The Weird, Improbable Evolution of Marjorie Taylor-Greene

 

     I'm amazed that I seem to be the only one who'd noticed this and made mention of it, but Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene (GA-14) has only been in office for less than one year of either Trump administration. She was sworn into office on January 3, 2021 in the twilight of Trump's first term and will spend less than a year in Congress in the second one. She will retire after five years in service in the US House on January 5, 2026.

     Shooting star analogies are certainly called for and justified. For five years in the House, and for a couple of years before that, Greene had firmly established herself as a right wing gadfly and providing endless laugh reels for late night comedians. She'd made a fool of herself next to Lauren Boebert by heckling President Joe Biden during his States of the Union addresses. Jewish space lasers. Gazpacho Police. Masks during the COVID crisis. And, before that, stalking and harassing David Hogg through the streets of DC. Shouting into AOC's congressional office mail slot. The list goes on.

     Most notoriously, she was Donald Trump's cheerleader throughout his all-too-brief exile. She entered office as a fire-breathing  QAnon right winger and honestly thought that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Three days after she was sworn into office, Trump sent an angry mob to attack the Capitol building to stop the certification and counting of the electoral votes. And, even as she sheltered in place, she kept insisting that the rioters were antifa and other left wing groups until a fellow Republican, Kat Cammack, had to take her by the shoulders and remind her the rioters were wearing MAGA hats.

     By this time, Greene had proven to be such a troublemaker that she was expelled from the House Freedom caucus (such a drastic and dramatic departure that the caucus to this day hasn't ever admitted to doing so). She lost her committee assignments, thereby technically making her one of the least powerful and influential people in the House. Yet, she still held sway over Republican voters well beyond Georgia 14.

     She'd cynically made friends with then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Bided her time. Learned how things really worked on Capitol Hill and, yes, became more politically sophisticated. She realized that throwing bombs is not the way to get things done in government.

     But in this, her only year as a congresswoman during a Trump regime, Greene underwent a gradual evolution. In fact, it's so eerie and improbable that one suspects it isn't genuine, yet it seems to be just that. She began breaking with Trump on a wide variety of issues, such as Trump denying states the right to impose regulations on AI companies for a decade. the lapse of the ACA subsidies at the end of the year, SNAP aid not going out during the shutdown (77.000 in Greene's district survive on SNAP benefits). Declaring the mass deaths in Gaza at the hands of Israel a "genocide". Abortion. Greene wants it outlawed and calls it "murder" whereas Trump wants to leave it up to the states.

     Then there were Trump's remarks on Charlie Kirk's memorial service, in which he said, “He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose. He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.” Green later told Robert Draper of the NY Times, “That was absolutely the worst statement. It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.” Which, one must admit, was a strange turnaround for someone who'd spent virtually her entire congressional career squirting vitriol at people.

     Then there was the Epstein files.

     For Donald Trump, that was a bridge too far. Greene was one of only four Republicans who'd put their name on the discharge petition that forced a vote on the DOJ releasing the Epstein files. Trump called Greene and Boebert and basically demanded they remove their names from the petition, thereby lowering the count to below the minimum 218 that would have forced a vote.

     Then, at a closed door House Oversight committee hearing, Greene listened to and spoke to victims of Jeffrey Epstein. Greene then publicly threatened to disclose the names of the powerful men who'd also sexually abused them. Pretty soon, Trump called her office.

     To quote Draper, "Greene was in her Capitol Hill office, and according to a staff member, everyone in the suite of rooms could hear him yelling at her as she listened to him on speakerphone. Greene says she expressed her perplexity over his intransigence. According to Greene, Trump replied, 'My friends will get hurt.'" In other words, I will get hurt.

     Now, it's important to take this in its proper context. As far as we know, Marjorie Taylor-Greene had never been sexually assaulted nor has she claimed to be. So this empathy for Epstein's victims isn't merely another case of a Republican's thoughts evolving only when it personally affected them. Green has two daughters, so she was thinking about what would happen to them.

     In well under a year, Marjorie Taylor-Greene went from being Athena to Cassandra. As with the Cassandra of Greek mythology, Trump bestowed upon Greene compliments and so forth (Though never, pointedly, a government job). Then, when she stopped returning Trump's transactional praise, he doomed her, never to be believed.

     If anything, this seemed to steel her resolve until the day came when she was in open warfare against Trump. He went from, “She’s loved and respected, and she’s tough and smart and kind,” to calling her "Marjorie Traitor Brown".

     The very day after Trump had affixed that idiotic nickname to Greene, the congresswoman got an anonymous email threatening her son, Derek's, life. When she relayed this information to Trump, he essentially told her she had no one but herself to blame.

      Even for Trump, that was especially shiftless and cold-blooded and I actually felt sorry for Greene and her family when I read that.

      Draper went on to write, "When she urged Trump to invite some of Epstein’s female victims to the Oval Office, she says, he angrily informed her that they had done nothing to merit the honor. It would be the last conversation Greene and Trump would ever have." 

      And, since this fall especially, Marjorie Taylor-Greene has been making a lot of sense. These days, I find myself nodding my head reading her words instead of shaking it. After nearly five years of hysterics, she seems to have finally found her Inner Sane Person.

      This doesn't mean that she's going to turn into a banana peel-burning liberal. She still believes in America First and what passes for Trump's policies. She's groping her way toward the light but she isn't quite there, yet. She's rightfully criticized the administration for slow-walking the Epstein files' release but still can't even bring herself to suspect that Donald Trump has been doing so because he's frantically trying to protect himself, because he knows his name's all over those files and that he's been personally dictating to Pam Bondi how to go about protecting him.

     In short, she still can't bring herself to believe that Trump was pals with Epstein for so long because they shared an unhealthy obsession for underage girls. But he's prompting death threats aimed at her children then shrugs his shoulders and blames her and, for any mother, that's crossing a big, red line.

     But Greene has come light years from the bomb-thrower she was in the beginning of her political career. She still thinks Trump walks on water but she sees that he's doing so with feet of clay. And she's just reaching the point of fully understanding that, in MAGA World, women become invisible the minute they stop toeing the party line. 

      Marjorie Taylor-Greene's political evolution is finite and will stop eventually well short of her becoming a liberal. She's always going to be a conservative and that's her right, of course. She will always be a Christian and that's OK, too. But MTG now knows through a newfound sense of empowerment, some weird version of right wing feminism, that she no longer has to hitch her wagon to powerful Republican men like Kevin McCarthy or Donald Trump.

     And I couldn't be happier for her.