{"id":30364,"date":"2026-06-26T06:12:28","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T10:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/why-did-tucker-carlson-and-marjorie-taylor-greene-leave-the-republican-party-geoffrey-kabaservice\/"},"modified":"2026-06-26T06:12:28","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T10:12:28","slug":"why-did-tucker-carlson-and-marjorie-taylor-greene-leave-the-republican-party-geoffrey-kabaservice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/why-did-tucker-carlson-and-marjorie-taylor-greene-leave-the-republican-party-geoffrey-kabaservice\/","title":{"rendered":"Why did Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene leave the Republican party? | Geoffrey Kabaservice"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n<\/p>\n

F<\/span>ormer Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene \u2013 once among Donald Trump\u2019s most prominent champions \u2013 announced recently that they have left the Republican party.<\/p>\n

Both rightwing superstars had feuded with the president throughout his second term, but their split was provoked by Trump\u2019s war with Iran and what they viewed as his elevation of foreign affairs over domestic concerns like inflation and high gas prices. Although both have said that they will not support Democrats, their defection points to serious divisions within the Republican party that could weaken its prospects in the midterm elections and beyond.<\/p>\n

The Republican establishment has dismissed the pair as malcontents and Trump has reviled them with his usual insults, calling<\/a> Greene a traitor and Carlson a \u201clow-IQ person\u201d.<\/p>\n

Other conservative commentators have claimed their critique stems from animus against Israel. Greene was the first Republican member of Congress to refer to Israel\u2019s actions in Gaza as a \u201cgenocide\u201d, and Carlson has charged that Trump betrayed the American people by allowing Israel to push him into going to war with Iran.<\/p>\n

Carlson\u2019s criticism of Israel, coming on the heels of his softball interview with the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes, has provoked accusations of antisemitism that he has denied.<\/p>\n

Although Greene\u2019s loopiness makes it difficult to take her seriously \u2013 who can forget her fulminations against \u201cNancy Pelosi\u2019s gazpacho police\u201d? \u2013 both Greene and Carlson merit consideration as potential 2028 presidential contenders. Their political strength lies in their influence with the \u201cAmerica first\u201d faction of the Republican party, as opposed to the Maga faction dominated by Trump. Although Trump was long able to keep both factions in coalition, they represent different worldviews that correspond to different historical incarnations of American conservatism.<\/p>\n

The America First Committee was the leading pressure group in 1940-1941 campaigning against US entry into the war in Europe. Although it began as a nonpartisan movement, \u201cAmerica first\u201d became associated with populist nationalism and the antisemitism of spokespeople like Charles Lindbergh.<\/p>\n

Trump, in reviving the \u201cAmerica first\u201d label for his 2016 campaign, drew upon a deep and persistent strand in American political culture that fears becoming entangled in other countries\u2019 wars and grievances, views immigrants with suspicion and hostility, and distrusts internationalist foreign policy as a project that benefits elites instead of the American people. Carlson, who has articulated the position of \u201cAmerica first\u201d conservatives in terms that would have been recognizable to mid-20th-century isolationists like Senator Robert Taft, understandably feels betrayed by Trump\u2019s decision to go to war against Iran.<\/p>\n

But Trump\u2019s most resonant political slogan \u2013 \u201cMake America great again\u201d \u2013 looks back to different eras of conservatism from pre-second world war isolationism. Trump rarely defines when exactly he believes America experienced the greatness he has promised to recapture.<\/p>\n

But when pushed he invokes, first, the period of American military and industrial expansion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and second, the decades after the end of the second world war when baby boomers like Trump himself were born.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s Maga supporters have expressed nostalgia for America\u2019s Gilded Age, when the country\u2019s booming industrial base was largely protected from foreign competition and tariffs were the primary source of revenue for the federal government. But the late 19th century also marked the onset of American imperialism, with the annexation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American war \u2013 an action applauded by Rudyard Kipling in his 1899 poem Take Up the White Man\u2019s Burden. Trump believes that a strong nation should dominate weaker ones and take whatever resources and territory it requires for its own greatness.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s \u201cDonroe Doctrine\u201d echoes the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine\u2019s claim to US regional hegemony, and his siding with Russia against Ukraine harkens back to that era\u2019s belief that great powers could keep the peace by respecting each other\u2019s spheres of influence. Trump shares the America firsters\u2019 contempt for alliances and US global responsibilities. But Maga is not an isolationist creed, as Trump\u2019s actions in Venezuela and Iran have demonstrated.<\/p>\n

The 1950s is the decade that marks America\u2019s vanished utopia in the minds of many Maga supporters. In fact, a 2024 survey<\/a> found that about 70% of Republicans think that America\u2019s culture and way of life have changed for the worse since the 1950s, as compared with only 30% of Democrats who say the same.<\/p>\n

Republicans from both the Maga and \u201cAmerica first\u201d factions express nostalgia for what they consider to have been a time of patriotism, religiosity and growing prosperity for blue-collar breadwinners. Their critics, unsurprisingly, charge that they want to return America to an era when minorities were largely invisible, gays and lesbians were in the closet and women\u2019s possibilities were mostly restricted to marriage and childbearing. But Trump also relishes the memory of a time when America was by far the most powerful nation and wasn\u2019t shy about using its power to order the world to its liking \u2013 which again hardly describes the isolationist vision of \u201cAmerica first\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never understood it,\u201d Carlson said of Maga in a recent podcast interview<\/a>. \u201cI think there was a strong latent desire in the hearts of a lot of Americans to improve the country \u2026 but it was imprecise by design.\u201d Trump\u2019s charismatic incoherence \u2013 and the restraining influence of his more traditionally Republican advisers during his first term \u2013 allowed him to paper over the contradictions between Maga and \u201cAmerica first\u201d. But it\u2019s unlikely that any other 2028 Republican presidential candidate \u2013 and certainly not JD Vance \u2013 will be able to hold these factions together with anything like Trump\u2019s success.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been a consistent defender for 35 years of the Republican party,\u201d Carlson told his interviewers. \u201cAnd if I\u2019m out, then I think a lot of other people are out.\u201d Disillusioned America firsters may sit out the midterm elections, particularly if instability in the Middle East continues to be a drag on the economy.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not impossible to imagine Carlson or Greene attempting to retake control of the Republican party in 2028, or even creating some kind of populist-isolationist third party. But it\u2019s also quite conceivable that shared hatred of the left will continue to keep Republicans together despite their factional disagreements.<\/p>\n