Former MAGA Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said on Monday that she’d spoken to senior White House officials whom she claimed, in some cases, privately opposed Donald Trump’s war with Iran.
The revelation comes as Greene, formerly one of Trump’s biggest backers in Congress, has issued withering criticism of the president over his decision to launch military strikes in Iran. A member of the GOP’s isolationist wing, Greene has consistently opposed U.S. commitments in foreign conflicts, including the war in Ukraine.
Greene told The Situation Room co-anchors Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown that a generational divide increasingly exists within the president’s MAGA base, with younger voters and Gen X Republicans like herself viewing the conflict as being waged on Israel’s behalf.
“Many of the older Americans from the baby boomer generation that watch Fox News all day long very much believe the talking points on Fox News, and they, you know, they’ve spent decades of their lives convinced that fighting these wars is the right thing to do. But the younger generations – I’m Gen X – millennials and Gen Z are very much against this war, and so when you talk to people on the ground, that’s how it comes across,” said Greene. “It’s very generational.”
“Younger generations want to be able to afford their American lives, and they don’t want their taxpayer dollars shipped off [overseas],” Greene continued.
She was quick to blame the president for abandoning his “America First” agenda, pointing out that the president had first broken with her last summer over the vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files held by the Department of Justice. Trump, Greene said, had “perverted” the MAGA brand into something that “nobody wants.”
“This is absolutely absurd, and it’s 100% a betrayal to what MAGA was supposed to be when we voted in 2024, and it’s turned into some perverted, deranged version of MAGA now that nobody wants,” said Greene.
The former MAGA congresswoman was asked in the interview about the reported opposition of Vice President JD Vance to Trump’s military operation in Iran. Greene responded that she wouldn’t go into her own private conversations, while revealing that there was disagreement over the war among senior White House officials she’d spoken to.
“I won’t speak for anyone, but there are people in the administration, high up in the administration, I know that don’t support this, but the longer they stay silent, it hurts them. It definitely hurts them in the future,” she told CNN on Monday.
The U.S. and Israeli war with Iran is now estimated to have resulted in the deaths of more than 1,300 people across Iran, as well as the deaths of 13 U.S. service members. Donald Trump, on Saturday, spoke with NBC News and claimed that Iran was seeking an agreement to end the war, which he was not ready to sign. Iran’s foreign minister on Sunday then denied that his country was ready to stop fighting, during an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation.
Meanwhile, the Iranian armed forces, including its Revolutionary Guard corps, have sought to restrict commercial shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway through which as much as 20% of the world’s oil supply typically travels. Oil prices have shot up past $100 per barrel, and in the U.S. average gasoline prices have jumped by more than 70 cents per gallon, according to AAA.
Members of the isolationist wing of the president’s MAGA base were cheered by Trump’s denunciations of “endless war” and recurring military engagements in the Middle East during his 2024 run for president. Now, the administration is haunted by those same proclamations as the president shows little sign of seeking the “off-ramp” that many Republicans in Congress and, according to Greene, in the White House, too, want him to take.
Polling suggests that more than half of Americans oppose the war with Iran, while about four in ten support it. On Capitol Hill, the war’s terms have been denounced by Democrats, while some members of the opposition party have called the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, a positive development for the region.
Greene’s critiques of Trump’s warmaking emerged last year as the president escalated a campaign of strikes targeting small boats in the Caribbean that U.S. forces claimed were trafficking drugs. That campaign ramped up and culminated in the abduction of Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s president, in a U.S. raid to seek Maduro’s prosecution in the U.S. for drug trafficking charges.
She and other figures in the broader MAGA community off Capitol Hill have become increasingly vocal opponents of Trump’s actions against Venezuela and support for Israel in now two military campaigns against Iran under his second presidency, and have accused the president of doing the opposite of what he promised on the campaign: to use America’s wealth at home, not abroad.
