What Is Going on Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Brain?!
The Georgia congresswoman has been increasingly restless with Trump. What does it mean for MAGA’s future?
AT THE START OF THIS YEAR, it would have been hard to name a more stalwart Donald Trump supporter than Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. But the firebrand Georgia Republican with previously unquestionable MAGA credentials and a knack for spouting off zany shit has been breaking with the movement an awful lot over the past week.
Greene has offered stinging criticisms of the Trump administration’s handling of deportations, the Epstein files, and tariffs. Most crucially, she slammed Republicans’ negotiations on the government shutdown, saying her party needs to compromise with Democrats to prevent Obamacare subsidies from expiring.
“I’m not willing to be a cheerleader,” Greene said of her turn against Trump on podcaster Tim Dillon’s show.
Months before this latest turn, Greene had also grown critical of the Republican party for its lockstep support for Israel. But this round of heterodoxies has felt bigger, and different. Her criticism of Trump has gotten so loud, and the stakes from the shutdown are so high, that it has prompted a real response from MAGA media. Not just that, she’s lobbing her attacks from what is considered enemy terrain, with recent interviews on CNN and NBC and with the New York Times.
“What the hell are you doing, Marjorie?” asked conservative website Townhall.
“Sellout fraud,” groaned MAGA thought leader “Catturd” on X.
Other conservative influencers have sought to cast Greene in a sort of Nancy Pelosi mold, criticizing her wealth since entering office and suggesting that she’s just an out-of-touch Democrat.
“MTG is sounding like a wealthy white Napa liberal,” wrote conservative media personality Will Chamberlain.
It’s hard to know what’s going on inside Greene’s head—we’re talking, after all, about a one-time hardcore QAnon believer who posited that forest fires are caused by space lasers controlled by the Rothschilds. But Greene’s efforts to distance herself from unpopular Trump initiatives does give us a glimpse into what the post-Trump Republican party could look like.
Greene’s most telling clash with Republicans has come over the expiring enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. Greene has been vocal about her own adult daughter’s prospective insurance increases if Congress lets the policy lapse. But she’s making the case from, ostensibly, the populist right. On Monday, she called out House Speaker Mike Johnson for saying that full Obamacare repeal was off the table, saying it was an “unacceptable” position.
In the same way that influential pro-Trump podcaster Steve Bannon has opposed cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid, Greene has recognized—I think savvily—that issues like rising insurance costs could sink the popularity of other Trump agenda items like an immigration crackdown. Trump’s own pollsters have said the same.
Greene is an avowed believer in “real” Trumpism: no more wars, an isolationist “America First” foreign policy, and little concern about pre-Trump Republicans’ agenda items for fiscal responsibility. And the fact that she—one of the most internet-addled members of the House—is insisting that current Trumpism has strayed from those roots is stinging others just a little more. It infuriated right-wing activist Laura Loomer, a longtime Greene foe who has clashed with her for years over both America’s support for Israel and a number of personal issues, including Loomer’s contention that Greene sank her chances of working for the Trump campaign.
Responding to Greene’s criticisms, Loomer embraced what’s becoming the right’s main attack line against apostates: accusing them of being on someone’s payroll or a liberal shill.
“Looks like @RepMTG got a check,” Loomer posted on X on Sunday.
Loomer added that Greene is just resentful of Trump, after he failed to back her gubernatorial or senatorial ambitions in Georgia.
“She wants to destroy MAGA because she isn’t the leader of MAGA,” Loomer tweeted.
FOR GREENE, THERE’S ALSO the looming prospect of a 2028 run. The right’s most dynamic media personalities are already jettisoning Trump’s more unpopular policies when they can. Why shouldn’t politicians be doing the same? Dillon raised the matter during his interview, predicting Greene would be the next president, and relaying that he’d attended dinner parties where Greene was discussed as a top presidential pick. Greene, for her part, appeared to mouth, “Oh my God!” at the camera.
The 2028 presidential primary is a long way off. More immediately, it’s worth seeing just how far Greene will continue to go in criticizing Trump and how much blowback she will get. Trump himself hasn’t weighed in. But there are ways he could do so without directly pushing back on the congresswoman.
Greene’s boyfriend, right-wing media figure Brian Glenn, is a Trump favorite and a regular presence at White House scrums. To the general public, Glenn—the White House correspondent for the digital channel Real America’s Voice—is probably best known as the guy who asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky why he didn’t shape up and wear a suit to his Oval Office meeting in February, a question that was lauded by the right.
A White House this vindictive could make life difficult for Glenn on account of Greene’s recent comments. But, for now at least, Glenn appears to be sticking with his girlfriend. As Greene faced accusations of antisemitism for criticizing Israel, Glenn posted a video claiming the charge was unfair and adding, bizarrely, that the public has “raped” the term antisemitism.
Greene may be working on Marjorie 2.0—chips falling where they may—but she’s not giving up conspiracy theories entirely. In a tactic she’s probably much more comfortable deploying, she claimed on Monday that there was a “paid social media lying campaign” targeting her—a campaign, she suggested, that was run by Israeli operatives.
The more things change. . .
I’d suggest that what’s going on in MTG’s brain is cold political calculation. She doesn’t want to be one of the rats sticking with Trump’s sinking ship.
I think the Kool-aid has worn off and she has gotten religion. Plus this shutdown affects her family. That is always a clarifying circumstance.