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Way back in 2018, before she had ever held any kind of political office, Marjorie Taylor Greene reportedly endorsed a plan to murder former President Barack Obama. “Stage is being set,” she wrote in response to one Facebook commenter’s request to “hang” Obama and Hillary Clinton. “We must be patient. This must be done perfectly or liberal judges would let them off.” (Greene later distanced herself from the comments but did not deny having written them.)
Oh how things change. After nearly five years in Congress, the hard-right North Georgia representative is calling for an extension of provisions in the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature health-care policy, breaking with her party over the central policy issue of the current government shutdown and creating ripples of anxiety throughout the broader MAGA movement. “I’m absolutely disgusted that health insurance premiums will DOUBLE if the tax credits expire this year,” she wrote on X. Today, Greene put the blame for the government shutdown squarely on Republican leadership. (Greene’s office did not respond to a request to comment on some of her recent statements.)
Greene is no Democrat: She believes that Obamacare created many of the problems with today’s health-insurance market, but she also believes that Republicans “have no new solution.” Lately, her impulse to go after both sides has left her very much on her own.
Her sudden criticism of Republicans’ approach to health care comes after a summer of minor defections from the far-right political milieu. In June, while many Republicans were throwing their full support behind Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza, Greene became the first Republican congressperson to call Israel’s actions a “genocide.” And whereas the White House has tried to put an end to the discussion about the sex offender and former Donald Trump associate Jeffrey Epstein, Greene has pushed for transparency, supporting a petition to force a vote on the release of information about individuals connected to Epstein (the other backers have largely been Democratic House members). She has also continued to champion oddball issues that few others in Congress seem to care about. Her Clear Skies Act, for example, doubles down on Greene’s stated belief that “they” control the weather. Jury’s out on who “they” are.
Neither the White House nor congressional leaders have been shy about expressing frustration with Greene’s heel turn. “What’s going on with Marjorie?” Trump reportedly asked at least two different senior Republicans. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, whom Greene tried to oust from Congress last year, alluded to the idea that Greene doesn’t have all the facts. “Not everyone knows everything,” he said during a press briefing. Democrats, however, are praising Greene for her new stances. “You are going to hear me utter words I never thought I’d say,” said Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia. “Marjorie Taylor Greene is right.”
When she first ran for Congress, Greene was more known for her fanatical adherence to the QAnon conspiracy theory than for her vision for sound policy. Even as she was publicly praising Trump from afar during her campaign, Greene didn’t receive the president’s endorsement right away—she was well on her way to winning before he threw his support behind her. Greene has hewed closely to the MAGA movement during her time in Congress, even after the White House reportedly discouraged her from attempting a Senate run this past spring and neglected to give her a Cabinet position. But she insists that she is still a free thinker: “I’m not some sort of blind slave to the president,” Greene told NBC News this week. “I got elected without the president’s endorsement, and I think that has served me really well.”
The question is whether Greene’s actions are the result of genuine disenchantment with the congressional GOP and its mode of governing—an expression of the anti-establishment spirit that got her elected in the first place—or just political maneuvering. Her political calculations may have to do with the fact that an estimated 2.3 million Georgians signed up for Obamacare from 2014 to 2024—one of the highest numbers of any state. “It’s as authentic as anything is in Congress,” my colleague Mark Leibovich told me of Greene’s recent moves. “Whether it’s a heel turn, or whether it’s a calculated heel turn,” he isn’t yet sure. “And I don’t pretend to understand her thought process.” Still, he said, her ideological independence has “gotten her pretty far in a pretty short period of time”: Not every representative secures a subcommittee chairmanship so quickly.
Upstart political candidates in the GOP broadly understand that their potential for success is correlated with their fealty to the MAGA movement and its leader. Greene understood this before most; she was bending the knee well before Trump even acknowledged her. And perhaps it’s thanks to those political instincts that she now seems to be recognizing an opportunity to seize the narrative. With the government at a standstill, Greene is once again making noise.
Related:
Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
- The boat strikes are just the beginning.
- Trump’s plan to finally end the Gaza war
- Retribution is here, Jonathan Lemire writes.
- Jeffrey Rosen: The insurrection problem
Today’s News
- President Donald Trump announced last night that Israel and Hamas have agreed to a deal that would secure the release of approximately 20 living hostages held in Gaza and the bodies of about 28 other hostages in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners. Israel’s government is set to vote on the agreement; if they approve the deal, a cease-fire would begin 24 hours later, according to an Israeli spokesperson.
- Federal courts are hearing challenges to Trump’s attempted deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago and Portland; Illinois and Oregon state officials are arguing that the move is unconstitutional.
- According to people familiar with the matter, senior Republican lawmakers are urging the White House to not proceed with large-scale federal-worker layoffs and aid cuts during the shutdown, even as the Trump administration considers such actions to pressure Democrats to reach a deal.
Dispatches
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Time-Travel Thursdays: Álex Maroño Porto on writing, thinking, and falling in love in another language.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
Can Gen Z Get Rid of Their iPhones?
By Elias Wachtel
In 2009, Apple coined a catchy slogan: “There’s an app for just about anything.” The original commercial is a time capsule from the early years—when the idea that smartphones could be used in every corner of life read more as a promise than a threat.
Now we have apps to help us stop using apps. The deterrents are creative. Some apps slow down how quickly we can open others; some block everything except calls and texts until we enter a specific password; some prompt us to reflect on a mantra or take deep, meditative breaths before scrolling on. One shows a little animated tree growing—a tree that dies if we open Instagram.
If an app for everything was prophecy, this is its dark fulfillment.
More From The Atlantic
- Jonathan Chait: Trump’s Nobel thirst is actually great for the world.
- Americans are about to feel the government shutdown.
- The Trumpian fantasy of WhiteHouse.gov
- Radio Atlantic: Saudi Arabia gets the last laugh.
- Arthur C. Brooks: The happiness of choosing to walk alone
- How Native nations shaped the Revolution
Culture Break
Read. László Krasznahorkai is unusually experimental for a Nobel Prize winner, but in an unstable world, his selection feels perfectly timely, Walt Hunter writes.
Explore. A conversation between the director Benny Safdie and David Sims about Safdie’s first big-budget film, The Smashing Machine—which takes an unusual approach to the sports biopic.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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The post What’s Going On With Marjorie Taylor Greene? appeared first on The Atlantic.
