The idealistic explanation.
You don’t need to like or respect Greene to believe she’s an earnest populist revolutionary who’s grown disillusioned at seeing her movement betray its ideals upon taking power.
Every revolution has figures like that. In fact, her jab at Trump for worrying more about his crypto donors than about regular people smacks of the famous ending to George Orwell’s parable about another illiberal revolutionary movement.
I suspect that explains some of the half-serious “strange new respect” for her that I mentioned earlier. Unusually for modern Republicans and very unusually for MAGA influencers, Marjorie Taylor Greene defines populism more robustly than “whatever Donald Trump wants at any given moment.” She takes policy seriously, or as seriously as someone who’s anxious about Jewish space lasers can.
“Considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides” what it means, Trump said in June in response to criticism from nationalist doves over his Iran airstrikes. Greene begs to differ. To her, “America First” means spending taxpayer money on subsidizing Americans instead of on foreign aid and military interventions. She made that point explicit last week in calling for new Obamacare subsidies: “All our country does is fund foreign countries and foreign wars, and never does anything to help the American people!!!”
There are precious few members of the right’s ostensibly populist revolution who include wealth redistribution in their priority wish list. Apart from Steve Bannon and a few other media blowhards, it’s all culture war, all the time. Greene may be one of the few Republicans in Congress whose ideas for helping the so-called “forgotten man” include government handouts, and may be the only elected Republican anywhere offering a vision of nationalism that diverges meaningfully from Trump’s. For better or worse, her idea of making America great again contains actual ideological content.
So if you want to know “what’s going on with Marjorie,” it may be no more complicated than that. She watched Trump run and win last year on bringing down the cost of living and “ending endless wars,” and this year she’s watched him bomb Iran, coordinate with Ukraine, supply Israel, and drive up the price of goods with new tariffs and ICE raids aimed at deporting immigrant labor. Now she’s stuck in a shutdown in which one party is demanding federal subsidies to help Americans defray the cost of health insurance—and it’s not the party she belongs to.
She’s a disillusioned revolutionary. And by dint of her sterling revolutionary credentials, she’s better positioned than anyone else in Congress to criticize the leader of the party without being mau-maued as a traitor to the cause. (Although some fellow travelers will try.) If you’ve waited in vain for 10 years to see Trump’s cult of personality crack, Marge Greene’s low-key rebellion is a glimmer of hope and a tantalizing preview of the internecine bloodletting that awaits the post-Trump GOP.
Just try not to think too hard about the fact that her politics are worse than the president’s are.
The cynical explanation.
You rarely need to look hard to find a selfish motive for how politicians behave. Greene isn’t a disillusioned revolutionary, perhaps, but a disfavored revolutionary. And she’s not happy about it.
Two years ago, everything was coming up Marjorie. Trump, her friend and political patron, was forging ahead with a campaign that might return him to the White House and potentially land her in the Cabinet. And the Republican speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, was a trusted ally, having cultivated her friendship in order to boost his credibility with the wary populist GOP base. “I will never leave that woman,” he told a friend after her support helped win him the speakership. “I will always take care of her.”
Greene’s favor wasn’t enough to prevent McCarthy from being ousted as speaker in October 2023. He was replaced by Mike Johnson, but only after the conference tried and failed to find a consensus on several other candidates. By the time Johnson won the gavel, House Republicans were so embarrassed by the ordeal that the prospect of eventually ousting him had become unthinkable. Greene was left with little leverage over the new speaker, particularly once he secured Trump’s support and became a loyal Renfield for the White House’s agenda.
Then things got worse. Instead of rewarding her loyalty, Trump thwarted her ambitions—twice. Once elected, he went about filling his Cabinet with kooks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kash Patel, but somehow couldn’t find a position for one of his loudest champions in Congress. A few months later, he discouraged Greene from running for Senate in her home state of Georgia, fearing that her kookiness would hand a winnable race to the Democratic incumbent, Jon Ossoff.
Donald Trump’s Republican Party did not want Greene in a position of influence, and she allegedly took it hard. “She felt especially burned after the White House talked her out of running for the Senate,” four Republican sources told NBC News. According to one source, she had her eye on running the Department of Homeland Security and was disappointed when she wasn’t chosen. Another source claimed that she now feels “ignored” by the president and party leaders.
Lyndon Johnson once said of attention-seeking political troublemakers in his coalition that it’s better to have them inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. Marjorie Taylor Greene used to be inside the tent but now finds herself outside of it, so it’s Trump and Mike Johnson rather than their enemies who are suddenly being showered in piss.
Which is good for America, and not just because the two of them deserve it. “I’m not some sort of blind slave to the president, and I don’t think anyone should be,” she said in an interview with NBC News. “I serve in Congress. We’re a separate branch of the government, and I’m not elected by the president.” It’s pitiful that nothing grander than butthurt can inspire a sentiment like that among Republican lawmakers in 2025, but that still makes Greene more civic-minded than practically every one of her colleagues.
Or maybe, on some level, she prefers to be outside the tent. I’m sure it isn’t fun for her to have lost the influence she had—or thought she had—circa 2023, but some revolutionaries are more comfortable waging war on “the system” than running it. A dissident populist as strident as MTG will always look for some establishment to rail against, and there’s no way around the fact that Trumpism is the establishment in today’s Republican Party.
The GOP is her enemy now because the GOP is “the system.” Which brings us to the third possibility.
The strategic explanation.
Maybe Greene is positioning herself for the post-Trump civil war on the American right.
I’ve written about that civil war before. The president’s retirement will ultimately resolve the greatest mystery in politics: whether Trumpism’s appeal to Republican voters was mostly a function of charisma, attitude, and celebrity or whether those voters have sincerely converted from conservative to nationalist in their ideological outlook.
Reaganites believe (or hope) that a Trump-less right will revert to some of the conservative defaults of the pre-Trump era—smaller government, free markets, support for alliances with Europe and Israel, respect for classically liberal values. Postliberals intend for the Trumpist revolution to continue in an authoritarian, isolationist, “fundamentalist MAGA” direction. Greene, a postliberal, is getting out of the gate early in signaling that if the GOP pivots back to what it was, she’s done with the party.
“I’m carving my own lane,” she announced last week in her tweet revealing her support for Obamacare subsidies, the latest of several statements recently in which she’s kinda sorta declared her independence. “I don’t know if the Republican Party is leaving me, or if I’m kind of not relating to the Republican Party as much anymore,” she told the Daily Mail in August, but “I think the Republican Party has turned its back on America First and the workers and just regular Americans.”
Her various breaks with Trump this year are a sustained exercise in political “brand-building” aimed at establishing her as a leader-in-waiting of the postliberal camp that will wrestle with traditional conservatives for control of the right once the president retires. Greene has never been coy about how important that control is to her: Remember that during last year’s presidential primaries, she warned Trump’s Reaganite critics that “any Republican that isn’t willing to adapt [sic] these policies, we are completely eradicating from the party.”
If postliberalism doesn’t maintain its hold on the GOP after Trump departs, she means for us to understand that she isn’t sticking around as a member. She’ll start her own party, perhaps, or she’ll remain neutral as the two arms of the so-called “uniparty” battle for supremacy. Either way, she’s serving notice that she’ll do what she can to sustain the populist hostage crisis that’s crippled the right since 2015, in which postliberals threaten to boycott the Republican Party unless they get to set its agenda. Reaganites can lose in the primaries or they can lose in the general election, but it’s one or the other.
Which seems like a shrewd ploy to me—if she’s bluffing.
If she isn’t bluffing, and she truly intends to play Ralph Nader to some Republican nominee’s Al Gore by launching a spoiler third-party in 2028, she’ll discredit her cause. Most right-wingers are tribalists before they’re conservatives or postliberals; handing the general election to Democrats by siphoning off votes from the GOP candidate won’t endear her “America First” agenda to the right-wing base.
But if she’s bluffing about leaving the party? Then she wins no matter what. Maybe the postliberal faction she’s angling to lead will vanquish the conservatives in 2028, as I expect, and she’ll be back in a position of influence as one of its most recognizable faces. Or maybe it’ll lose to conservatives, in which case Greene will become the same sort of valued “MAGA whisperer” for the party’s eventual nominee that she was for Kevin McCarthy. Any Reaganite who ends up in charge of the GOP will need help building credibility among populist postliberals. Greene can help, for a price.
Perhaps she’ll get that Homeland Security job in the long run after all. Or perhaps she’ll end up in a leadership position in the House GOP conference, elevated by jittery establishmentarians who are keen to show Trump’s base that it still wields real power in Congress. Whichever it is, by daring to jab at the president now, she’s showing the next generation of Republican leaders that she’s willing and able to weaken them among the MAGA base. And unlike Trump, when she does it to them, they almost certainly won’t have the reservoir of goodwill among those voters that they’ll need to weather the attempt.
