Right-wing Republicans have also criticized the president’s stances on Iran and Ukraine, hinting at a broader fraying of his political coalition.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the right-wing Georgia Republican who first discovered politics by way of the QAnon conspiracy theory, has always been one of President Trump’s most ardent acolytes in Congress.
But these days, she is finding plenty to criticize about her “favorite president,” particularly his turnabout on revealing a complete accounting of the Jeffrey Epstein case.
“It’s a full reversal on what was all said beforehand, and people are just not willing to accept it,” Ms. Greene said in an interview, after the Justice Department said no further disclosures would be “appropriate or warranted” when it came to the disgraced financier who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
It was the latest flash of frustration within Mr. Trump’s hard-right faction on Capitol Hill. After a six-month honeymoon in which a fractious Republican Party has remained mostly united by unblinking allegiance to the president, there are now signs of a potential fraying of Mr. Trump’s political coalition.
In the past few weeks, Ms. Greene and other right-wing Republicans have criticized the administration’s bellicose stance on Iran, the president’s reversal on supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia and the Justice Department’s pivot on the Epstein matter. They have suggested that on each issue, Mr. Trump has betrayed the voters who elected him.
“I don’t accept it, and I don’t think anyone else should accept it,” Ms. Greene said of the decision not to release more information about Mr. Epstein. “I just think that it’s a punch in the gut when regular people go to jail all the time, when they mess up and do something wrong, and then it always seems the rich, powerful elites escape.”
