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Charles Bethea
A staff writer focussing on the American South.
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The first time I saw Marjorie Taylor Greene in person, a little more than five years ago, she was stroking a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump in an unventilated room in northwest Georgia during the height of the pandemic.
She and the cardboard man have come a long way. Greene fell out of favor with Trump slowly this past year—and then all at once. I’d been tracking the surprising fissures in their relationship for a while when, in mid-November, the President called her a “traitor” on Truth Social. This followed a dizzying number of deviations by Greene from the party line, dating back to early summer—foremost were her very public calls for the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. She’d even had the chutzpah to embark upon a kind of “What’s Wrong with Republicans?” media tour during the shutdown that yielded compliments from as far left as the lips of Senator Bernie Sanders. And this past Saturday, as most prominent members of the G.O.P. were swiftly falling in line behind Trump’s shocking Venezuela operation, Greene called bullshit. “Why is it ok for America to militarily invade, bomb, and arrest a foreign leader but Russia is evil for invading Ukraine and China is bad for aggression against Taiwan? Is it only ok if we do it?,” she posted to X.
Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker
Yet for all of Greene’s surprising turns in the past year, her decision to quit Congress may be the most unexpected. Only one of the dozens of people I’d spoken to about Greene in Georgia, where I live, and D.C., where I travelled to report, thought that she might leave. She officially departs her office today, two days after her pension became available to her. She’d had enough of “the Political Industrial Complex of both parties,” which was “ripping this country apart,” she wrote in a resignation letter, in November. Had the scales really fallen from her eyes, though, or was it something else? Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had suggested to me, a few weeks earlier, that Greene is best understood as “the canary in the coal mine of the G.O.P.” In this week’s issue, I consider what that analysis might mean, in the context of Greene’s life and career. Her swan dive from the platform of political office—although still firmly ahold of her social-media bullhorn and other persistent modes of influence—has implications not just for the swath of rural Appalachia that she has represented (as a heroic avatar more than an actual problem solver), but for the future of Trumpism itself.
As the hagiographies pile up, with some casting Greene as populist martyr, it’s worth noting that two things can be true at once: she took a brave stand on behalf of Epstein’s victims, but that decision cannot paper over a career built on pugnacity, paranoia, and brazen misrepresentation, some of which is revealed here for the first time.
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