Friday must have been a confusing day for Donald Trump’s remaining supporters. First, he swooned over Zohran Mamdani (D) in the Oval Office and torpedoed the GOP’s entire midterm message, and then Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), one of the MAGA movement’s most loyal foot soldiers, announced that she would quit Congress in large part because the president had branded her a traitor.

They probably would not have been more flabbergasted if Trump had told them that he had an affair with a porn star right after the first lady gave birth to their son / was friends with a sexual predator for years and knew about his preferences / is not really 6’3” and 225 lbs./ would sell out every last one of them to make a buck was planning on implementing Sharia law in the United States.

Prior to the president’s meeting with Mamdani, who was elected as New York City’s next mayor earlier this month, Fox News had proclaimed there would be a “Showdown with Socialism” in the White House. If that was the case, then socialism seems to have come out ahead (we’ll spare you the usual disclaimers that Democratic Socialism is not actual socialism and much more in line with the social democracies found in western Europe because you either know this already or you don’t care).

Because their joint appearance afterwards had made it quite clear that the meeting wasn’t contentious at all and that Mamdani had managed to charm Trump.

The president noted that the two of them agreed a lot more than he would have thought.

“We had some interesting conversation, and some of his ideas really are the same ideas that I have,” Trump stated.

He also expressed confidence that Mamdani would do “a very good job,” and laughed off questions from conservative reporters who brought up some of the things the mayor-elect had called the president on the campaign trail.

When Mamdani was asked whether he would retract his remarks that Trump was a “despot” and an “authoritarian,” the president noted that he had been “called much worse than a despot and so it’s not that insulting.”

Then, when the Fox News correspondent, perhaps dismayed that the “showdown” had turned into a lovefest, asked the future mayor whether he still thinks Trump is a fascist, the president smirked, patted Mamdani’s arm, and said, “That’s OK,” before advising him that it would be easier if he just answered the question in the affirmative and that he didn’t mind.

The entire meeting undermined the GOP’s nascent strategy of making Mamdani the face of the Democratic party and typecasting him as a communist, which Trump has called him, as well as a “jihadist,” which is what Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) is calling him.

The president dismissed the notion that Mamdani is the latter and suggested that it was all just a bunch of campaign rhetoric.

“I met with a man who’s a very rational person,” he said. “I met with a man who really wants to see New York be great again.”

With that cleared up, let’s turn to someone Trump feels less warmly about.

While regular MAGA supporters may feel a sense of betrayal when watching the president having a grand old time with Mamdani, or championing policies that are decidedly not “America First,” their sentiments are nothing compared to what Marjorie Taylor Greene is going through right now.

In a blistering video message that slams Democrats and Republicans alike, she left little doubt that her decision is the direct result of being branded a “traitor” by the president for her support of the release of the Epstein files.

“Standing up for American women who were raped at 14 years old, trafficked, and used by powerful men should not result in me being called a ‘traitor’ and threatened by the president of the United States, whom I fought for,” she said, noting that “loyalty should be a two-way street.”

That, of course, is not at all how Trump feels, which is why Greene was just the latest supporter he cast aside after she dared to defy him.

Even in our crazy political world, it almost defies belief that the president will laugh off a political adversary calling him a fascist but go after one of his most loyal supporters.

Almost.

Then again, one wrong word from Mamdani could just as well lead Trump to cutting all federal aid to New York City and sending in the military to show those protesters from a decade ago what “occupying Wall Street” really looks like.

As for Greene, we will miss her, not just as a subject for entertaining stories but, most recently, even more as a refreshingly honest voice in Washington, DC… a voice that is now being silenced.