Marjorie Taylor Greene flees Trump's sinking ship
Even hardcore MAGAs are eyeing the emergency exits.
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A note from Aaron: This newsletter was finalized before a critical mass of Senate Democrats caved Sunday evening and voted to end the government shutdown. We’ll have coverage of that tomorrow.
“I will praise Nancy Pelosi. She had an incredible career for her party.”
That’s certainly a reasonable and perhaps even boring reaction to the retirement of Pelosi, one of the most consequential House speakers in history. However, the source of the quote is neither reasonable or boring. It’s jaw dropping.
The person who praised Pelosi live on CNN was MAGA extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Since her election in 2020, Greene has built a reputation as a raving, frothing MAGA true believer, marinated in conspiracy theories, bile, and Trump worship. In recent months, however, she’s moved sharply to the center, becoming one of the most reliable Republican critics of House leadership and of Trump himself.
This raises some obvious questions — chief among them, what the hell?
When someone who has been advocating good policies — like, say, John Fetterman — starts to spend their time canoodling with Lara Trump, it’s disorienting. But it’s even harder to process when the person who warned about “Jewish space lasers” begins to make trenchant critiques of the administration.
Reading minds is difficult, and reading Greene’s mind is an especially challenging case. Her motives are probably multiple and may be opaque even to her. But her sudden leftward tilt does suggest that at least one politician who rode the MAGA wave believes its force is not what it once was.
Trump’s strongest soldier
It would be impossible, or at least unendurable, to chronicle every evil, ugly lie that Green has perpetrated or cosigned in her career as far right influencer and congresswoman. Still, it’s worth running through some of the greatest hits just to establish how deep in the derp she was before her recent experiments with Pelosi-praising.
Greene has been an enthusiastic proponent of a bewildering array of conspiracy theories. Before entering office she pushed “Pizzagate,” the (false, evil) claim that Democratic leaders were running a human trafficking and pedophelia ring. She also embraced related QAnon conspiracies.
In one ad for her first congressional run that was removed by Facebook, she brandished a rifle and threatened “antifa” protestors. She referred to elections of Muslim women to Congress as “an Islamic invasion of our government.” She made posts on social media suggesting that the horrific 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, was a false flag operation, and suggested House Speaker Pelosi (who she recently praised!) was “guilty of treason … a crime punishable by death.”
After Greene was elected, she kept on keeping on. She was of course fully on board with Trump’s election denial conspiracy theories and embraced his coup attempt. She refused to wear a face mask while sheltering in place during the January 6 riots and claimed the rioters were members of antifa even though a close friend and ally of hers was in fact among those who stormed the Capitol. Her past comments in support of violence against Democrats, and her failure to repudiate them, led to her being stripped of her committee assignments in 2021. (They were restored in 2023 after Republican retook the House.)
And there’s much more. Greene repeatedly misgendered trans officials and colleagues and lied that they were child abusers. In 2022 she attacked the Catholic church for its support of immigrants and claimed it was being controlled by Satan. Perhaps the most iconic Greene nonsense is her claim in 2018 that California wildfires were being caused by lasers fired from satellites controlled by the Rothschild family. Greene disavowed those comments, but in October 2024 — about a year ago — she suggested the government under President Biden was controlling the weather and targeting Florida with a dangerous hurricane.
Greene’s history of lies and violent rhetoric is extensive. It began before she entered Congress and, despite her insistence to the contrary, continued throughout her tenure. She has not been smeared. On the contrary, she is a well-documented conspiracy theorist and hate-monger.
Pulling a reverse Fetterman
And yet, in recent months, Greene has ratcheted down the hate and started to sound, in the words of Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, “surprisingly enlightened.”
The breach between Greene and Trump appears to have started over Trump’s onetime friend and convicted child sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein, a billionaire financier who died in prison, has been a focus of QAnon conspiracy theories in part because he was also friends with Democratic figures like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates. Trump initially promised to release files associated with the Epstein case, then reversed himself this summer, probably because he was told that his name appears in them.
The controversy has divided MAGA and given some a path to distance themselves from the president. Greene grabbed the opportunity. In September she was one of a handful of Republicans who signed a discharge petition which would force a vote on releasing the Epstein files in the House.
Since the summer, Greene has broken with Republicans on other issues as well. She criticized Trump for failing to do more to end the famine in Gaza and characterized Israel’s devastation of Gaza as a genocide. That’s a remarkable and welcome reversal given her past virulent Islamophobia — though of course Greene has also embraced antisemitic conspiracy theories, and opposition to Israel is growing on the antisemitic right.
Greene has criticized Trump for being insufficiently “America first” and has been even more outspoken in her dissatisfaction with Speaker Mike Johnson — especially his move to shut down the House instead of seating Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, who would be the decisive vote required to pass the Epstein files resolution.
In October, Greene sided with Democrats on extending ACA tax credits — the core issue of the current government shutdown. She has insisted, accurately, that without the credits “insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE.”
In recent media appearances Greene admitted that Republican leadership has no healthcare plan to replace the ACA. That’s true, but it undermines GOP claims that they’ll fix health insurance as soon as Democrats approve their budget.
Just last week, Greene contradicted Trump’s claim that grocery prices are falling.
“I go to the grocery store myself,” she told CNN. “Grocery prices remain high. Energy prices are high. My electricity bills are higher here in Washington DC at my apartment, and they‘re also higher at my house in Rome, Georgia, higher than they were a year ago.”
Greene, however, remains a complicated character. As if to prove that she’s still a conspiracist at core, she (politely) told Wolf Blitzker during her most recent CNN appearance that she remains “opposed” to covid vaccines “because I know so many people who had vaccine injuries.”
MAGA without Trump
While no one knows for sure what Greene is up to, there are two prevailing theories: spite and strategy.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued for spite last week on an Instagram livestream.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene wanted to run for Senate in Georgia,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Trump said no … and she has been on a revenge tour ever since.”
Greene could also have expected a position in the administration — a position she obviously was not offered, since she remains in Congress. (Though like fellow MAGA extremist Matt Gaetz, she may have had a hard time getting confirmed.)
The other prevailing theory is that Greene wants to try for higher office. NOTUS reported early this week that she is mulling a 2028 run for president, citing a source who said that Greene believes she is “real MAGA and that the others have strayed.”
Greene has said she doesn’t want to run for Senate since it’s “where good ideas go to die.” She also told NOTUS that she has no plans to campaign for president. Her denials may be true — or she could just be lying again.
Either way, Greene’s exact motivations may be less important than the context in which those motivations are floating.
Whether she’s propelled by resentment or ambition or some combination of both, it’s clear that Greene believes it’s safe, and/or to her advantage, to defy Trump and Republican leadership now in ways that it was not before. The president’s approval has plummeted, his party just got destroyed in off-year elections, he’s faced a string of embarrassing defeats and seems more out of touch than ever. At the beginning of the year Trump seemed invincible; now being associated with him seems like a one-way ticket to electoral Siberia.
Greene is still most likely the same hateful liar she’s always been. She is now, however, a hateful liar who thinks her political fortunes depend to some degree on tacking away from Trump and towards the center. Whether she’s looking at reelection in her district or a run for higher office, she’s obviously decided it’s to her benefit to put some distance between her and Trump, and to associate herself less with Islamophobia, transphobia, and bigotry, and more with pocketbook issues and healthcare.
Does this mean that the Republican Party is waking from its fever dream of fascism? That seems doubtful. Still, it’s significant that even the space laser believers like Greene seem to be positioning themselves for a post-Trump politics. A president Marjorie Taylor Greene would still be nightmarish. The fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks she needs to be less Marjorie Taylor Greene to win, though, seems hopeful.
That’s it for today
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BEWARE
TIGERS NEVER CHANGE THEIR STRIPES...or Rats if they had them!!
Like I don’t trust MTG as far as I can throw her, but I will cheer her on in the fight to release the Epstein files. Thanks, Noah. I am scratching my head over this as well. One thing for sure is she plays the part of the foil pretty well. She’s not stupid. More like opportunistic. Let’s keep that in mind.