Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and far-right commentator Tucker Carlson mistook President Trump’s charm and graciousness as an invitation to tell him what to do, leading to their respective fallings-out with the commander-in-chief, Victor Davis Hanson argued on the latest episode of “Pod Force One.”
“I think they felt that because they had been very intimate with [Trump] — in the sense that they had been at Mar-a-Lago, or they were on Air Force One — that they insidiously began to think that they could tell him things, and they forgot that he is the president of the United States, and that they represent maybe one-one thousandth of the people he contacts,” Hanson told Post columnist and “Pod Force One” host Miranda Devine of the MAGA movement’s most famous “apostates.”
“This is a man who’s talking to the most powerful people in the world, and we’re not that important, but [Greene and Carlson] felt — I don’t know how else to explain why Tucker said he called him and said, ‘Don’t do this with Iran,’ or ‘Don’t do this,’ or ‘Don’t do that,’” added Hanson, a scholar of classical history and military strategy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a best-selling author
“Why would a president listen to somebody just because he was on Air Force One, and why would Tucker, who’s a very intelligent person, think that he had that entree to affect a policy that would change decades just because he had been on Air Force One or had known Trump?”
Devine, who has interviewed Trump multiple times, noted that the president is “very generous and gregarious” and “treats everybody the same,” which may lead people to “fall into this trap of thinking” that they are at his level.
“I think they misinterpret informality and magnanimity as sort of an allowance for them to have a greater role than they otherwise should or would,” Hanson argued.
“And when they start to exit that role, then they get a snap back from him, and then they get very angry, as if, ‘Well, wait a minute, I was at Mar-a-Lago, I was on Air Force One, I talk’ – and they don’t understand he’s the president of the United States, and that’s the difference.”
Hanson, who chronicles the president’s second term in his new book, “The Counter Revolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement,” said that behind closed doors, Trump’s demeanor is “completely at odds with the left’s character of his public persona,” which may have resulted in Greene, Carlson and others getting too comfortable with giving the president unsolicited advice.
“He calls people and he asks how you are and what can he do for you, but you can’t mistake that genuine interest, intimacy and niceness and kindness with the fact that he’s not president of the United States,” the academic explained.
“So, you don’t go to the next step and say, ‘Hey, Mr. President,’ you don’t say, ‘Hey, Don,’ or ‘Hey, this,’ and you wouldn’t assume that you had control.”
Greene (R-Ga.) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), both of whom criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the release of files related to notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, “went that extra step, they never really appreciated the power that [Trump] wields and the influence that he has,” according to Hanson.
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“When [Greene] crossed him on the Epstein files and started telling him – calling him numerous times a day – she didn’t understand that he had the power to say, ‘You know what, I will make a few calls, and you won’t even want to run for your own party nomination.’ Or, ‘You’re going to cross me, Mr. Massie, but you’re not even going to be nominated,’” he continued.
Greene, Carlson and Massie didn’t see the rebuke coming because “contrary to his image, [Trump’s] not provocative in private conversations,” Hanson said.
“He doesn’t warn you. He doesn’t correct you and say, ‘I’m president, Victor. I’m president.’ Because you know that, and the people who know that, I think, can get along with him much better.”
