Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Lost His Most Reliable Amplifier

Episode Date: November 15, 2025

JVL and Andrew Egger take on Donald Trump’s messy public split with Marjorie Taylor Greene and what this rift signals for the future of the MAGA movement.

Extra value meals are back. That means 10 tender juicy McNuggets and medium fries and a drink are just $8. Only at McDonald's. For limited time only, prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California, and for delivery. Hello, everybody. This is JVL here with my bulwark colleague, Andrew Eger. And on Friday night, something amazing happened.

In full view of the public, Donald Trump broke up with Marjorie Taylor Green. but maybe she broke up with him. I don't know. It's amazing. And Andrew, I feel like I was so early on Marjorie Taylor Green. I think it was two years ago when I first started my recurring bit that how I feel like she and I could be friends, that she was on a journey of self-discovery, that Marjorie Taylor Green was basically doing a very modern American eat, pray, love journey. And, uh, and that I always realize, I always believe she would wind up in this place where she's basically a never Trump or now. She's getting there, man. It's, uh, you know, I don't know if this is the, if this is the apex for Marjorie or what we're about to talk about or whether this is, you know, step three of 15.

Just the beginning out. But yeah, I'll be honest. I did not think it was going to get this far. I thought she was going to pull back. I thought she would get the message from Trump that this stuff wasn't working for him. Uh, but, uh, but so far. So not. That's not happening with Marjorie so far. Here's what I think people need to realize about Marjorie Taylor Green. And we're going to show you guys the tweets in a moment to give you the full explanation. But I want you to understand as you read it that Marjorie Taylor Green's, what you need to understand about her at base is that she believes it all. Now, some of the stuff she believes is crazy. I think she's a 9-11 truther.

A so-called plane that crashed into the Pentagon. It's odd. never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon. I think she has made some comments about Jewish space lasers. She believes some crazy, crazy ass, but she genuinely believes it. It's not an act. So we have a long truth social post from last night where Donald Trump announced, I am withdrawing my support and endorsement of, quote, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green of the state of Georgia. Over the past few weeks, despite mine, here he just lists all of the amazing things that he has done. It is just like the Fox News, Chiron, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Basically,

he says, all I see wacky Marjorie do is complain, complain, complain. And he then says that he thinks this could be because he sent her a poll saying that she shouldn't run for governor and that she didn't have a chance. And that he said he's heard from people that she's mad, that he won't take our phone calls. And he said, I can't take a lunatic's phone calls every day. And then he says that it was really bad that she went on the view. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Make America great again. I love that the view is so prominently placed there. I mean, like, you know, Donald Trump, TV addict is like, she's done all these horrible things. She won't do what I want to do about the Epstein files. She's trying to run for governor. And also, she went on the view once.

How dare she? Yeah. So, uh, um, Marjorie, I say this, because again, if she and I could go to the outback state, I don't know why I'm so fixated on this, but I believe it's the bloom and onion, which could bring us together. We sit on either side on one of those big old tables in an outback booth with a bloom and onion between us. We could find common ground, me and Marjorie, Taylor Green. President Trump just attacked me and lied about me. I haven't called him at all, but I did send these text messages today. She provides two text messages, one she sent to Donald Trump, and one she sent to the human printer, Natalie Harp, his assistant. Apparently,

this is what sent him over the edge, the Epstein files. And of course, he's coming after me hard to make an example to scare all the other Republicans before next week's vote to release the Epstein files. It's astonishing, really, how hard he's fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out, that he actually goes to this level. But really, most Americans wish he would fight this hard to help the forgotten men and women of America who are fed up with foreign wars and foreign causes. Touching my nose here for people who are listening and not watching. and cause rootless cosmopolitan foreign. But again, she believes it.

And they're going broke trying to feed their families and are losing hope over ever achieving the American dream. That's what I voted for. And here she goes on and says, I have supported President Trump with too much of my precious time, too much of my own money, and fought harder for him even when almost all the other Republicans turned their back and denounced him.

But I don't worship or serve Donald Trump. I worship God. Jesus is my savior. Amen, sister. and I serve my district, Georgia 14 of the American people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Very strong. Very, very strong. But what really gets us, Andrew, is that this morning, she comes back to Twitter and writes

something that honestly sounds like it could have been written by one of us. Okay? The toxic political, industrial complex thrives on ripping us all apart, but never delivers anything good for the American people whom I love. The PIC, that's the toxic and dutchral political context, tells us to hate each other, fundraisers off why we have to hate each other, and pits Americans against each other to the point of violence and nearing civil war. This is all so wrong. We can have our own differences in differing opinions, but we can still love and respect one another. We have far more in common than we have a part. I believe in the American people,

more than I believe in any leader or political party and the American people deserves so much better than how they have been treated by both sides of the aisle. She's the bulwark candidate. No, come on. Let's not go that far, okay? Okay, can we keep a little... Talking about love and not getting dragged into violence

and the people who profit off it. I mean, I'm just saying she sounds like me, basically. But this is what is interesting to me. and I'm curious what you make of this because I don't know how to read this. Like there's, there are, there are certain parts of it that are kind of like hieroglyphics to me because it seems like you could read it a couple of different ways. One is that it is sort of like this weird come to Jesus moment from her with this sort of like bulwarky swerve of realizing that Donald Trump is self-interested and a bully,

all of these sorts of things that she has loved for a long time. She has, you know, loved participating in the bullying, all of these sorts of things. You could roll back the clock to any number of things that she sort of made her bones. There's a reason she became such a maga darling, and it was because she, you know, spoke the language, and she was so fluent in just sort of like the own the libs stuff and, you know, all the conspiracy theories and all of these things for so long. That's how she became Marjorie Taylor Green and not just like some random Congress. There's a video of her chasing David Hogue down the street when she was a private citizen and yelling at him, video of her in committee hearings, shouting at Democrats. Totally like a catharsis to this. And like, obviously it's bad news politically and at least the immediate term.

for Trump. I mean, like, any major internal political clash is bad for the people that's happening to. I mean, that's just obvious, right? That's just kind of 101 stuff. And it is hard to imagine a more awkward one for Trump than somebody like Marjorie Taylor Green, who is just true blue MAGA. I mean, like, it really is a stress test of the thing Trump said the other day when he was, you know, I think it was with Laura Ingram when Laura Ingram was like talking to him about all these different concerns and gripes and fears that people in his own base have about sort of affordability and things like that. He's like, and she's kind of like, you know, Maga is concerned about this. And he's like, you know, Maga is concerned about this. And he was like, I'm Maga. Maga was my idea. Maga was nobody else's idea. I know what Maga wants better than anybody else. I decide what Maga likes. I decide what Maga cares about, right? And we are fast forwarding to the part where we very quickly get to find that out, right? But the other side of the whole thing is, and this is the part where I'm a little less eager to get in the booth and do the Blumen Onion sort of thing. I worry about what exactly this portends, because Margaret Taylor Green has not just been like a normal MAGA person. She has been like rubbing elbows with like the groipers and the white nationalist America first types like before that was cool

look you're not wrong she spoke at affect she spoke at nick fuentes's event like a couple of years you're not wrong Andrew right now and I'm not trying to like puncture your bit or anything but like like the the thing that I worry about a little bit here is that this has also been a thing coming from nat space right I mean Nick Fuentes very famously has been spending the last few months saying Donald Trump is cooked maga is over you know like that's a failed experiment that's on on the downtrend and we're on the upswing. And like, I wonder, you know, it's not like he and Marjorie Taylor Green can't do that at the same time, but I do wonder whether there is still a certain amount of like

overlap there. You know what I mean? And, and, you know, Maga might not be the worst thing ever in human history, you know, 25 years from now when we look back, that could, it could portend to something darker in theory, in theory. It's funny you say that, Andrew, because Marjorie closes out her post this morning by saying that the only way forward is, and here it's all capitalized, America First, America only, or as I like to think of it, AFAO, which sounds a lot like F-A-O, F-A-O, A-F-A-O, I guess that's a thing that we're

going to make happen. It's going to be a split. I assume that at some point we will see competing AFAO hats. Like, that has to be a thing that's on the horizon. I do think that it is very dangerous for Trump that this has manifested around FAAO hats. I do think that it is very dangerous for Trump that this has manifested around Epstein. This isn't really about the government shutdown. It's not really about the ACA subsidies. Those things he could finesse, I think, because those are just politics. And politics, nobody really cares about politics.

Nobody really cares about policy. People do care about, like, pedophilia and sex crimes, I think. They care about conspiracies. And Trump both finds himself now on the wrong side of, the most notorious pedophile ring in recent history and also finds himself on the wrong side of the conspiracy. He's now the guy on the inside trying to make something disappear instead of on the outside saying, oh, I'm just asking questions. What's happening here? I think that's dangerous for his base of support. Maybe I'm wrong about this?

No, I don't think you're wrong at all. I think you're absolutely right about this. I think that he has been running into wall after wall and just like, you know, he's tried so many different things strategically for the Epstein story at this point. He's tried just completely stonewalling it, tried to say, nobody cares about this, nobody should care about this and just like manifest that into existence. And the first thing he tried was like the Pam Bondi like give the binders to lips of TikTok and DC Drano. Obviously that backfired. He's tried, you know, getting Mike Johnson to sort of like quietly smother the thing in the house with a pillow. He has tried, you know, so many different things. And now his most recent and and sort of maybe most desperate strategy because

obviously he just wants to turn a page on the whole thing. But now he's trying to deflect it. Now he's trying to make it a story 100% about the Democrats. Again, he's trying to take, take what you just said, where he is like the guy in the position of concealment. And he's trying to rewrite the script where he is again sort of like the agent of, of revelation and this is a tremendous miscalculation on his part. Because I think Donald Trump thinks that Democrats are going to want to protect Bill Clinton and Larry Summers and a bunch of Democratic elites. And I think Donald Trump hasn't been paying attention to what's gone on the Democratic Party because the Democrats are willing to get rid of all of their elites. They hate their

elite. They hate Hakeem Jeffries at this point. They really hate Chuck Schumer. Like there is zero appetite in the Democratic Party to protect Larry Fing Summers. Believe me. And if anything, I think if those guys get burnt to the ground. That's actually bonus for Democrats. Yeah. And Trump seems to be like, oh, wait, do you see who else is in there? And, you know, Dems are like, yeah, let's burn. And forget, like, putting Democrats in a tough spot. I don't think it's going to work for MAGA either. And I think that is what is so significant about this break with MTG happening right now, because this was just, I mean, just yesterday, he was like, yeah, I want to appoint a special counsel to go after all these Democrats. And then several hours after that, here you have this messy public breakup with

Marjor Taylor Green where Marjor Taylor Green explicitly says, gosh, I wonder what Donald Trump is trying to hide over all of these things. And it's just like she's a very credible person who has a voice to those people, very credible person to those people. She has a voice to those people. And maybe it wouldn't matter because nobody has a bigger megaphone among MAGA or more credibility among MAGA than Donald Trump. But on this one issue, he is. is just so plainly wrong, like, he can't get out from under it. He's been trying to for months and it's just not working. And so I don't see how this does anything other than continue to ratchet up that tension, continue to raise that temperature. And like his, his best hope for all this was that

everybody would just close ranks around him and that there would be nobody saying this in the MAGA register to the MAGA voters in the MAGA information channels that already exist. And that has just blown, like, the biggest gasket, that strategy. But it took only a few people, right? Literally, it took four Republicans who actually believe this stuff. That's it. That's all it took. And we're going to see a vote, I think, next week on the discharge petition.

And, I mean, the Republican conference is already floating the idea that there's going to be dozens of defections. I think it's going to be pretty dangerous for any Republican that doesn't go with it. I don't know. Is that is that wishful thinking on my part that it creates danger for them down the road? I don't know. I don't know. It'd be a weird primary to watch. I am inclined sort of like intellectually to say this is low valence enough that like maybe it won't. You know, maybe it's not like people are going to get primaried over this sort of thing. But on the other hand, it's a really key issue for MAGA. And like I just don't know who would drive it. Like if Donald, if Donald Trump were on the opposite side of this thing, if Donald Trump were in the driver's seat, he could very easily make it a thing that people got primary over, right? I don't know what that will look like in practice without him being there, but, you know, Marjor Taylor Green has her eye on 2028. She wants to actually become like a very key person, if not the key driver of some succession movement to Donald Trump.

Uh, and maybe a big part of that is this sort of jockeying, this sort of politics, getting more like, God help us, America firsters to go sort of primary soft MAGA Republicans around the country. And you could see this sort of thing being. a wedge there. So, I mean, this is all very speculative because, like, we're just sort of going off of vectors that point off in insane directions that we've never really seen before. But, like, I do not see that as, like, an implausible possibility at this point. So, Andrew, I think one of the things that is funny to me about this is that as we sit here

taping on Saturday morning, Lindsay Graham, who doesn't believe any of this stuff, is still firmly on Donald Trump's side. Lindsay Graham, who, in fact, whose entire political worldview is antithetical to Donald Trump's. He's still firmly with Trump, whereas Marjor Taylor Green, who is as MAGA as they come, is like, hey, this thing is all rotten from the inside. We got to go and figure out how to how to burn it down and renew our movement. And so I floated this theory yesterday. And it's just a theory, not a pronouncement, not a prediction. But I kind of wonder if the last people to wind up defending Trump will be the people who least believe in any of it. They'll be the guys like Lindsey Graham, all of the good

Republicans, the marker Rubio's of the world. They'll hang in there until the very last minute, long after like the actual believers have left. Does this sound right to you or no? I think it's incredibly plausible. McKay Cobbins at the Atlantic wrote something years and years ago. I forget exactly when, but it has always stuck with me about how Trump arrived at a moment when sort of like your median, just sort of like soulless, empty suit, Republican politician was realizing that he had no idea how to continue to succeed in just sort of Republican politics. The base was was so mad at him all the time, this empty suit guy, because he's part of the DC establishment, the GOP establishment. He didn't really know. how to fix that. You saw sort of the tea party wave, got rid of a bunch of a bunch of these guys, but even years later, you know, that that, that sense of like just sort of anti-establishment iconoclastic rage was just building and building and building and building inside the Republican party. And it got Trump elected, that wave of rage. But it also gave this lifeline to all these empty suit Republican guys, because as soon as they realized that not only was Trump not really

coming for them. Not only did not only like did they stand to lose anything really from his being elected, but in fact, he gave them what they had been trying and failing to find for years and years and years, which was just a way to get their constituents from being so mad at them all the time because all they had to do was back him to the hill and say, Donald Trump is right about everything and I'm going to vote with him 100% of the time and I'm going to go after all of his enemies and I'm going to cover for him in every single story. And that was all the base wanted for a long time. and like they loved that they were like this is great this is the best this is the easiest my job has been in a long time right because i without having to change really anything about myself

just get to like put on the hat and like suddenly everything's cool i think that might be changing right like what we're talking about right now you know the actual base has reasons to get restless but i think that you you may be very well correct that like they're going to hold on to that strategy until the bitter end because it has done so well for them for so long. All right, we're going to close with my open invitation to Marjor, Taylor Green. If you're listening, Marge, let's go do this. Let's go to the Outback. It's my treat.

We'll get a bloomin onion. We'll get a couple of Bonzo burgers and, you know, whatever. Drink some fosters because it's Australian Fabia. And then if you've learned to trust me, we're bringing you over on the bulwark feed. and we'll have a have a conversation right here. Andrew, thanks for sitting down with me. Everybody else, we'll see you later. Good luck, America.