Another day, another truly wild and unhinged claim from Marjorie Taylor Greene on social media. At this point, the joke of a Georgian congresswoman isn’t so much commenting on current affairs as writing a high fantasy novel one tweet at a time.
The latest mind-boggling band wagon she’s hopped on to, taking her on a non-stop trip to Crazytown? That President Biden and the FBI were trying to assassinate Donald Trump when the federal authorities searched Mar-a-Lago for classified documents in August 2022. Blame Trump himself for spreading this ridiculous claim around first, although Marj was all to happy to squawk about it herself, like a politically inept parrot.
For context, unsealed court filings have revealed official documentation from the search, with one passage reading “Law enforcement officers for the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary.” This caused Trump himself to blow up (well, not literally — if only) on Truth Social, claiming that Biden had authorized the FBI to use “DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE” on him during the “UnConstitutional Raid” on Mar-a-Lago.
Clearly a man with such a strong grasp of the English language and punctuation cannot be mistaken, so MTG dutifully started tweeting about it too, going so far as to claim that “The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light.”
Here’s the thing, though: the “deadly force” line is standard FBI procedure, used on documentation relating to all incidents like this and was not some special, underhanded request from Biden. In fact, it’s employed in a a bid to limit fatalities, not ensure them.
Ironically, Taylor Greene’s own flagrant falsehoods were assassinated themselves, all thanks to X’s Community Notes feature. The fact-checking service slapped Greene’s tweet with an addendum reading, “This is false. Neither the DOJ nor the FBI were planning to assassinate Mr. Trump. That language in question is standard procedure.”
In other words, “Please pay no attention to the screeching doomsayer with the bleach blonde bad built butch body.”
MTG is probably feeling pretty betrayed now, given that Community Notes is a favorite feature of her old pal, Elon Musk, who she’s previously allied with on the app for various offensive endeavors. There’s not a lot we can be thankful for about what Musk has done to Twitter, but at least the rise of fact-checking on the site has been a useful addition, and now it’s led to this deliciously embarrassing moment for Marjorie.
Unfortunately, we know all too well by now that the MAGA minions don’t exactly back down in the face of iron-clad facts, so we might continue to hear more about these nonsensical claims from Trump and co. in the future. One commenter to Greene’s tweet put it best, though, when reasoning how we know the FBI never tried to assassinate him: “He’s not dead. If they wanted him dead, he’d be dead.”