Marjorie Taylor Greene says ‘disgusting’ New York City ‘smells bad’: People ‘can’t even stand up’

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene laced into Mayor Eric Adams and condemned New York City as “repulsive” and crime-ridden following her brief visit to Manhattan this week to protest former President Donald Trump’s arraignment.

Greene, a far-right Georgia Republican and purveyor of wild conspiracy theories, said on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program Wednesday that the city is “disgusting” and that its streets are filled with people “basically dying on drugs — they can’t even stand up.”

“There’s so much crime in the city,” she said. “It smells bad. I think it’s a terrible place.”

A spokesman for Adams, Fabien Levy, issued a brief statement Thursday: “Is Marjorie Taylor Greene referring to the hate speech she spews day after day?”

Greene, a close ally of Trump with a flair for falsehoods, has asserted that the Democratic Party is driven by pedophiles, that former President Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim and that Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, the former Democratic House speaker, is “guilty of treason.”

Greene’s galling comments about New York came one day after she was drowned out and jeered at a rally in lower Manhattan near the courthouse that hosted Trump’s historic arraignment, and two days after Adams publicly admonished her to stay on her “best behavior” during her visit.

“New York City’s our home — not a playground for your misplaced anger,” Adams, a Democrat, said at a Monday news conference.

Carlson teed up Greene’s rant by asking her about Adams’ comments. “How did his home look?” Carlson asked. “Pretty neat and tidy?”

“I can’t comprehend how people live there,” she said in her harangue.

Earlier in the segment, Greene said Adams had “threatened” her before her visit and claimed New Yorkers did not want her to be able to exercise her First Amendment rights.

“They wanted violence,” she claimed, though there was no significant violence in connection with the former president’s circus-like arraignment.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, a Democrat, described Greene’s commentary as “bizarre.” He said the congresswoman is “angry that her political patron is facing justice, and she’s even angrier that she couldn’t have her protest.”

“This is not a serious person making a serious policy critique,” Levine said of Greene’s invocation of crime. “She’s not making fact-based arguments. In fact, New York City remains the safest big city in America.”

Georgia’s violent crime rate was higher than New York State’s in 2020, according to FBI figures, though the data is incomplete.

In New York City, crime rates climbed across the pandemic, but have started to drop this year, according toPolice Department data.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive Bronx-Queens Democratic firebrand, wrote on Twitter that Greene sounded like “a petty HOA complaint,” referring to private homeowners associations.

“If anyone went on TV and talked about a rural area like this, it’d be gloves off — and deservedly so. This is no different,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “If she doesn’t like the greatest city in the United States, that’s her problem.”