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Marjorie Taylor Greene attacks Curb Your Enthusiasm for depicting Trump supporters as ‘racists and rednecks’

Georgia populist accuses comedy star and other ‘nasty commies from California’ of coming to her state to film in order to exploit tax breaks

Joe Sommerlad
Wednesday 14 February 2024 13:16 EST
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Related: Trump tweets Curb Your Enthusiasm MAGA clip mocking his own supporters

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Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has picked a fight with legendary comedian Larry David, complaining that the latest episode of his long-running HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm “lied” by portraying conservatives as “racists and rednecks”.

In a lengthy post on X, the hard-right Georgia populist and conspiracy theorist said that the comedy show stands as “a glaring reminder of why most Georgian’s resent Republicans in our state for inviting the nasty commies from California, the Hollywood elites, into our state by dishing out Hollywood tax credits”.

She continued: “This week’s episode lied and painted GA conservatives and Trump supporters as racists and rednecks and made fun of our good new law that stops the Stacey Abrams vote pandering machine and prevents voter fraud.

“We in Georgia are fed up with disgusting Hollywood and their disgusting values and elite judgement in our state that is trying to turn GA blue!”

Several further paragraphs follow in which Ms Greene veers off into raving about electric vehicles and George Soros.

Curb has just commenced its 12th and final season and the episode that so triggered Ms Greene saw David (who plays an exaggerated version of himself) arrested under the Peach State’s Election Integrity Act 2021 for the crime of offering a voter a sip of water while queuing at a polling booth on a hot day, a situation that leads his case to become a cause celebre and prompts Ms Abrams, a Democratic ballot access activist, and rock superstar Bruce Springsteen to make cameo appearances as themselves, leaping to his defence.

In another scene, David is forced to go door-to-door in Atlanta, seeking a replacement for a racist lawn statue he has accidentally damaged at his Airbnb, leading to an angry confrontation with a Trump supporter in a red Maga cap.

This is not the first time Curb has addressed the Trump era.

In February 2020, the 45th president himself tweeted a clip from a scene in the previous season of the show in which David is threatened by a biker after a near-miss on the highway and only narrowly avoids being beaten up by putting on a Maga cap, which immediately calms the aggressor down.

“TOUGH GUYS FOR TRUMP,” the then-president posted, apparently misunderstanding the point of the exchange: David, a misanthrope, has realised that the hat serves as “a great people repellent”.

David had already been asked at an advanced screening whether he was concerned about “alienating” conservatives with jokes at Mr Trump’s expense and answered, “Alienate yourselves! Go, go and alienate! You have my blessing”, before adding, more seriously: “No, I could give a f***.”

In the finale of that season, David also gave a guest spot to Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Vindman, the Purple Heart-recipient and National Security Council member who blew the whistle on Mr Trump over his attempt to blackmail Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in July 2019 and then testified against him at his first impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives, only to be fired for his trouble.

David is forced to throw a party for Lt Col Vindman, only for the guest of honour to overhear an incriminating phone call of his host’s and feel compelled to report that one too.

“It was a perfect call!” David insists, echoing Mr Trump’s defence, to no avail.

Long before that, the Seinfeld creator had unexpectedly interrupted an appearance by Mr Trump hosting NBC’s Saturday Night Live (SNL) in November 2015 by shouting: “You’re a racist! Trump’s a racist!”

He subsequently explained that he had heard the campaign group Deport Racism was offering $5,000 to anyone who would heckle the candidate, to which Mr Trump responded: “As a businessman, I can fully respect that.”

David subsequently returned to SNL on several occasions to play veteran Democratic senator Bernie Sanders, an outspoken critic of Mr Trump, after discovering that they not only looked alike but actually really were distantly related.

Although David has only recently begun to incorporate overtly political subject matter into Curb, his animosity to Trumpworld has also been noted off-screen, with Page Six reporting in August 2021 that he had entered into a heated confrontation with Mr Trump’s impeachment lawyer Alan Dershowitz after running into him at a grocery store near Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, berating the counsel and his “whole enclave” as “disgusting”.

Cheryl Hines, the actor who plays David’s long-suffering, on-off wife Cheryl, is married to independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, who recently revealed that he had been approached to be Mr Trump’s running mate but had rejected the opportunity because he doubted his marriage would survive the ordeal.

No doubt true, but what a plotline that would have made.

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