Marjorie Taylor Greene hints at major political announcement

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Georgia lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene believes that she may have what it takes to be senator. The rabble-rousing Republican has been working on Capitol Hill since 2021, and in just a few short years, she has become one of the most recognizable lawmakers in Washington after years of stoking controversy.
One of the most fervent Trump allies, Greene has sided with the president on virtually all of his policy positions. She rarely bucks the MAGA trends set by the president. Buoyed by support from Trump amid some of her more contentious culture wars, Greene has made a name for herself by consistently backing far-right causes and combatively shouting down Democrats, like Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, who disagree. Now, after years of honing her right-wing message and growing her already massive social media following, Greene is seriously considering a run for Senate in 2026, two sources revealed to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The lawmaker is reportedly planing to hop in the race if the Georgia's popular Gov. Brian Kemp opts out of running against Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff (pictured). Kemp is term-limited and cannot run again, so Greene appears to be preparing for a contentious GOP primary should he bow out. The sources revealed that Greene believes she would 'crush' the competition if Kemp stays out of the contest. Reps. Mike Collins, Buddy Carter and Rich McCormick are all reportedly interested in hoping in the race, meaning the race could get messy as the House Republicans angle for the coveted Senate seat.
Should she decide to run, Greene would be in the spotlight for one of the nation's most contentious Senate races, which will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2020, when Ossoff last ran for Senate, the contest ended up costing over $500 million, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. And already Ossoff, 38, is raising money to fend off a challenge to his seat. According to a recent Politico report, the Georgia Democrat already has over $11 million in his war chest over a year and a half out from the 2026 election.
Though MTG's hopes to run for the upper chamber may be dashed by Kemp (pictured) as he is the clear favorite should he get in the race. Multiple polls examining the race have shown that in a head-to-head matchup between Kemp and Ossoff, the governor trounces the Democrat. A survey from WPA Intelligence for the Club for Growth in January found that Kemp leads Ossoff 46 to 40 with 14 percent of respondents still undecided.
Another poll from the Tyson Group in February found Kemp leading 49 to 42, with 8 percent undecided. And Senate leadership has been lobbying Kemp to run, too. Senate Majority Leader John Thune and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Tim Scott met with the Georgia governor in Atlanta this month to convince him to run.
As a two-term governor Kemp has a robust fundraising network and an already built out political operation. Regardless, Greene would be able to breeze through the GOP primary process if Kemp were to stay on the sidelines, one of the sources told the outlet. She also has an advantage in being a close Trump ally whereas Kemp drew the ire of the former president after rebuffing him after the 2020 election.

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Metro

an hour ago

• Metro

Is Donald Trump gambling his popularity and presidency with strikes on Iran?

The US bombed three nuclear sites in Iran overnight, which might be a surprise if you heard his campaign rhetoric against foreign intervention. Boasting to be 'the only president in generations who didn't start a war' on the campaign trail, he said his presidency would 'turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars'. So what led to him sending B-2 Spirit stealth bombers to drop 'bunker buster' bombs on Iran last night, as as well as firing Tomahawk cruise missiles from US Navy submarines? Angelia Wilson, Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester, told Metro that his motivations are most likely to be political rather than borne from ideological conviction. 'Two weeks ago he had a big military parade that no one showed up to, and he had millions of Americans protesting against him over 2,000 cities. You've got to get those headlines shifted somehow,' she said. Her work looks particularly at the Christian Right in the US, and she said that key figures have been calling for the US to support Israel in their war against Iran. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video 'I monitor the emails from political organisations to their constituents, and they've spent the last two weeks softening the ground for this,' she said. Many had been sharing Bible verses such as Numbers 23:24, which describes Israel rising 'like a lion' to destroy and devour its enemies until all the blood of its prey is drained. Military action supporting Israel is therefore likely to play well with this key section of his base, which also includes those with the biggest pockets to fund Republican politicians. 'MAGA' supporters, who tend to be more secular, working class, anti-establishment and supportive of the 'America First' slogan against involvement overseas, are unlikely to be cheerleaders for the bombing campaign. The in-fighting between these two factions of Republican supporters could be seen most clearly when Senator Ted Cruz debated Tucker Carlson over Iran. The former Fox News heavyweight savaged the politician, claiming he knew little about the country he intended to bomb, and could not say its population of ethnic mix. But Professor Wilson, who wrote The Politics of Hate: How the Christian Right Darkened America's Political Soul , said that although Maga supporters may not like the idea, they are unlikely to turn against Trump over it, so long as strikes remain limited, and troops are not sent to fight. Trump has 'weighed up which of the constituents he needs to keep happy at this stage, and it's very much the Christian right,' she claimed. Asked whether he was gambling his presidency over the issue, she said she doubted he was too concerned with his personal political legacy as he doesn't have to be elected again (constitutionally, he can only serve two terms). To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video She claimed he was more likely to be concerned with keeping rich backers happy to secure income for the future – and the Christian Right have deeper pockets. 'I think he's taken a calculated decision that he's not going to get that much push back for it,' she said. 'Whatever he does in the next three years, it's going to be to suit him and his needs. 'I suspect he's thinking that by standing by Netanyahu on this particular account, that he will benefit from it financially in the long-term, post-presidency.' She said that what he is really gambling with is 'the reputation of the Republican Party'. So even though few are falling out of line just yet, he might face more pushback when it comes to the next election campaign. 'Americans get two weeks holiday a year in the summer, she said. 'And if gas prices are through the roof, I don't care who's president: they get very angry at the president. 'So having a war in the Middle East is not going to be good for the popularity of the president or the Republicans.' Trump himself has claimed that war in Iran does not contradict his 'America First' strategy. He told the Atlantic: 'Considering that the term wasn't used until I came along, I think I'm the one that decides that. 'For those people who say they want peace — you can't have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon. So for all of those wonderful people who don't want to do anything about Iran having a nuclear weapon — that's not peace.' More Trending Professor Wilson pointed out that the slogan was not developed by Trump, having emerged during World War One when it was used by isolationists and later the KKK, and again being used to oppose the US joining World War Two. The decision to bomb Iran without approval from Congress was also not popular with Democrats, unsurprisingly. US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for him to be impeached over it, saying the strikes could be unconstitutional if they amount to a declaration of war. Professor Wilson said this was unlikely to phase him, however, as 'while both houses of Congress are in the hands of the Republicans, then he's not going to get prosecuted for anything.' Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: London to Dubai BA flight turns back 90 minutes from landing after Iran strikes MORE: Has World War Three started and how close has Iran come to having a nuclear bomb? 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The Guardian

2 hours ago

• The Guardian

‘Our era of violent populism': the US has entered a new phase of political violence

It has been a grim couple of weeks in the US, as multiple acts of politically motivated violence have dominated headlines and sparked fears that a worrying new normal has taken hold in America. Last Saturday, a man disguised as a police officer attacked two Democratic legislators at their homes in Minnesota, killing a state representative and her husband, and wounding another lawmaker and his wife. The alleged murderer was planning further attacks, police said, on local politicians and abortion rights advocates. The same day, during national 'No Kings' demonstrations against the Trump administration, there was a spate of other violence or near-violence across the US. After a man with a rifle allegedly charged at protesters in Utah, an armed 'safety volunteer' associated with the protest fired at the man, wounding him and killing a bystander. When protesters in California surrounded a car, the driver sped over a protester's leg. And a man was arrested in Arizona after brandishing a handgun at protesters. Later in the week, a Jewish lawmaker in Ohio reported that he was 'run off the road' by a man who waved a Palestinian flag at him. Police in New York also said they were investigating anti-Muslim threats to the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. The political temperature is dangerously high – and shows few signs of cooling. 'We are in a historically high period of American political violence,' Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, told the Guardian. 'I call it our 'era of violent populism'. It's been about 50 years since we've seen something like this. And the situation is getting worse.' He said the US is in a years-long stretch of political violence that started around the time of Donald Trump's first election, with perpetrators coming from both the right and the left. In 2017, the first year of Trump's first presidency, a leftwing activist opened fire on a group of Republican politicians and lobbyists playing baseball, wounding four people. In 2021, pro-Trump rioters attacked the US Capitol. In 2022, a conspiracy theorist attacked then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer, and a man angry about the US supreme court's rightward drift tried to assassinate justice Brett Kavanaugh. Trump survived two assassination attempts in 2024; the Pennsylvania gunman's bullet missed Trump's face by a few centimeters. The Israel-Gaza war has contributed to the tension. Last month a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington DC; the alleged perpetrator, an American-born leftwing radical, described the killings as an act of solidarity with Palestinians. A couple weeks later a man in Colorado attacked a group of pro-Israel demonstrators with molotov cocktails. Pape directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, which studies terrorism and conflict. He noted in a recent piece in the New York Times that his research has found rising support among both left- and right-leaning Americans for the 'use of force' to achieve political means. The May survey was 'the most worrisome yet', he wrote. 'About 40 percent of Democrats supported the use of force to remove Mr. Trump from the presidency, and about 25 percent of Republicans supported the use of the military to stop protests against Mr. Trump's agenda. These numbers more than doubled since last fall, when we asked similar questions.' Americans are not only polarized, but forming into distinct and visible 'mobilized blocs', Pape says. He also notes that acts of political violence seem to be becoming 'increasingly premeditated'. Quantifying political violence or 'domestic terrorism' can be difficult, Pape said, because the FBI does not track it in a consistent manner. The best proxy, he said, is often prosecuted threats against members of Congress. Those 'have gone up dramatically, especially since the first year of Trump's first term', he said, adding that the threats have been 'essentially 50-50' against Democratic and Republican lawmakers. The US Capitol police, which protects Congress, reported in April that the number of threat assessment cases it has investigated 'has climbed for the second year in a row'. While both sides have committed violence, Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism, thinks that Republican political leaders carry more culpability for the violent climate. 'We haven't seen the mainstream political left embrace political violence in the same way,' he said. He noted that while Luigi Mangione, the man who allegedly murdered a healthcare insurance executive last year, could be considered leftwing, he was 'more of an anti-system extremist' who also hated the Democratic party. In contrast, 'when you look at the rhetoric and language being used in neo-Nazi mass shooter manifestos, it's almost identical to Stephen Miller posts', he added, referring to the White House aide. Quantifying violence is also tricky because it can be difficult to determine ideological motives or causal relations. People died during the 2020 George Floyd protests and riots, but it is not clear to what extent all of the deaths were directly related to the unrest. In 2023, a transgender shooter attacked a Christian private school in Tennessee, killing three children and three adults; while the attacker had railed against 'little crackers' with 'white privileges', investigators concluded that the attack was most motivated by a desire for notoriety. This April, someone set the Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro's mansion on fire while he and his family, who were unharmed, slept inside. Although Shapiro is Jewish and the alleged perpetrator made remarks condemning Israel, the suspect's family members have said that he has a long history of mental health problems. In other cases, acts of violence are ideological but don't fall on to conventional political lines. Earlier this year, a man bombed a fertility clinic in California; the suspect was an anti-natalist – or self-described 'pro-mortalist' – who was philosophically opposed to human reproduction. Pape believes that the current wave of violence and tumult is only partly a reaction to Trump's polarizing politics. 'He's as much a symptom as a cause,' he said. The more important factor is 'a period of high social change … as the US moves from a white-majority country to a white-minority country. And that's been going drip, drip, drip since the early 1970s, but around 10 years ago we started to go through the transition generation', Pape said. The closest analogue is probably the US in the 1960s and 1970s, when the civil rights movement, the hippy counterculture, the Vietnam war, and Black and Latino nationalism were accompanied by a wave of political assassinations and other violence as white supremacist groups and others harassed and killed civil rights leaders. There was also a wave of leftwing violence. Domestic terror groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground attacked judges, police officers and government offices. In 1972, according to Bryan Burrough's 2015 book Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, there were over 1,900 domestic bombings in the US, though most were not fatal. Later, the 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of the anti-government militia movement, which culminated in Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma federal building. That bombing killed 168 people, and is the most deadly domestic terror attack in US history. Lewis thinks that violent rhetoric is now even more normalized – that there is increasing tolerance of the idea that 'political violence, targeted hate, harassment, is OK if it's your in-group … against the 'other side''. American political leaders need to condemn political violence, Pape said, ideally in a bipartisan way and in forms that show prominent Democratic and Republican figures physically side-by-side: 'The absolute number one thing that should happen … is that president Trump and governor Newsom do a joint video condemning political violence.' After Melissa Hortman, the Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, was killed last weekend, Mike Lee, a Utah senator, published social media posts making light of her death and insinuating it was the fault of the state's Democratic governor, Tim Walz. Lee later deleted the posts, but has not apologized. Walter Hudson, a Republican state representative in Minnesota who was acquainted with Hortman, said he has been thinking about the relationship between political rhetoric and violence since Hortman's death. 'I think it's fair to say that nobody on either side of the aisle, no matter the language they've used, would have ever intended or imagined that something they said was going to prompt somebody to go and commit a vicious and heartless act like the one we saw over the weekend,' he said. He acknowledged that rhetoric can be a factor in violence, however. 'I don't know how we unwind this,' he said. 'The optimistic side of me hopes that it's going to translate into a different approach.'

Leader Live

3 hours ago

• Leader Live

Plaid to PM: 'Don't follow Trump into Middle East conflict'

Rhun ap Iorwerth, MS for Ynys Môn, and Liz Saville Roberts, MP for Dwyfor Meirionnydd, welcomed Prime Minister Keir Starmer's calls for diplomacy and de-escalation, but voiced concerns that he had fallen short of roundly condemning President Trump's authorisation of US strikes against Iran overnight. The Plaid Cymru politicians said that the pursuit of peace should take priority over any UK loyalty to the US and warned against repeating history where the UK entered a regional conflict in the Middle East as 'America's puppet.' In a joint statement, Mr ap Iorwerth and Ms Saville Roberts said: 'President Trump's decision to launch US strikes against Iran is potentially catastrophic for an already destabilised region. 'Whilst Prime Minister Keir Starmer's calls for diplomacy and de-escalation are to be welcomed, it is concerning that he has fallen short of roundly condemning President Trump's actions. 'The pursuit of peace should take priority over any UK loyalty to the US. We all remember the disastrous consequences of being dragged into a regional conflict in the Middle East as America's puppet. 'It is essential therefore that Parliament has the opportunity to veto any UK military involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict should Keir Starmer yield to any pressure from President Trump and propose some form of intervention. 'In the same way the US Democrats are divided on the issue, Keir Starmer may well face pressure from Labour hawks to follow President Trump's lead. 'Air strikes were launched against Syria in 2018 without granting Parliament an opportunity to vote on military action. At the time Plaid Cymru accused then-Prime Minister Theresa May of showing complete disregard towards democracy. 'We stand firmly by that view and reiterate our calls for restraint before more innocent civilian lives are lost.' The US strike on Iran has fuelled fears that Israel's war with Tehran could escalate to a wider regional conflict. World leaders have reacted with calls for diplomacy and words of caution. US President Donald Trump had said on Thursday that he would decide within two weeks whether to get involved. In the end, it took just days, and Washington inserted itself into Israel's campaign with its early attack early on Sunday, reports the Press Association (PA).