Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) said late Friday that she will resign from Congress as of Jan. 5, a surprise announcement that came days after a public spat between President Donald Trump in which he lobbed public insults at his longtime ally and said he would not endorse her next year.
In a video and a statement shared on social media, Greene, a staunch supporter of the Make America Great Again movement, touted her conservative voting record in Congress and alignment with Trump’s priorities. But she slammed her colleagues, particularly House Republican leaders, over their handling of the shutdown and other issues she said have rendered Congress ineffective.
“I ran for Congress in 2020 and have fought every single day believing that Make America Great Again meant America First,” Greene said in a video and statement on X. “However, with almost one year into our majority, the legislature has been mostly sidelined.”
In a 10-minute video and four-page statement, the Georgia congresswoman said that the House should have been working to address health insurance instead of being shut down for eight weeks. She also noted that lawmakers will soon go into campaign season — and leave Washington again.
“I raged against my own speaker and my own party for refusing to proactively work diligently to pass the plan to save Americans health care and protect Americans from outrageous, overpriced and unaffordable health insurance policies,” Greene said. “The House should have been in session, working every day to fix this disaster, but instead, America was force-fed disgusting political drama.”
In an unusual move, Greene, who first came to the House in 2021, will be resigning in the middle of her latest two-year term.
She and Trump had been on opposite sides for weeks on issues including foreign policy and health insurance subsidies. A major rift broke on Nov. 14 as she pushed to force the House to vote on requiring the Justice Department to release more files on the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Late last week, the president called Greene a “traitor” and said he would endorse a challenger against her in the 2026 midterms.
Moments after Greene made her announcement, Trump told ABC News reporter Rachel Scott that her resignation is “great news for the country.”
Trump told Scott that the congresswoman did not give him advanced notice of her decision. “It doesn’t matter, you know but I think it’s great. I think she should be happy,” he said in a phone interview.
Greene said Friday night that she loves her district too much to endure “a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the president that we all fought for.” Greene also said that she has also endured “nonstop, never-ending personal attacks, death threats, lawfare, ridiculous slander and lies” throughout her career in Congress.
Greene’s departure will leave House Republicans with 219 seats if they win a special election in Tennessee in early December. The Georgia congresswoman, from a safely-red district, predicted that Republicans will lose the midterm elections in 2026.
Greene seemed not to rule out a future political run, saying in her announcement that she looked “forward to seeing many of you again sometime in the future.”
Greene had become one of MAGA’s biggest stars in Congress, casting herself in recent weeks as more “America First” than Trump on some issues. Denise Burns, a former GOP chair for the 14th congressional district Greene represents, said she was also caught off guard by the resignation and lamented the loss of a “very effective spokesperson” for the MAGA movement.
“We are going to need an effective spokesperson to step up and carry that flag since she is handing it off,” Burns said as her phone buzzed with texts. “We’ll need another effective spokesperson on the Hill that’ll be prepared to distill [MAGA] for people that are becoming increasingly concerned that nobody up there has our back.”
Greene touted her voting record as a staunch member of the Republican Party and her opposition to several of Trump’s policies, as well as her demands on the release for more information on Epstein.
“Loyalty should be a two-way street and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our districts interest because our job title is literally representative,” she said, adding that “standing up for American women who were raped at 14 years old trafficked and used by rich, powerful men should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States whom I’ve fought for.”
Greene also accused both parties of sowing division among Americans, arguing that, every election cycle, politicians work to “convince Americans to hate the other side more.”
Among her litany of complaints, she attacked corporate and global interests, as well as legal and undocumented immigrants, whom she claimed are “replacing” American labor. She also complained that Americans’ tax money is being used to “fund foreign wars, foreign aid and foreign interests” while “the spending power of the dollar continues to decline.”
Greene, who first joined the House in 2021 has long been a polarizing figure and a darling of Trump’s MAGA brand of conservatism before it became the norm within the GOP. Her political career has also been marked by inflammatory, antisemitic and Islamophobic statements. In addition, she had publicly backed QAnon, the baseless theory that Trump is fighting a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex. Greene has said she longer believes in QAnon.
Greene also accused some “establishment Republicans” of “secretly” hating Trump, arguing that she spent millions of her own money defending the president when he was on trial in New York but that other members of her party “stabbed him in the back and never defended him against anything.”
As The Washington Post reported this week, Greene’s supporters in her home district continued to back her even after Trump revoked his endorsement. Even some of her Republican critics acknowledged, before the Friday night bombshell, that her populist brand resonated and that even a Trump-backed candidate would have had a hard time beating her in a primary.
Salleigh Grubbs, a state GOP leader who used to chair the party in Cobb County — which overlaps with Greene’s district — said she is “truly heartbroken” and that Greene’s record “was truly MAGA.” “Absolutely stunned and sad for Georgia,” Grubbs said.
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