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Republicans in Congress privately made fun of Donald Trump only to come around to support him when he won their party’s 2024 White House nomination, outgoing GOP House member Marjorie Taylor Greene said on Sunday.
“I watched many of my colleagues go from making fun of him, making fun of how he talks, making fun of me constantly for supporting him, to when he won the primary in 2024, they all started – excuse my language, Lesley – kissing his ass,” Greene, a Georgia Republican, said in a clip of an interview that is set to air on Sunday on CBS’s 60 Minutes program.
Referring to Trump’s “Make America great again” slogan, Greene told the 60 Minutes correspondent that those Republicans at that point “decided to put on a Maga hat for the first time”.
Greene was once a staunch Trump ally who has split with the president and is leaving Congress in January. Trump has called her a “traitor” and attacked her online, prompting what she says is a wave of threats against her.
In posts on Sunday on X, Greene said she has reported hundreds of threats to the US Capitol police. She added that first those threats came from those who opposed Trump on the US’s political left. But then, she said, threats were aimed at her and her son when she opposed Trump on his handling of files pertaining to the prosecution of the president’s former friend Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted sex offender and disgraced financier.
Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor and died by suicide while jailed on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019, during Trump’s first presidency.
“All of the death threats came from the ‘left’ until I stood with the Epstein Survivors, woman who were raped as teenagers, abused, and trafficked by rich powerful men – and that’s when President Trump turned on me and called me a ‘traitor’ and then new death threats and harassments came from the ‘right’ or somewhere,” Greene wrote on X. “I sent these assassination threats on my son to President Trump in which he responded with harsh accusatory replies and zero sympathy.”
In her 60 Minutes interview, Greene said Republicans don’t criticize Trump in public because they fear being targeted by him.
“I think they’re terrified to step out of line and get a nasty Truth Social post on them,” she said.
