In the spring and over the summer, GOP congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene broke with her Republican colleagues on multiple issues, from Donald Trump’s spending bill to support for Israel’s attacks on Iran. And several months later, the conservative lawmaker is still at it, despite the fact that a large portion of the country could have once easily imagined her starring in an attack ad where she brandished a broken beer bottle and warned Democrats not to “f–k with my clique.”
Earlier this week, Greene told The Washington Post, “There’s a lot of weak Republican men [in the House] and they’re more afraid of strong Republican women,” adding that said GOP men “always try to marginalize the strong Republican women that actually want to do something and actually want to achieve.” She also accused her male colleagues of jealousy, saying, “They’re always intimidated by stronger Republican women because we mean it and we will do it and we will make them look bad.”
Chief among the Republican men on Greene’s shit list? Her boss, it seems: House Speaker Mike Johnson, whom she sought to oust last year. Greene apparently spent a chunk of last week on the receiving end of “angry” texts from Johnson over her push for the Senate to abolish the filibuster in order to end the government shutdown. “He told me they can’t do it and it’s math,” Greene told the Post. “I sent him the article about them doing it yesterday,” she added, referring to the Senate’s move to change its own rules in order to confirm a group of nominees with just one majority vote. “I said, ‘They just did it.’”
Greene also appeared to suggest that she believes Johnson is sexist toward his female colleagues, claiming that there’s a “night and day” difference in how Johnson and his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, have treated GOP congresswomen. McCarthy elevated talented women, Greene said, while Johnson has pushed them aside. She cited how, in contrast, Trump has filled his Cabinet with women, with the Post also noting that, under Johnson, just one GOP congresswoman chairs a committee; there are five female House lawmakers who serve as the top Democrats on committees. (Johnson told reporters on Friday that he and Greene had engaged in a “good discussion” as “colleagues and friends,” comments a spokesman referred to when asked by the Post about Greene’s claims.)
As the shutdown has dragged on, Greene has lashed out at fellow Republicans for being unable to come up with a plan to address the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies, saying it’s ridiculous that more of her colleagues aren’t on the same page. “I’m actually representing what a lot of Americans fully support,” she told The Hill. She was also one of just four House Republicans to sign a discharge petition seeking to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files in their entirety, a move that prompted Jimmy Kimmel to declare, “You know things in Washington are broken when Marjorie Taylor Greene is the lone voice of reason on the Republican side.” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has been similarly shocked, telling MSNBC of Greene, “It does seem to many of us that she’s had a surprisingly enlightened few weeks.”
Yet while one anonymous Republican lawmaker told The Hill that Greene has lately “been 180 degrees opposite of Trump” in her positions, the lawmaker from Georgia does not yet appear ready to abandon the president. While describing many of her male House colleagues as “weak,” she insisted that Trump “has a very strong, dominant style—he’s not weak at all.”
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