Why is a president who pledged to put “America first” handing a $40 billion bailout to Argentina while quadrupling Argentine beef imports to undercut the price of beef produced by U.S. ranchers at the same time his tariffs have destroyed U.S. soybean sales to China, thereby enabling Argentine soybean farmers to sell to China instead?
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has absolutely no clue.
The Georgia Republican continued her surprising tour of pushback against Republican nonsense with an appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show Wednesday, where she called the bailout “one of the grossest things I’ve ever seen.”
“I have no idea who is telling our great president, our ‘America first’ president, that this is a good idea,” she said. “Because, honestly, it’s a punch in the gut to all of our American cattle ranchers, and they are furious and rightfully so.”
“I can’t think of a country that’s further away from the United States of America than Argentina,” she continued. “It’s literally at the bottom of South America in the Southern Hemisphere, and we’re all the way at the top. I don’t know how that’s ‘America first.’”
(Trump contended in a social media post that American cattle ranchers should, in fact, be thankful: “If it weren’t for me, they would be doing just as they’ve done for the past 20 years — Terrible!” he wrote.)
Greene made the comments at the tail end of a longer screed against Republicans in Washington, D.C., who she said have “hijacked” Trump’s movement and are “turning it into everything that we hate.”
The two focused in particular on America’s bizarre embrace of foreign entanglements under Trump, with Greene wondering aloud at the extent of U.S. military action in the Middle East.
“Fox News and everyone tells me that Houthis are the most dangerous people on the planet and I literally can’t find a Houthi in my district,” she joked.
“When we bombed Iran on behalf of Israel, it was pretty interesting to me that hell was not unleashed like we were told it was going to be,” she remarked, questioning the oft-employed Israeli warning that Iran is always weeks away from producing a nuclear weapon.
“I didn’t see hell be unleashed on Israel. We didn’t see a single bomb fall on our heads, on our neighborhoods, on our homes. We didn’t see anything happen here like has happened to Gaza now for months and months and months. We didn’t see children and toddlers being blown to pieces. We didn’t hear about these horror stories … but this is a lie that we’re constantly told over and over and over again, that we have to hate these people in the Middle East, that we have to hate these foreign countries.”
“Why are we considered hateful and antisemitic if we don’t want to pay for Israel’s wars constantly?” she asked. “That doesn’t make us antisemitic and hateful. We want our money to stay here at home.”
(Despite her claim, it’s important to note the congresswoman has certainly fueled antisemitic tropes in the past, however, including infamously suggesting in 2018 that a prominent Jewish family started a wildfire in California via lasers beamed from space.)
“People are hurting here at home. Food prices are high, rent is high, home prices are ridiculously high, cars are high, auto insurance, home insurance, health insurance is insane, energy prices are high … much more expensive than they were even a year ago.”
In addition to the above, Greene repeated her call for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to call Congress back to order ― and stop avoiding her colleagues’ efforts to force the Justice Department to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.