Rep. Ilhan Omar is urging Democrats to do something unusual in today’s politics: embrace some of Donald Trump’s loudest former allies now that they are turning on him. In an interview this week with Pod Save America’s Tommy Vietor, Omar said Republicans who once backed Trump but have since become critics should be credited for the change.
Omar threw her support behind vocal MAGA personalities such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was once Trump’s most outspoken supporter in Congress before moving back into private life and becoming one of the right’s more visible critics of the president. Vietor played a clip of Greene during the interview, and Omar said Americans have to work together to preserve what is good in the country and back leaders they can trust to protect it.
“As Americans, it is really important for us to work together for the preservation of everything that is good in our country. and to support leaders that we can trust to safeguard what is good about our country,” Omar said, adding that Greene and others are realizing Trump “never really had any principles outside of uplifting his ego.” She said Democrats should give them credit for that wake-up call and “put our arms around” them to figure out how to save the country from what she called the disaster Trump is creating.
The comments land at a moment when some former Trump supporters have grown more critical of him, creating an opening that neither party has fully settled. Omar and Greene have had a long and bitter history in Congress, including Omar’s push in 2021 to strip Greene of her committee assignments after Greene made threatening posts about her and other Democrats. Greene later pushed to censure Omar in 2024, claiming Omar could be a foreign agent.
Omar also said the two spoke last year, just before Greene left Congress, and that she found Greene on the House floor to thank her for supporting an end to the genocide and for speaking up about what people in Gaza had experienced. For Omar, the message was not about forgiveness for its own sake. It was that people who break with Trump should be taken seriously, not shoved aside. That is the answer at the center of her argument: Democrats, she said, should welcome the defections and use them.
