Former Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie joined Tucker Carlson and ex-Trump counterterrorism official Joe Kent for a public show of unity around a new political "movement", one built on opposition to the president's Iran war.
Greene shared a photo of the four seated around a wooden table on X on Aug. 1, declaring that Trump "betrayed us all" by breaking his promise to avoid foreign wars. The post drew nearly 10 million views and was shared 15,000 times, a measure of how far frustration with the war has spread inside the president's own base.
The gathering amounts to the most visible step yet by dissident figures on the populist right to channel that frustration into something organized. Greene, Massie, Carlson, and Kent have each paid a political or professional price for breaking with the White House. Now they say they want to build an alternative.
Greene did not leave much room for ambiguity. In her X post, she wrote:
"We said no more foreign wars and we meant it and supported Donald Trump because he made that promise. But he's betrayed us all."
She followed that with a second declaration:
"Our commitment is America First for all Americans, right, left, and center. The movement has begun."
In a separate appearance on "Piers Morgan Uncensored," Greene went further, USA TODAY reported:
"I think there's a group of us that if we decide to align, we could launch a true America-focused party that doesn't fall into the traps of Democrats or Republicans."
She also said she is "in talks" to launch a new party, though no formal organizational or legal steps have been disclosed.
Carlson has been moving in the same direction. In a recent interview, the former Fox News host said plainly: "I'm going to help build a third party." He argued that Democrats and Republicans are in "lockstep" on war in the Middle East and that the government should focus on "the welfare of its own people."
That language, welfare of Americans first, skepticism of bipartisan foreign-policy consensus, tracks closely with the original "America First" pitch that helped Trump win the White House. The difference now is that Greene, Carlson, and their allies say Trump himself abandoned it.
The four figures around that table share more than rhetoric. Each broke with the administration and absorbed consequences for it.
Greene chose not to run for reelection. Massie lost his primary. Kent resigned from his counterterrorism post inside the Trump administration over concerns about the Iran war. Carlson, already outside government, has used his media platform to hammer the war and float the third-party idea publicly.
Greene and Massie also pushed legislation to release government records on Jeffrey Epstein, the accused sex trafficker, a move Trump opposed. That fight over the Epstein files added another fault line between the dissidents and the White House.
Trump has responded to the broader MAGA criticism by lashing out repeatedly at dissenters, and the political fallout for critics like Massie has been real. But the question now is whether the war's growing unpopularity gives figures like Greene and Carlson enough of a constituency to sustain something beyond social-media posts and cable hits.
An AP-NORC poll conducted July 23, 27 found that 64% of Americans believe the Iran war has not been worthwhile. Most Republicans still approve of how Trump is handling the conflict, but that support is eroding. Republican approval of Trump's war management dropped to 61% from 71% in June, a 10-point slide in roughly a month.
That erosion matters. A president who built his political identity on keeping the country out of new wars now faces a base that is starting to question whether this one was worth it. The dissidents are betting that gap between promise and policy is wide enough to build on.
The GOP heads into the midterm election season divided over the war and over how much internal criticism the party can tolerate. Greene and her allies are framing their effort as a return to the original populist mandate, secure borders, no foreign entanglements, government that serves its own citizens first, rather than a rejection of conservatism itself.
For all the bold language, the practical distance between a viral photo and a functioning third party is enormous. Greene says she is "in talks," but no party name, filing, or organizational structure has surfaced. Carlson has pledged to help, but pledges are cheap in August of a midterm year.
Third parties in American politics face brutal structural barriers, ballot access laws, fundraising disadvantages, and the gravitational pull of the two-party system. The last serious populist-right insurgency, the Tea Party movement, ultimately chose to work inside the GOP rather than outside it. Whether Greene, Massie, Carlson, and Kent have the appetite and the infrastructure to do something different remains an open question.
What they do have is a grievance that resonates. A war that most Americans already consider not worthwhile, a base whose approval is sliding, and a president who promised them something different. That combination has fueled political realignments before, though rarely on the timeline that social-media momentum suggests.
Promises kept are the currency of political trust. When voters decide the account is overdrawn, no amount of party loyalty covers the balance.
