Trump’s in trouble – and it’s not just Epstein tearing Maga apart

There is something truly delicious about sitting on the sidelines and watching a really good political spat. It warms the cockles. And the epic falling-out between Donald Trump and the conspiracy-loving, fire-breathing, Maga ultra, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has not disappointed.

In an age marked by utter obsequiousness, Taylor Greene took the fight to Trump. And the name-calling has been fabulous. He now calls her Marjorie Traitor Greene. She says he’s put her life at risk – and in a dramatic new twist has said she will quit Congress, saying: "I refuse to be a 'battered wife' hoping it all goes away and gets better."

If the late, great Tony Benn were alive, he would say politics is about policies, not personalities. I always thought that when he was in his fight with Denis Healey for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party back in the early 1980s, it was a remarkably po-faced response. And so much of politics in the US today is about the personality of Trump. It has been for a decade.

But actually, in relation to the Trump/MTG mega-tiff, Benn’s maxim is right. This is about policy. Sure, the fight is between two combustible personalities, but there are some big issues at stake here. And they have the potential to tear the Make America Great Again movement apart.

It has left the president seething. His view is that Maga is whatever he says it is. It’s not for other people to decide. Say it quietly, it is almost Dr Frankenstein losing control of his monster – and if he has lost control, then is he no longer the all-powerful president we have hitherto thought? Even, perish the thought, a little bit lame?

So let’s dive into this. The main cause of the falling-out between MTG and the president was around the release of the Epstein files. It has been a running sore, and Trump has been all over the place on this. Pre-election, the Maga movement was as one: the files must be released. But as it became clear that the president’s name might feature quite prominently, suddenly those closest to him lost their appetite for publication. The Wall Street Journal revealing the tasteless card Trump sent Jeffrey Epstein for his birthday added to that sense of jeopardy. Trump insists it’s a fake – though he hasn’t explained how or why.

It’s not just that he opposed publication; the Republican Party did everything it could to prevent a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. But MTG and a handful of others weren’t going to budge on their view that they owed it to the victims of America’s most prolific paedophile. Until 10 days ago, the White House was turning the thumbscrews on the holdouts.

It was only when there was a recognition that the threats were going nowhere that Trump accepted the inevitable and said he would support the release of the files. Be in no doubt, this is a stinging defeat for him. He was free at any time to release the files without the need for a congressional vote. He chose not to. His tetchiness was more than apparent when a woman reporter questioned him about it on Air Force One and he said – disgracefully – to her, “quiet piggy”.

But it doesn’t end there. MTG and others want the administration to focus much more on the economy, not buying the Trump bromides that the US economy is the envy of the world, that trillions of dollars are pouring in from his tariff policy, and that Americans have never been better off. The affordability crisis has been seized on by political opponents – like the Epstein files, Trump is trying to dismiss this, too, as a Democrat hoax.

There is something else tearing at Maga. It is principally about free speech, but it goes much deeper than that. The spark has been an interview that the former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson conducted with the Holocaust-denying antisemite, Nick Fuentes. The interview could not have been friendlier.

Initially, the controversy was on whether Fuentes should have been platformed at all by someone with such a huge following as Carlson, and whether he should have been given such an easy ride. It was the usual debate about free speech and cancelling.

But it morphed into something else. It became about whether the Trump administration was too close to Israel. If Maga is about America First, why do we care what happens in a country far away with only a few million people in it? Indeed, why did the Trump administration intervene in Argentina, bailing out their beef farmers when America’s farmers are reeling from his administration’s tariff policies?

In the moves of certain key figures, you can see that minds are turning to the post-Trump world and who will be the standard-bearer for the Republicans in 2028. Once that happens, power could drain from this presidency quickly.

But I have been doing this for too long to dare to count Trump out. And let me go back to the Epstein vote to underline why. As I said, 10 days ago, when Trump was still trying to prevent the release of the files, there were only a handful of GOP members who needed to be won over. In the 435-seat House of Representatives, about 215 supported Trump that the files should stay under wraps. But once he said he was in favour of their release, all but one voted for release.

Just think about that. These politicians, each with an electoral mandate from their own electorates, are so supine that all but one changed their minds once freed by Trump to do so. It’s pathetic.

Trump may be weakened. But the Republican Party is yet to discover any kind of backbone.