Bulwark Takes - Loomer Calls MTG a “Dumb Hick *****”

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

MAGA’s biggest feud right now isn’t with Democrats — it’s inside Trump World. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Laura Loomer have turned on each other in spectacular fashion. JVL and Andrew Egger take on why Loomer goes lower than anyone, and why MTG actually believes the crazy stuff. Get 10% off your first month of therapy with BetterHelp at https://BetterHelp.com/BULWARKTAKES #sponsored

Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with my bulwark colleague, Andrew Eger, and we have a story for you today about the escalating fight between one Marjorie Taylor Green and Laura Lumer. It is the great Arby's throwdown of our time. Before we get started, everybody out there, hit like, hit subscribe, follow the channel, be here with us for all the stuff we do. Eger, you may remember that Laura Lumer has a long-running beef with her one-time friend, Marjorie Taylor Green. Yes? Yeah. In fact, the video you just referenced with the Arbys and everything is I think the one piece of bulwark content that I consumed when I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago. You all were talking about it, and I just couldn't stay away. Yeah.

So this was in a deposition under oath. but Laura Lumer was asked about her tweeting that she believed that Marjorie Taylor Green had Arby's in her pants and Laura Lumer said that she, to her best belief and knowledge, Marjorie Taylor Green liked to buy Arby's sandwiches and then shove them down her pants. This is what she said under oath. So we had some movement since then. And the reason this is so important is because, it's not important at all. The reason this is so fun is because it is both a schism over Maga and a schism over Israel and Zionism. So it begins with Laura Lumer claiming yet another scalp when she brought to the president's attention that some Palestinian children who had lost limbs in the fighting, it's not even fighting, but lost wins in the assaults on Gaza were being given visas to come to America to undergo advanced medical procedures. Laura Lumer did not like this.

She got the Trump administration to cancel the visas. And Marjorie Taylor Green rushed out onto Twitter to say that this was bad. And in a tweet, I will just read a little bit from it, she says two recent State Department decisions involved children. The first is that we need to be the America that allows war-torn children to come here for life-saving surgeries. and the America that never releases a foreign child sex predator. What is she saying? Oh, she's referencing the story about the Israeli official who seems to be a predator, who was apprehended in America, and who was then extraded back to Israel.

So she puts a little bit of a fine point on it. She says, you know, this Israeli gentleman, had he been a Mexican government official, He would never have allowed to be extradited to Mexico. Had he been Chinese sex predator and government employee, he would not have been extradited to China. What is it about, about Israel that's special? She asks, you know, she's just asking questions. Andrew, do you have any thoughts on MTG's opening barrage here? Yeah, I mean, where do you begin, right?

I mean, it's all so snarled up. I feel like I need more of a leading question than that. Just to real quick, because people probably haven't been following this story. story. There was an Israeli official who was arrested. I believe in California in sort of like a child sex sting. It was like one of these like honeypot to catch a predator type things. He was arrested along with some other people. And he was, he was basically released on bond. And he flew back to Israel. Now like these, there are plenty of people who are like, this is not that big of a deal. Like this guy's got a court date. He's planning on coming back for his court date. I guess we'll see. But this

has kicked up a big stir in particular on the kind of. anti-Israel faction of the right that is like well isn't this interesting like this guy's getting sort of this special treatment that we kind of just trust him to come back um it's all the things right it's the groomers and pedophilia and israel stuff it's all of their loves combined into one story and so you can totally see why these these things are breaking down this story's breaking down the way it is even absent just marjorie taylor green and laura's white hot hatred for one another, right? I mean, Laura Lumer is insanely Trumpy, but she is also very pro-Israel. She's kind of like classically Republican in that way, whereas Marjorie Taylor Green has

long been much more allied with the sort of like new America first sort of Nick Fuentes, like, is she white nationalism curious? Is she not? But certainly, you know, much more isolationist, much more like we shouldn't be giving favors to anybody. And certainly we shouldn't be, you know, like, you know, protecting Israel as Israel continues to bomb Gaza. So, like, there's all these weird little, like, ideological, sort of facets to all of this that these two, you know, very prominent women on the right are sort of grabbing to hurl like javelins at one another as they accuse each other of being traitors to Trump and disloyal and bad for the movement and all these things.

You know, Marjorie Taylor Green, as she says in her tweet here, I know that God does not discriminate in his love for children. why would we? I mean, it just seems right on point to me. Like, I just feel like we should just take her at her word. It's all about God's love. So, uh, she's right about that one, by the way.

I mean, she is, I'm glad, I'm glad that somebody is calling out this, like, insane Laura Lumer story. We've been calling it out, right? I mean, we wrote about this. Will Summer and I both wrote about this week about how just flatly insane it is that Laura Lumer can, can whip up an online firestorm so that like 10 or 11 Palestinian children have to be turned. turned around at the airport and can't get, like, the medical care they need on private,

on private donors dollars in America. I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's just crazy and horrible and wrong. And like, yeah, Marjorie Taylor Green might be, uh, you know, bringing this up just so she can make these sort of like crypto white nationalist points about Laura Lumer. But I guess like I'm, I'm glad she's using her crypto white nationalism to stick up for these Palestinian children rather than for doing something evil like she usually does. How about that? This is an ad by better help. These days, it feels like there's advice for everything. Cold plunges, gratitude journals, screen detoxes, but how do you know what actually works for you?

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BetterHelp.com slash bulwark takes. That's BetterHELP.com slash bulwark takes. So we then get the horseshoe. The horseshoe thing happens where we get Sink O'Eager and another sort of lefty hippie piecenik who rushed to MTG's side and there's a little bit of video we can run on that. And they are they are calling Lumer a Zionist and, well, Here, have a look.

Lumer hates Marjorie Taylor Green because Marjorie Taylor Green has the sign outside of her door letting foreign lobbyists like Israel, no, don't come in my office. I'm not taking bribes from you. I'm not interested. I'm America first. APEC, you know what? You can bring it on. She doesn't want to go to war with Iran on behalf of Israel. She's been vocal about that as well.

I don't think we should be fighting wars on behalf of Israel. Well, that offends the sensibilities of someone who is like a hardcore Zionist, like Laura Lumer, who loves the Israel. lobby loves the influence that the Israel lobby has. On our website, t.y.t.com, we asked, who's writing this fight? Laura Lumer, Marjorie Taylor Green, or neither. Zero percent believe that it's Laura Lumer, correct. Laura Lumer doesn't care about any other issue but Israel. That's the only thing she's obsessed about is she's trying to take out America first guys and

put in Israeli first guys. And so she's an Israeli first through and through all of her propagandas on behalf of a foreign government. And I have no idea if she's being paid or not. All right. So that comes out. And then Lumer replies to explain why it is that she hates Marjorie Taylor Green. And she says, actually, I hate MTG because she planted a hit piece on me in the New York Times with blatant lies when Trump hired me to work on his campaign in 2023.

So, wow. Lumer then details the history of their friendship and says that MTG had promised to help her when she was deplatform. but that MTG never lift a finger. And that now that she, Laura Lumer, has raised herself up by her bootstraps and overcome all of the forces that were arrayed against her. MTG is a, what's this word? MTG was consumed with a jealous rage.

And she is a malicious liar. And I'm just looking for other things. a dumb, hick, bitch, who is a con woman and a liar. And then she turned into a jealous, subversive Neanderthal. No mentions about Arby's in all of this, which frankly shocked me. But it feels like if somebody enjoys putting Arby's down into their pants, that that should be the very first sentence on the Wikipedia page every time you talk about them. But that's okay.

It is funny that MTG goes about this stuff, at least with the pretext of, hey, we're fighting about the issues. And Lumer's just like, no, none of this about the issues. I just hate her because she tried to hurt me in the media. This has always kind of been Lumer's superpower, right? Which is just that she is willing to go lower than anybody. And that is easier said than done in sort of like the swamp of right-wing infotank. today, right? I mean, she will, she, she will win any race to the bottom with literally any person. And, and sometimes, you know, these are, sometimes it's even with people who are more theatrically evil, even than Marjor Taylor Green. Sometimes Laura Lumer feuds with like Nick Fuentes and they're like, you know, that's like, you know, that's like, you know, the rumble in the jungle in this department. But, but, but, uh, but yes, I mean, Marjor Taylor Green, she's very popular online among the crowd that just east this stuff up. But she is also a congresswoman, you know, she, she sort of feels the need to sort of like tie it back to, these issues and pretend that it's sort of high-handed in this way. At bottom, this is sort of a

seething hatred thing. We've talked about this a lot. And Lumer is more comfortable talking about that because she sort of gets and is at peace with the fact that seething hatred is the core of this whole political project, right? I mean, it's not like, it's not like people are ever going to be like, whoa, slow down, Laura. Like, let's let's let's let's let's let's let's do though. When they go low, we go high here. No, I mean, that's that's not what people are signing up for. That's not why people come to her content. That's not why people stay with her content. One thing that you said right at the beginning, though, I actually think I disagree with because you said right at the top, well, it's not really important, but it is a lot of fun. And it is fun. I mean, like, it's, it's totally messy and insane. But I honestly think these sorts of moments are kind of important because, and let me know what you think of this is just like a thought that I just had one second ago. But, but it sort of seems to me like this is the only way that MAGA can process internal policy disagreement. Because if there's anything, because if there's stuff that they disagree on, usually it's just kind of. of hush, hush. And usually it's like, oh, gosh, well, like, that's kind of awkward that

we disagree. Let's yell at the Democrats some more. Let's yell at, you know, Joe Biden and the fake news media and all of those people some more and, like, keep our fire focused on the enemy. But it's in these struggles with the influencers who are all just terrible people and all just hate one another, like truly hate one another. This is the only place this kind of stuff ever seems to bubble up because it's like, well, this is something I can hit somebody with and something I can like, you know, steal a little market share with. And so it's like, it's like an entire movement that can only process its own internal disagreements about like Israel and foreign policy and and whether we should be allies with a nation that's, you know, bombing another

nation, you know, into smithereens, all this stuff can only ever really be talked about through the psychotic lens of this cat fight between these two awful women. I mean, it's very, very strange. Because no one can ever disagree with the strong man himself. So you have to frame any disagreements through a proxy, right? You know, if only Comrade Stalin knew what was going on, then he would... And he himself exists in sort of this much more unformed protean, like, kind of, like, he can kind of be all things to all people because he does not take the strong policy stances on any of this stuff.

And so everybody can kind of assume he's on their side. Or he changes them because he doesn't actually believe them. That's the other... The other advantage he has is that he doesn't believe any of the stuff, so he can take both sides of every issue. like back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and nobody blames him for it, whereas it's only the people who, like, have actual beliefs.

I want to try something on you, Andrew, because I don't think we've talked about this before. One of my long-running bits, and it's only, like, halfway a bit, is that I think I like Marjorie Taylor Green, possibly as a human being, because I believe, and this may be wrong,

I don't have any special insight here, just from watching or from the outside, that unlike me, 95% of MAGA, she genuinely believes all of this shit. And to my mind, I will take somebody who genuinely believes it all over Marco Rubio every day of the week and twice on Sunday, right? Somebody who's not positioning or playing an angle or even like Laura Lumer, just like looking to get big, right? Looking to get a White House job and get a consulting. It seems to me that MTG genuinely believes all of everything like a child. And I don't know. I feel like we can work

with that. You could interact with that. You can interface with that. I feel like maybe if MTG and I went to the Outback Steakhouse together and split a bloomin onion, we could find some common ground and maybe even be friends who agree to disagree. And that because that, what this gets at is what you were saying. So MTG believes all of them make America. great stuff, whereas Lumer understands that everything is just about the seething hatred. And that is like the fundamental divide here within Maga, is there the people who are basically the marks who are like, but I thought we were making America great again. I thought we weren't doing forever wars.

I thought we, hold on. What about the Epstein files? It's those people versus the people who were only ever there to hurt all the people they hate what do you think do you buy any of that i think i do buy some of it and i hate i hate to like be the the debby downer on a rare sort of ray of halfway jviel light um i do think that there's something to be said that even though she very sincerely seems to believe all of these crazy things and there is something to be said about that i have never seen a lot of evidence that that is married to a person who is like all that great on a personal level either if you

know what I mean in the in the person of marjorie taylor green i mean just like watching the the sort of like nonsensical antics she gets up to in her day job in congress and just the way she treats all of the people around her is just so well she seems to have gone through something i mean this is if anybody was like done dug deep on the mtg background show which comes from a very well-to-do family was i think their money is in construction and then she seems to have had like a a real eat, pray, love kind of break and journey in which she got super into cross. You know, like people who suddenly in middle age get super into CrossFit, again, no judgment, but there's often something there.

Like, there's a precipitating event. And then, like, her marriage sort of falls apart. And then she's suddenly politically engaged. And then all of a sudden, she's, she's like, first she's just running around with videos, with video cameras yelling at high school kids from Parkland. And then the next thing she knows, she's in Congress. I mean, again, this, her path is really idiosyncratic. This is not the path of 99% of the people who wind up in Congress, right?

Most of them are people who are strivers who have been angling for something since they were in middle school. They've been running for stuff and looking to get power and get. And she just seems to have been like a normalish lower upper class or upper upper upper middle class person who was living her life and then like something happened. and I find that interesting. Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. People, if they haven't read it before, and are interested in sort of Marjorie Taylor Green's journey, Elena Plott had a really good profile of her.

Oh, yeah. Elaine is just fantastic. Yeah, yeah. They just kind of really went deep on like how a person be. I think that was actually the title of the profile is like, why is Marjorie Taylor Green like this or something like that, which seems like a dig. But really, that was like Elena went in.

Like, why is Marjorie Taylor Green like this? Like, that's interesting that a person becomes like this. And it's, I think it's totally, totally true that, like, she, she is a person who has been deformed by certain pressures. Like, she, she was relatively normal. And then she got into politics at exactly a moment when, like, the way to succeed in right-wing politics was to contort yourself into, like, this unbelievable caricature of a person. And that was her kind of secret sauce is that she was always able to kind of, like, grab at all of the insane psycho stuff that was, that was, like, percolate. relating online, but sort of pair it to this sort of like down home, normal seaman lady, like, whatever the female version of the Georgia good old boy is, was kind of like her brand.

And then she has just been so rewarded for that for so long that, like, it has melted her soul in a lot of ways. But I think you're absolutely right, that unlike Lumer, who has been just a total striver and has been like basically running a strategy since she was like 20, Marjora Taylor Green had basically a normal life and then has now just late in life or not late in life she's in middle age but but this is you know gone on this journey like you say

that has warped and deformed her and turned her into turned into a different thing but it all kind of happened to her sort of organically I think I think I agree with you on that yeah so if you had to before we get out of here if you had to be picking a team team MTG or team Lumer This is an impossible choice. Let's just circle back around to, I'll take the safe route, circle back around to where I was at the beginning and say, in this dispute, which again, in part is about whether or not the U.S. government should boot Palestinian child amputees out of the country before they get their medical care, rather than just letting them have the medical care and then go back.

In that dispute, I'm very much team Marjorie Taylor Green. I think what Laura Limer did there was despicable. Yeah. I mean, I'm team MTG, provisionally, team MTG basically all the way down the line. I feel like, again, she and I, MTG, if you see this, let's go hang out at an outback. I feel like an outback is the perfect place for us. I don't know why. I don't know why the Outback Steakhouse, like, is the place that calls to me for her.

That's where I'd like to go. Good video content for the bulwark. I would watch. Yeah, and go, you know, go in the comments and talk about whether or not, Here's when we make trouble. Is Laura Lumer's stance, do you think long-term productive for the Israeli relationship with the American public or not? Because this is one thing that I don't understand if Republicans are picking up on it or not. But it seems to me that the extent to which the Israeli government has become an appendage of the U.S. Republican Party

and has leaned into all of the worst caricatures that anti-Semites have conjured up over the, the Israeli government over the years, this is long-term, very, very dangerous for Israel. And I'd like to hear your thoughts on that in the comments. See you later, guys. Hit like, hit subscribe, follow us along as we come back for more things that the next thing won't be as fun as this. I promise that. Thanks, Andrew. Good luck, America.