Marjorie Taylor Greene arrived in Washington in January 2021 as a lusty warrior for the recently defeated President Donald J. Trump. Less than five years later, she appears to have lost all appetite for fighting.
On Friday, even her close associates were stunned after the three-term Georgia congresswoman posted a 10-minute video on X announcing that she would be vacating her office on Jan. 5, one year before her term expires. One associate said that she did not inform her inner circle until about 20 minutes before her video went up.
In it, Ms. Greene insisted that her decision had everything to do with her disillusionment with the current sorry state of politics and was not a politically calculated “4-D chess game” on her part.
Few believed her.
The question, “What is going on with MTG?” has consumed Washington in recent weeks.
The answer, according to interviews with friends and associates, is that she had become politically isolated, feeling betrayed by Mr. Trump, disgusted with her own party and friendless among the Democratic opposition. When Mr. Trump announced on Truth Social last week that he had had enough of Ms. Greene’s apostasies, labeling her “Marjorie Traitor Greene” and threatening to run a primary opponent in her district, Ms. Greene felt blindsided.
Terrified by the ensuing wave of death threats aimed at her and her family from apparent supporters of Mr. Trump, she could no longer see any upside to duking it out in the political arena.
In Homeric fashion, the ultimate MAGA warrior laid down her sword and limped home to Rome, Ga.
A Run for Higher Office?
In the months before the breakup with Mr. Trump, Ms. Greene appeared to be moving more swiftly away from her early far-right positions. She defied the administration by opposing military aid to Israel, demanded that the Epstein files be released and supported the extension of the health insurance subsidies passed during the Biden administration. She appeared on “The View,” the popular ABC morning talk show, and on CNN, where she told host Dana Bash, “I would like to say, humbly, I’m sorry for taking part in the toxic politics.”
Speculation that Ms. Greene is positioning herself for some higher electoral calling, perhaps even a presidential run, is not unwarranted. Since she first declared her candidacy for Congress in 2019, as a construction company businesswoman and social media activist who embraced far-right conspiracy theories, Ms. Greene has impressed Republican skeptics with her political acumen. She quickly became one of the most recognizable figures in American politics.
A year into her first term, she festooned her House office walls with fan letters from well beyond the state of Georgia. Frequently in demand at MAGA-centric events, Ms. Greene is also a prolific fund-raiser, although one who relies almost entirely on small online donations. Once greeted with derision by Washingtonians as a shrill and zany show pony, she is now seen more as a savvy operator who understands the conservative base like few others.
Notably, Ms. Greene in her exit video did not explicitly say goodbye to all that. Several people close to her suggest that she has at times contemplated running for higher office and may well revisit those ambitions. Still, the same people say her decision to abandon Congress was less a crass play for 2028 and more a reflection of how much she had come to dislike her job in the House. Ms. Greene declined to comment for this story.
A Craving for Attention
It remains a source of frustration to Ms. Greene that mainstream media outlets continue to harp on conspiratorial views she held before she decided to seek office, such as her embrace of QAnon.
True, in her prior life as a social media “citizen journalist” she once prowled the halls of the Capitol, hounding House Democrats like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Nancy Pelosi of California. But Ms. Greene often pointed out that she reserved near-equal contempt for the Republicans who had achieved so little when they held the majority during the first half of Mr. Trump’s first term. In Ms. Greene’s mind, her 2020 campaign slogan, “Save America Stop Socialism,” was as much about her party’s lethargy as it was about the threat posed by Democrats.
Even Ms. Greene’s close associates acknowledge that her craving for attention thwarted her desire to be taken seriously. In 2022, she decided to replace her chief of staff, a Georgia political associate, with Ed Buckham, who once served as chief of staff to Tom DeLay, the former Republican House majority leader and one of the wiliest legislators the G.O.P. has ever known. But Ms. Greene never realized any significant legislative achievements, in part because she did not cultivate relationships with Democrats, who regarded her as a pox on Congress.
The same mutual abhorrence held true with establishment Republicans. Ms. Greene never could bring herself to play the game within her own party. Unknown in Georgia Republican circles when she decided to run, she became a statewide power only when her alliance with Mr. Trump made it so. Eyed with distaste by traditional GOP donors, Ms. Greene adopted an outsider’s I-don’t-care attitude just as Mr. Trump had done in 2016.
Life in Washington improved for Ms. Greene in 2022, when the Republicans reclaimed the House. The new Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, took pains to court her support in return for plum committee assignments and a voice in the House majority’s agenda. But Ms. Greene’s alliance with Mr. McCarthy proved to be a mixed blessing at best. The far-right House Freedom Caucus rebelled against the speaker and, along the way, revoked Ms. Greene’s membership.
Throughout her travails, she remained Mr. Trump’s earliest and loudest defender in the House. Ms. Greene continually claimed that her twice-impeached “favorite president” had been cheated out of victory in 2020, even as many in her party hoped to move on from him. During Mr. Trump’s two years of exile, she became a reliable warm-up act at his rallies. More than once, Ms. Greene told others, Mr. Trump seemed to float the idea of her being his running mate.
When the party finally coalesced around the former president and he became the nominee in 2024, Mr. Trump directed Ms. Greene to sit beside him on the second day of the Republican National Convention, just three days after he had been shot by a would-be assassin.
Ms. Greene had reason to expect that her unceasing loyalty would be rewarded in the new administration. But Mr. Trump did not offer her a cabinet position. As the chairwoman of the newly established House Oversight subcommittee to root out government waste, Ms. Greene expected to be working in close partnership with the White House’s program-slashing Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk. Instead, her subcommittee was largely adrift, languishing from inattention after only a few hearings. She became aware that some senior West Wing officials regarded her with disfavor, according to a former White House official.
On the Hill, Ms. Greene was fast becoming homeless. She did not get along with the new Republican speaker, Mike Johnson. Her early antipathy toward progressive Democrats like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had been supplanted by ugly public spats with two Republican colleagues, Representatives Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.
The ongoing skirmishes between House leadership and the Freedom Caucus, combined with Mr. Trump’s seeming disinterest in the legislative body, wore on Ms. Greene’s patience. She contemplated running in Georgia for the Senate or perhaps governor. When Mr. Trump did nothing to encourage her aspirations, it began to dawn on Ms. Greene that her unflagging fidelity to the president was taken for granted, according to individuals familiar her thinking.
Personally injured though she was, Ms. Greene also told associates that she believed the Trump administration was straying from its “America First” principles. Both before and during the recent 43-day government shutdown, she spent time in her district interacting with voters. Constituents approached her to ask why the government was spending so much money in Ukraine and Israel. Some of them referred to the Israeli government’s occupation of Gaza as a “genocide.” Ms. Greene became the first House Republican to adopt the term.
Her constituents in the 14th district also voiced dismay about the high cost of housing. She was outraged to learn that private equity firms were buying up whole neighborhoods in Georgia and elsewhere. When her two adult daughters informed her that her party’s spending bill would cause their health insurance rates to double, Ms. Greene joined a chorus of dissent that included few if any other prominent Republicans.
But Ms. Greene was particularly distressed by Mr. Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files. She had met with several of Mr. Epstein’s accusers in her Washington office. Though she did not claim to have suffered abuse as they had, Ms. Greene later told others that she could understand what it was like as a woman to be standing up to powerful men.
On Nov. 4, the five women who co-host “The View” were prepared for Ms. Greene to be in the mood to brawl, according to a person who was on the set. Instead, the hosts were surprised by her agreeable demeanor. At the end of the segment, Ms. Greene pointedly said to them, “Women to women, we need to pave a new path.”
A Life in Limbo
Ms. Greene remains highly popular back home. Still, in Mr. Trump’s race against Vice President Kamala Harris last November, he carried the counties in Ms. Greene’s deep-red district by greater margins than she did against her Democratic opponent, Shawn Harris. The prospect of running in 2026 against a well-funded challenger handpicked by the president would have forced what she referred to her in her video as “my sweet district” to pick sides.
Ms. Greene has expressed confidence that she would have prevailed in a 2026 primary. Even in victory, however, she would have likely remained reviled by her party’s leader. Ms. Greene is also convinced, as she said in her video announcement, that the Republicans will lose the midterms next year and that the House Democratic majority will likely pursue more investigations against Mr. Trump. In such a scenario, Republicans would rally around the president. But could she, after Mr. Trump’s efforts to destroy her career?
There is little chance that Ms. Greene’s saga will end with her changing parties, despite the supportive calls and emails she has received from some Democrats. For that matter, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other Democratic members have openly expressed skepticism that Ms. Greene, who promoted Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud that led to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, is sincerely contrite and intent on pursuing a kinder, gentler mode of politics.
All of which leaves Ms. Greene in limbo. According to a close associate, her only immediate aim is to try and enjoy life for the first time in a long while.
Robert Draper is based in Washington and writes about domestic politics. He is the author of several books and has been a journalist for three decades.
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