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We were all given cause to contemplate the fundamental ricketiness of the modern internet this morning, as a major apparent outage at web-infrastructure provider Cloudflare knocked out access to a bunch of high-traffic sites. It was the second such large infrastructure error in weeks—last month, an Amazon Web Services glitch similarly locked up major chunks of the web for hours.
The Cloudflare glitch is monkeying with Substack and our Bulwark back-end too, although it doesn’t seem to be preventing us from building and sending this newsletter. We guess if you’re reading it, it worked! Happy Tuesday.
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Can MTG Survive Our Strange New Respect?
by Andrew Egger
So far, at least, it sure looks like Marjorie Taylor Greene’s winning her breakup with Donald Trump.
The president is running his usual playbook for slapping down internal enemies—the barrage of personal attacks, the accusations of sour grapes, the public brainstorming process for mean nicknames. But none of it seems to be having the usual effect. The shock-and-awe tactics are supposed to cow their target and set them crawling to Mar-a-Lago for forgiveness. But Greene seems unbothered. While Trump’s unsubtle declarations of open war against a Republican are supposed to function as marching orders for the broader MAGA base and Trump infotainment apparatus, Greene appears to be shielded by her own, hard-won MAGA cachet.
It is Trump, not Greene, who is beating a hasty retreat on the matter that sparked their fight in the first place. Despite his bullying, she has persisted in her support for releasing the full Epstein files, while he has been forced to pretend he suddenly supports it too, lest he suffer the embarrassment of seeing a huge swath of the House GOP vote to release them over his objections.
All these developments would have seemed impossible just a month or two ago. And it suggests that we may be witnessing a hinge point for MAGA, a motley coalition of groups that has long been held together only by the personal gravity of Trump. If Trump continues to falter, the power vacuum he will begin to create will be gargantuan. Plainly, Greene senses the opportunity to put herself forward as the leader of a possible successor faction. Well, so far so good for her.
But can it last?
Greene seems unambiguously to have won the early days of the fight. But those early victories may actually prove dangerous to her long-term chances, because she’s starting to get the strange-new-respect treatment from all the wrong people.
It’s a pattern we saw time and again in the first Trump term. Some Republican gets in a fight with Trump. Because Trump is the perpetual main character of our discourse, this fight shoves that Republican into the main-stage spotlight—maybe even into a spot on the January 6th committee. Suddenly they’re all over mainstream media, getting unusually sympathetic write-ups in the discourse and unusually charitable interviews from the establishment talking heads—perhaps about how they stood up to Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 elections.
Compared to the MAGA crowd who’s by now beating that Republican silly online, the mainstream response seems downright warm and loving to the Republican who has “seen the light.” They get correspondingly less prickly in their own rhetoric, more prone to bromides about bipartisanship and so on.
But of course this usually ends up playing right into Trump’s hands. He understands deep in his lizard brain that his base’s central driving concern remains what it has always been: owning the libs. Any non-hostile interaction between an elected Republican and a hated outsider—Democrats, the media, whatever—is inherently, deeply suspicious. And Trump channels that suspicion straight back into his own quarrel with the Republican—look, all our mutual enemies are rallying around THEM! They were a RINO all along!
Greene now presents an interesting test case. She is no establishment politician. She never wore MAGA like a skinsuit. She has lived and breathed it for her entire political career. Will this give her the antibodies she needs to withstand this sort of attack?¹
She’d better hope so, because she doesn’t appear to be strategically triangulating away from this playbook in the slightest. The first few major interviews she’s done since her pivot seem like they could have been chosen specifically for their base-alienating properties: A panel on The View, followed shortly by a CNN interview with Dana Bash in which she apologized for her own history of wacky, stuntish behavior—the same behavior that made her a MAGA star in the first place. In that same interview, she spoke about “ending the toxic infighting in politics” and said Trump’s attacks were putting her life in danger.
In many ways, yes, she’s winning the breakup. But let me leave you with the top Breitbart comment on the writeup of Greene’s interview with Bash: “When you go on CNN crying about Trump, you get what you deserve.”
Congress’s Next Backbone
by William Kristol
Today the House of Representatives will pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act, something President Trump bitterly opposed for months. This will be taken, correctly, as a suggestion that Trump may be beginning to lose his iron grip on the Republican party.
Could the president also be losing his iron grip on Congress?
That grip has been made possible by the fact that in the Trump era, partisan loyalty has swamped institutional responsibility. Could today’s vote be a sign that members of Congress are re-awakening to the fact that they were elected to serve as our representatives in a co-equal branch of the government, not as mere rubber stamps for the executive?