Fans of President Donald Trump love his style and authenticity… as they should. It’s refreshing to see a politician not pretending to be someone else. One example I like to cite is his refusal to get a dog when he first arrived at the White House, simply because it was expected of him. He thought it reeked of phoniness, and it would have. But his unabashed authenticity sometimes works against him.
Marjorie Taylor Greene made headlines Sunday morning when she posted a screenshot of Trump's Truth Social message to Iran.
“Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH,” Trump wrote.
Colorful, to put it mildly.
Greene's response was anything but measured. "Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump's madness," she wrote. "I know all of you and him, and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit."
ICYMI: Trump Drops an F-Bomb on Iran, and Democrats Are Melting Down
Now, it wasn’t all that long ago that Greene was a solid ally of Trump. Today, she’s just the latest in a long line of former Trump allies who have become useful idiots of the left for being anti-Trump Republicans.
Look, you can have legitimate concerns about the administration's direction in the Middle East. But Greene has become another useful idiot for the left, a reliable source for anti-Trump soundbites, and a card-carrying member of the Republican Trump critic roster that legacy media loves to parade around. She's channeling her personal grievances with Trump into performative outrage, and the cameras are eating it up.
In fairness, Trump deserves a real share of the blame for how these relationships collapse.
The list of former allies Trump went on to trash is quite extensive. Mike Pence, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, James Mattis, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, Nikki Haley, Kayleigh McEnany, and John Bolton are just a few. Some, like Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis, eventually found their way back into good standing. But most didn’t.
There's no strategic value in converting allies into enemies. Washington is hard enough without handing opposition media a parade of credentialed Republicans willing to go on record against you. Every former ally whom Trump alienates becomes a more powerful critic than anyone on the left could dream of being.
To his credit, Trump does seem to be learning. When he fired Pam Bondi, he posted a genuinely warm tribute to her on Truth Social. “Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year. Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900. We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future,” he wrote.
That's the right instinct. You can make personnel changes without burning bridges.
I hope that this represents a genuine shift. Trump is at his most effective when he's building coalitions, not burning them. His second term is too important, and the political stakes too high, to keep feeding critics to a media that's already working overtime against him. Turn your enemies into allies when you can. And when you can't, at least stop turning your allies into enemies.
