Trump’s inner circle are now his most dangerous opponents

You know you have gone through the looking glass when MAGA’s former conspiracy-theorist-in-chief Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to be the grown-up in the room.

The former Georgia congresswoman – who once blamed space lasers controlled by the Rothschild family for starting wildfires in California – has recently been calling out MAGA mouthpiece Laura Loomer for racism and hateful rhetoric.

Then she popped up on PBS, not rehashing her theories about satanic child abuse rings operating from DC pizza parlours, but instead chastising her former idol president Donald Trump for demeaning women.

In the sliding scale of MAGA looniness, Greene now seems to have slipped ever closer to “normal” territory, which says a lot about where the American right is today.

She may well represent where it is heading in the future: Greene is one of a growing band of Trump cast-offs who have gone from cheerleaders to critics and are mulling a takeover of a Republican Party that’s flailing about in search of a post-Trump identity – or perhaps a whole new movement.

Open any social media feed these days and you will bump into one of Trump’s motley crew of cast-offs. Greene split with Trump last year over his handling of the Epstein files, and while she seems to be positioning herself as the unlikely voice of reason, others are sounding a little more unhinged.

Defector-in-chief Tucker Carlson has been hosting a parade of fellow turncoats on his podcast, and a recent guest joining the conservative commentator for some cathartic Trump bashing was former US border patrol officer Gregory Bovino.

Bovino, you will recall, was for a time the face of Trump’s brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation, strutting round the streets of Minneapolis in a 1930s-retro double-breasted green trenchcoat, overseeing a campaign that ended with the deaths of two Americans and the terrorisation of an entire community.

Now he will tell anyone who will listen that the Trump administration is reneging on its promise of mass deportations, despite arrests and removals of migrants now being at levels that exceed those when he, Bovino, was in office.

He and Carslon nevertheless huddled in a dark wood interior under a chandelier of deer antlers as Bovino confided that he saw ulterior motives for the removal of his security detail after he left ICE.

“Do I think they want me dead? At this point, yes,” he told a frowning Carlson, who was apparently taking these claims with absolute seriousness.

“There are some crazies out there – you know this, Tucker,” he added, without any apparent irony.

Carlson is the beating heart in the battle for the soul of the post-Trump US right. Once the greatest champion of Trump’s America First agenda, he has turned into his most vocal critic, breaking with the president over his attack on Iran.

Now he and Greene have teamed up for a no-holds-barred attack on Trump: Greene insists Trump has “gone insane”, while Carlson has suggested he may be “the antichrist”. They have also both distanced themselves from the Republican Party.

The manoeuvres have gone beyond mudslinging to actual plotting. In early August, Carlson, Greene, Kentucky Republican congressman Thomas Massie and former National Counterterrorism Center chief Joe Kent holed up in Carlson’s Maine home to discuss the possibility of forming a new political movement. This comes after ample speculation that Carlson is considering a 2028 presidential bid.

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But independent presidential bids and third parties have never really taken off in the US. Kent has acknowledged this, telling USA Today that he didn’t know “how viable the third-party independent lane actually is”.

Instead, he floated the “Trump model” of bending the whole Republican Party to their aims and goals. Given increasing unease in the GOP about the ongoing conflict in Iran, there is certainly an ideological space which something needs to fill.

But what do these defectors want? Their central argument is that Trump isn’t following through on his America First commitments, evidenced principally by his attack on Iran, but also on policies like his import of foreign beef. Their argument is that Trump didn’t go as far as he promised, which will be worrying to those who fear he has gone far enough.

There is also a through-line with many of these figures: they have faced accusations of antisemitism. Carlson sparked outcry when he sat down for a cosy chat about Israel last October with far-right influencer Nick Fuentes, an openly antisemitic Hitler fan.

While Greene has distanced herself from the grab-bag of QAnon and school shooting conspiracies she has peddled in the past, she continues to accuse Israel of controlling US foreign policy, which many Jewish groups say is coded antisemitism.

While Massie has never alluded to Jewish space lasers, he has faced similar allegations of antisemitism in his criticism of Israeli influence on US politics. Both deny the claims.

Joe Kent has documented links to far-right figures, including hiring a former member of the Proud Boys as a consultant. He has also shared the stage at fundraisers with members of the far right.

And while Bovino is not one of the core political conspirators, it emerged this week that, at the time of his retirement, he was under investigation for disparaging a Jewish prosecutor. This is hardly a coalition of moderates. And who knows what other figures may emerge to join this gang of strident “reformers”.