The feud between Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene has hit the kind of ugly, paranoid new low that makes GOP insiders throw up their hands. According to sources speaking to Axios, aides in the White House actually alerted the Secret Service to their suspicion that Greene tipped off activists about Trump’s unpublicized dinner at Joe’s Seafood in Washington last September — the very dinner that spiraled into a viral embarrassment for the president, The Daily Beast reports.
This is not your typical political tiff. Trump goes months without speaking to certain allies, fine. But the White House billing an ex-ally to the Secret Service on suspicion of facilitating a protest against him? That’s something else.
Here’s the weirdness in blunt terms: Trump’s team had planned a low-key visit to Joe’s — an expensive restaurant a block from the White House — to show off how safe D.C. had become under Trump’s crime crackdown. Instead, protesters from Code Pink shouted anti-Trump and pro-Palestinian slogans right at his table.
Aides didn’t just see this as a PR problem. They apparently thought someone inside the circle had told Code Pink where Trump was going. And in a story that will give Beltway cynics whiplash, that someone was suspected to be Greene — a former stage-diving MAGA firebrand who’s now an often critic of the president’s agenda.
According to the report, the basis for suspicion was twofold: Greene had recommended the restaurant in the first place and she has a known friendly rapport with Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of Code Pink.
Trump aides said Greene called White House staff repeatedly on the day of the dinner, ironclad confirming — again and again — whether Trump would actually show up. Then, once Trump left for Joe’s, Greene didn’t show; aides found that odd.
But Greene doesn’t just deny it. She’s furious. She told Axios the allegation she set Trump up for protest was “an absolute lie, a dangerous lie. I would never do that.” She says only the White House and the restaurant knew about the reservation, and — in her telling — the real story should be why the Secret Service didn’t even sweep the place or set up metal detectors for a routine dinner.
Greene also blasted the tale on X, claiming the story exists because the White House is “mad at me for telling the truth about the President and forcing the release of the Epstein files.”
Code Pink, for its part, backed her denial, with a spokesperson telling Axios the idea Greene tipped them off was “comical.”
Whether there’s any investigation underway is unclear — the Secret Service won’t confirm or deny it. But the fact that Trump’s own camp would treat a longtime ally like a suspected saboteur says everything about how fractured this so-called movement has become.
