be seen in Greene’s exhortation for Trump to focus on domestic issues and Trump’s retort that he has to “view the presidency as a worldwide situation.”

Greene has been describing Trump’s foreign policy as a betrayal of his “America First” philosophy since the U.S. aided Israel by striking three Iranian nuclear sites in June, writing at the time that Trump ran on an agenda of “NO MORE FOREIGN WARS,” “NO MORE REGIME CHANGE,” and “WORLD PEACE.”

“Only 6 months in and we are back into foreign wars, regime change, and world war 3,” Greene said, adding that “it feels like a complete bait and switch to please the neocons,” using a shorthand for neoconservatives, the group of more interventionist Republicans like Mitch McConnell or Lindsey Graham.

A series of fights over Israel policy have been simmering within the GOP for months now: after Trump’s Iran strike, after Charlie Kirk’s death (when there was an immediate proxy battle to cement his legacy as either pro- or anti-Israel), and after Tucker Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic white nationalist, last month, bonding over their opposition to aiding Israel. That last development metastasized into a broader battle that embroiled the Heritage Foundation, after the think tank’s president defended Carlson against “the globalist class” (his words), sparking an open revolt from Heritage staffers.

These splits about Trump’s foreign policy more broadly — and about Israel specifically — have often formed the subtext of the Trump/Greene brouhaha, something she made explicit in a post on Saturday: “This and the Epstein files is why I’m being attacked by President Trump,” Greene wrote, attaching an image showing that she has received $0 in donations from AIPAC, the pro-Israel group. “It really makes you wonder what is in those files and who and what country is putting so much pressure on him?”

(Fuentes, for his part, had a similar analysis: “So now Ben Shapiro, Randy Fine and Lindsey Graham are considered MAGA, but Marjorie Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Thomas Massie are not? Your Israel First ‘MIGA’ movement is dead,” he wrote. “The America First Movement is the future.”)

Trump’s stances are “not America First positions,” Greene said on CNN yesterday, trying to claim the MAGA mantle from the movement’s founder. Indeed, the splits between the two expose how Trump was always an uncomfortable fit for populism to begin with.

Nothing exemplifies that more than his association with Epstein: whether or not there is anything untoward there, the very fact that Trump was friends with someone who trafficked young women for elites has always been, um, ironic for someone seeking to lead a movement that promotes an awful lot of theories about pedophiles and elites.

But it can also be seen in his foreign policy. Trump was always kind of an odd isolationist: there’s nothing he would appear to like more than being “leader of the free world,” a label he shied away from in his first term but has embraced in his second. An activist foreign policy simply checks so many Trumpian boxes: his desire to oversee everything (not just “locally,” but “worldwide”), to set the global agenda, to appear important on the world stage and be flattered by heads of state, his dealmaking instinct, and his longtime dream of winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Buying Greenland or dropping bombs on enemies was always more stereotypically Trumpian behavior; it just took him a few years to get there. He has dropped most isolationist pretenses in his second term, going on much more international than domestic travel and trying to place himself at the center of every global dispute, not exactly isolationist behavior. “Continuing to really travel all over the world doesn’t help Americans back at home,” Greene said this weekend. “I really — and I said this to him and I will say it out loud — I would love to see Air Force One be parked and stay home.”

Even on immigration, Trump is inconsistent: curbing illegal arrivals to the country may have been his signature issue, but this is also someone who employed unauthorized immigrants in the past and has mused about stapling a green card to foreign students’ American college diplomas.

Before Trump even returned to office, an intra-MAGA fight broke out over H-1B visas for high-skilled immigrants, pitting the nationalist Steve Bannon against immigrant Elon Musk. Trump sided with Musk, a stance he doubled down on in a Fox News interview last week. “Maybe it was my bill to get rid of the H1B visas,” Greene wrote on X after Trump blew up at her, referring to a proposal she introduced last week to eliminate the program entirely.

III.

Another thing about cult-of-personality presidents: it can be a raw deal for the cult. The conservative commentator Timothy Carney wrote in the Washington Examiner last week that “the Trump era is one of GOP decline,” noting that the GOP has suffered a 15% reduction in both governorships and legislative chambers since Trump entered the political scene in 2016.

“In the Trump era, here’s the rule: Elections in which Trump is on the ballot, the GOP does fine. In elections in which he is not, the GOP does poorly,” Carney wrote. The 2025 elections earlier this month are, of course, the most recent example.

This will all sound familiar to Democrats of the Obama era, who lost almost 1,000 state legislative seats over the course of the 44th president’s reign.

In some way, the Obama- and Trump-era trends simply reflect the fickle nature of the American electorate, which loves to elect someone, then vote in their opposites, and then repeat. But they also point to the fact that neither Trump nor Obama seemed very interested in growing their party’s benches during their time in office, or expressed much concern for their partisans lower on the ballot. (It should be noted, by way of comparison, that Joe Biden made a point to invest in state parties while in office.)

Cults of personality can get things done for a party (see: the Affordable Care Act, or the Big Beautiful Bill). They can paper over dissent for four years, quieting internal squabbles because no one wants to upset the Big Man (something Biden, for example, never had the juice to do). But they are about a person, not a party, and the parties tend to reap the consequences of that.

They are also, thanks to the 22nd Amendment, time-bound. If a party’s solution to any electoral trouble is just “wait until Charismatic President X is on the ballot,” well, that’s a strategy that will only work twice, at most. Even presidents-turned-cult leaders become lame ducks eventually.

Trump’s split with Greene is a test of whether he’s starting to reach that point, 10 months into his second term, with his poll numbers fading (including among the groups he was supposedly delivering to the GOP) and his party already being walloped at the ballot box.

The president threatened this weekend to back a primary challenge against Greene in 2026. I’ll be interested to see if that goes anywhere — or whether Trump backs down. After all, this won’t be like primarying Liz Cheney in Wyoming. Greene is popular in her district, plus local party elites seem to be sticking with her: the GOP chair in her congressional district stood behind Greene on X, embracing the “America First, America Only” slogan that Greene has been using lately.

The last time Trump broke with a major ally, Elon Musk, in June, I wrote that “the last decade of the Republican Party is littered with people who thought they were stronger than Donald Trump — and soon learned otherwise.” Musk’s since-aborted third party effort would be unsuccessful, I wrote, just as Ron DeSantis’ political career has been wrecked and Jeff Sessions’ attempt at a comeback fell apart.

But Greene is, potentially, a special case. Unlike Musk, or Sessions, or DeSantis, or Steve Bannon, or Mike Pence (yes, the list of close Trump allies he’s fallen out with is extensive), Greene has no pre-Trump political identity. She did not shapeshift into MAGAism; she is purely a creation of it. Greene couldn’t create a third party, either, but her sights are smaller: winning re-election in a House district where she already won without Trump’s endorsement in her first campaign, and then, potentially the presidency.

Unlike most of those ex-allies, her split with Trump wasn’t just about a personal difference with Trump, which made it easy for GOP voters to side with their party leader in those prior splits. The Trump-Grene divide probably has some personal element to it: he says he refused to back her ambitions of running for Senate over governor. But, at least publicly, it’s over policy divides — and she can legitimately claim to be on the more MAGA side of every one of them, which makes this a very different fight.

Greene isn’t necessarily on the more popular side on every one of her splits with Trump, but she is on the side quickly gaining popularity in the GOP (particularly among young conservatives): half of Republicans under 50 now have a negative view of Israel; support for releasing the Epstein Files and opposition to increasing legal immigration are also widespread across the GOP.

If those trends continue, one can almost imagine Greene playing the same role Trump did: battling a party establishment that has lost focus (especially by moving its gaze abroad) and taken on positions unpopular with the party base. Just as foreign policy and railing against Republican interventionists animated Trump’s 2016 run, perhaps Trump’s own international adventurism — from the Middle East to Venezuela — will create an opportunity for a true isolationist in 2028.

Or, maybe, Greene will crash and burn, the same way Sessions and Pence and DeSantis did. (Though, if she wages a 2028 presidential campaign — as she is reportedly planning — she will have the advantage of Trump being a lame duck by the time she tries for national power.)

JD Vance, already the 2028 Republican frontrunner, is likely to sound many of the same themes Greene will (we know from leaked Signal chats, among other sources, that Vance’s instincts are more isolationist than Trump). But she will have the advantage of not being tied to an administration that arguably abandoned those principles. With Trump off the stage after 12 long years, the fight for the party’s soul will be complex and crowded: Axios reports this morning that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is also mulling a 2028 run, “staking out turf as a traditional, pro-interventionist Republican.”

Trump likely won’t want this positioning to start while he’s still in charge (why do you think he keeps trying to freeze the field by floating his own 2028 rumors?) But he won’t be able to hold it off for long.

It did not escape the notice of GOP isolationists that, on the same weekend as he trashed MTG, Trump golfed with Lindsey Graham, a leading interventionist. That image was a reminder that Trump, the supposed isolationist, could actually represent the last gasp of American neoconservatism, because of his unquiet personal traits that made him an awkward isolationist even as he helped give that movement power in the party. Graham is a survivor of many GOP internal wars, so you never know — but I highly doubt the next Republican nominee, whoever it is, will tie themselves as closely to the South Carolina senator. Find me the Gen Z Republicans who count themselves as Lindsey Graham fans. The future of the party is tipping one way, and it’s not even clear Trump at this point fully represents it.

It’s also not clear he’s winning the first proxy battle of the post-Trump era, over — yes — the Epstein Files. Last night, Trump wrote that “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files,” when the bills come to the floor as soon as tomorrow, “because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party.”

This comes after Trump did everything he could to avoid this vote being called in the first place, and after reports that as many as 100 House Republicans might have broken with the president to vote for the release of the files. Sensing the writing on the wall, Trump is now freeing Republican members to vote “yea” at the last minute, rather than suffer a large-scale defection from his party.

But make no mistake: this was was a move made under duress, a rare example of the GOP rank-and-file making Trump adopt their position, not the other way around, right at a time when many in the party are beginning to grapple with his new role as a lame duck.

Greene 1, Trump 0. Many rounds to go.