Ask A Genius 1570: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Exit, Trump’s Instability, and U.S. Power Shifts
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/23
How do Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen interpret Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation, Trump’s erratic behavior, and emerging national-security concerns in the United States?
“Trump is not strategic. He reacts. When he looks friendly, it’s usually whim, not plan.” — Rick Rosner
In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner examine Marjorie Taylor Greene’s abrupt resignation and the political fallout surrounding her break with Trump. Rosner argues that Trump’s friendliness toward New York mayor-elect Mamdani reflects impulse, not strategy, and explores whether New Orleans may face the next immigration dragnet. They discuss congressional warnings about unlawful military orders, Trump’s explosive reaction, and the administration’s attempt to impose nondisclosure agreements at the Department of Education amid efforts to dismantle it. The conversation concludes with U.S.–China chip tensions and whether NVIDIA’s advanced AI hardware could be approved for export under Trump’s erratic decision-making style.
Marjorie Taylor Greene Resignation
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Marjorie Taylor Greene, resigning effective January 5th, 2026 after a public falling-out with Trump over things like the Epstein files and his attacks on her, says she doesn’t like getting a bunch of criticism from Trump after all the work she put in trying to get him elected. She’s leaving. People are speculating about what she does next, including runs for higher office, maybe even president.
Rick Rosner: The way I feel, and the way I think a lot of liberals feel, is: good for her—she’s sounding highly rational. Other liberals are cautioning us and saying she still holds a bunch of horrible beliefs; she’s just not expressing them right now. Anyway, that’s where she stands. Trump, meanwhile, welcomed Mamdani, the New York City mayor-elect, to the Oval Office and was extremely friendly with him—punched him on the arm in a chummy way, let Mamdani joke about calling him a fascist in a friendly way, and said he’s rooting for him. It was strangely friendly.
Nobody knows what it means. If Trump were a rational guy, it might suggest he’s seen his approval numbers—which, in many polls, are in the 30s, near the lowest of his presidencies—and has decided to behave differently for a while. But that’s never been his style. It could simply be that he was amused by Mamdani. He liked the guy. He is somewhat of a star-follower, and Mamdani is very charismatic. I believe you should never credit Trump with strategic thinking, because he’s never shown himself to be strategic. Anyway, it was strange. Yes? What else can we look at here?
Following Constitutional Orders
Jacobsen: There’s another situation where six Democratic members of Congress—at least one being Senator Mark Kelly—made a joint statement reminding military personnel not to follow illegal or unconstitutional orders. They didn’t mention Trump by name, but the implication was clear: Trump might issue illegal orders, such as directing troops to fire on U.S. civilians, which would be unconstitutional and contrary to the role of the U.S. military toward American citizens. Trump reacted intensely. Not entirely unhinged, but he claimed what they did was “seditious behavior” and talked about such behavior being “punishable by death,” amplifying voices suggesting they should be executed for promoting sedition. Do you think New Orleans will be the next crackdown point for Trump’s immigration policy?
Rosner: I don’t know. They like to do hit-and-runs. They like to come to a city, grab a bunch of people off the streets, and scare the people in that city. They don’t have enough personnel. There are only about 25,000 ICE officers compared to roughly a million police officers in the country—so about one-fortieth. Obviously, they can’t cover the entire country, and they can’t come anywhere close to hitting the target that Trump wanted. Trump wanted a million “bad hombres” deported a year ago, and so far this year, where we’re more than halfway through November, they’ve only apprehended about 280,000 undocumented immigrants. They’re on track to not even meet one-third of their target, and two-thirds of these people have no criminal record. Only about 7 percent—roughly 20,000—have been convicted of violent crimes, even though the Department of Homeland Security put out a list claiming tens of millions of undocumented immigrants as “criminal illegal aliens.” So they’re only off by a factor of a thousand.
They’ve caught about 20,000 “bad hombres,” and the Department of Homeland Security is claiming, I don’t know, 20 or 30 million. They will keep doing what they’ve been doing: setting up dragnets, going from city to city, grabbing a bunch of people, most of whom aren’t criminals, and setting them up to be deported. They did Chicago last month or the month before. The Chicago Tribune reviewed the numbers. They grabbed around 600-plus people—maybe more—and the number that sticks with me is the verified one: only about 3 percent had a criminal record. Everyone else was simply undocumented, which is not a criminal offense; it’s a civil offense.
A lot of disruption to the city, a lot of fear, all to apprehend a few dozen criminal cases. They’re incompetent. They’re thuggish. Okay, Rotten Tomatoes. I don’t know if they’ve hit New Orleans yet. It seems like an attractive target because Louisiana has terrible governance, is run by Republicans, but New Orleans is a fun city full of Black people, and they love going after people who aren’t white. All right, Rotten Tomatoes.
The Putin Peace Plan
Jacobsen: The Putin peace—well, technically the U.S. peace plan. Any thoughts on it? The point-of-peace plan for Ukraine and Russia?
Rosner: No, it’s impossible and stupid. It has 28 points, and I looked at a bunch of them today. Thing one, outside of the points: the U.S. has very little leverage over Ukraine. The U.S. can say, “Don’t agree to the plan or we won’t give you aid,” but they haven’t given them any aid this year—2025—and they gave very little in 2024 because Biden wanted to get them aid but Congress blocked it. So Ukraine isn’t losing anything from the U.S. by rejecting the peace plan.
Jacobsen: I’ve got some more important ones. The U.S. Education Department is requiring nondisclosure agreements in the Trump reorganization. Why do you think there’s an attempted enforcement of NDAs at the Education Department?
Rosner: Trump has repeatedly stated that he wants to disband the Department of Education. The Department of Education was formed in 1979 under Carter. Before that, it had been part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, but Trump does not want to return it to any other department. He wants to dismantle it. Some parts—like the collections arm for outstanding student loans, which total around a trillion dollars—will not disappear. They still want to come after borrowers. They will just move that sub-department somewhere else. He appointed Linda McMahon—someone with no experience in education, whose executive background was helping her husband run WWE, World Wrestling Entertainment.
She comes from the world of pro wrestling, and she has acknowledged that her job is to undermine the Department of Education and help disband it. This aligns with the broader Republican goal of choking off resources to public schools and funneling more resources to private, mostly Christian schools. This is disastrous for the country. The U.S. had a massive education push starting in 1957–1958 when the Soviet Union shocked the world—and especially the United States—by becoming the first nation to orbit a satellite. Under Eisenhower, the U.S. panicked and launched an all-out push for education, especially in math and science, to make sure the Soviets would not overtake us.
The bill funding this effort even had “defense” in the title; education was considered a national defense priority. It paid off enormously—adding tens of trillions of dollars to the economy in the 67 years since that push began. It created a whole generation in the 1960s and 1970s. It helped educate the older tech billionaires. It produced a wave of technological superiority that powered the modern U.S. economy. The people who benefited from post-Sputnik STEM investment helped create the iPhone, and by 2007–2008 we had the first smartphones. Now there are roughly as many smartphones in the world as there are people. That education push created a technological revolution. And now the Republicans are trying to do the opposite—trying to dumb down America, to deny anything but Christian schooling to Americans. It is happening at a critical moment in history, when the populations who master AI and emerging technologies will effectively control the world for decades.
Or, if we fail catastrophically, AI will end up in charge of the world permanently and humans will eventually be shut out. Economic forecasters estimate that AI could double global GDP in the next fifty years. Maybe it is part of the hype bubble, but maybe not. Even with an AI bubble and a crash, the long-term outcome could still be that doubling. The internet had a crash in 2000, and within a few years we got Google—and the internet now permeates everything. The crash shook out the nonsense. The same will happen with AI: a crash will clear out the hype, and from the ashes will rise the actual, non-hype, powerful AI that will dominate. But maybe not for us, because Trump and the Republicans want to keep the country ignorant.
NVIDIA H200 Chips
Jacobsen: The U.S. is reportedly considering letting NVIDIA sell H200 chips to China, according to some sources. Thoughts on this?
Rosner: Are these their best chips—their fanciest chips?
Jacobsen: I don’t know, but they’re AI chips, which means they’re some form of advanced chip.
Rosner: I don’t know what makes an AI chip different from any other kind of chip. When you say “the U.S.,” you mean Trump. Trump is our dumbest president—also one of our most swayable. Somebody comes into his office, gives him a 45-second pitch that sounds convincing, and he might just go with it. He doesn’t have consistent positions. He contradicts himself constantly on tariffs and everything else. Someone must have talked to him about these chips and China. I don’t know.
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