Illustration by Andy Bunday
One of the defining characteristics of radical or extremist politics is the head-spinning speed with which devout loyalists are recast as dangerous heretics. The latest example of the phenomenon is the US representative of Georgia’s 14th congressional district, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has just announced her intention to quit Congress.
In her resignation letter she said: “Standing up for American women who were raped at 14, 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 fought for.”
Donald Trump said it was “great news for the country”.
Yet ever since arriving on the political scene, seemingly from nowhere back in 2019, Greene has made a name for herself for being plus royaliste que le roi, more Trumpian than Donald Trump: Mrs Mega Maga. As she admitted in 2021: “I wasn’t a political person until I found a candidate that I really liked, and his name is Donald J Trump.”
Reminded of her history of toxic politics, Greene said being targeted by Trump had made her rethink
Six months before Greene uttered those words, Trump had declared her “a future Republican star”. If it hasn’t been a fully fledged mutual appreciation society then it’s fair to say that Greene’s exaltation of Trump had been second only to the president’s exaltation of himself.
Then suddenly, a week ago, via a Truth Social posting, the 21st-century version of a medieval proclamation, Trump denounced Greene, 51, as a “traitor”, “wacky” and a “ranting lunatic”. All she does, he complained, is “COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN”.
What prompted this outburst was Greene’s vociferous campaign for the release of the Epstein files, relating to the disgraced late financier Jeffrey Epstein, which Trump had sought to keep out of the public eye. Unlike the majority of Republicans, Greene would not back down, despite her veneration of the president.
“She was pretty firm that these records should be released,” says Chuck Hufstetler, a Republican Georgia state senator who has criticised Greene’s “slash and burn” conspiratorial politics. He believes she has been instrumental in leading other Republicans to take a stand, which made Trump change tack and support the release of the files (he may yet be able to hold some files back under prejudice protections for various federal investigations that he is launching).
“I don’t think history is going to look kindly on all those viewed as protecting paedophiles,” says Hufstetler.
The price of Greene’s stance, however, has been Trump’s fury. Last Sunday, she told CNN that she had been subject to death threats following the president’s comments about her. “The most hurtful thing he said, which is absolutely untrue, is he called me a traitor, and that is so extremely wrong,” Greene said. “Those are the types of words used that can radicalise people against me and put my life in danger.”
It was a sound observation, but its moral power was undermined by a January 2019 Facebook video in which Greene claimed that Nancy Pelosi, then the Speaker of the House, was “guilty of treason” and that treason was “a crime punishable by death”.
Reminded of her own history of incendiary accusations, Greene said that the experience of being targeted by Trump had made her rethink her political approach. She promised to abandon “toxic” rhetoric.
Had she seen through that commitment, it would have marked a fundamental volte face because hitherto Greene has been all about toxic rhetoric. Indeed it was the means by which she first reinvented herself as a politician and then rose to national – even international – prominence.
The daughter of a construction company founder, Greene studied business administration at the University of Georgia (a bachelor’s degree, though she later said: “I have a PhD in recognising bullshit when I hear it”). She enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle in the Atlanta suburbs, married with three children, but as recently as a decade ago she was struggling to put together a coherent self-image.
Although she was an evangelical Christian committed to family values, she was alleged by several people who knew her at the time, including her boss at the gym where she worked as a personal trainer, to be conducting a number of extramarital affairs – allegations she has denied.
She became obsessed with CrossFit training, about which she blogged in exhaustive detail. In 2015 she was ranked 62nd in the world for women aged 40 to 44. Nevertheless, she confessed in her blog, she was assailed by “negative thoughts”. Later that year she stopped her updates on fitness and nutrition and began following and liking rightwing commentators on Facebook.
She later described the effect of her new interest as like “ripping the duct tape off my mouth”. But her social media activity didn’t translate into political activism. She didn’t vote, for example, in the 2016 primaries that Trump went on to win. It wasn’t until the following year that her political identity came into focus.
On the now defunct site AmericanTruthSeekers.com, she began posting pro-gun, pro-Trump, anti-mainstream media pieces with titles such as “Dear Spineless Elected Republicans, You’re On Notice! Get On The Trump Train Or Get Out of Office!!”. What turbocharged her transformation into someone with a following, though, was her promotion of QAnon conspiracy theories – a miasma of fantastical imaginings involving a powerful “global cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles”, human sacrifice, North Korea, Iran, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
She also implied that Clinton had murdered John F Kennedy Jr, because he was a potential rival for a Senate election, that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then supreme court justice, had been replaced by a body double, and that there had been an Islamic invasion of the American government. The Trump base didn’t get any more base.
Greene presented it all as a series of factual exposés, as though she were a conduit of sacred truth. “Most Q people I know are very accomplished professionals,” she tweeted. “It’s not a movement for dummies.”
In another era, she would have been summarily dismissed as a crank, but in his first term as president, Trump praised QAnon supporters as patriots, and polls showed that at least a third of Republican voters believed the movement’s claims were true.
Although she would eventually distance herself from QAnon, and recently claim that she was in fact a “victim” of “social media lies”, the conspiracies helped propel her towards Congress. She fought a 2020 campaign described as “racist” by critics, to which she contributed a million dollars of her own money, and in the primaries trounced her nearest Republican rival, a neurosurgeon called John Cowan.
As one local conservative commentator put it at the time: “She’s bat-shit crazy but she’s going to Congress.”
She has since won two congressional elections by handsome margins and acted, the Epstein files notwithstanding, as a staunch ally of Trump. But where to now? Without the fiery language and confrontational politics, she would lose her USP. But to continue on estranged from Trump, she risked a backlash from the Maga base.
Despite Greene’s reputation, it’s conceivable that her extremist politics could fade as quickly as they emerged. She has no real ideological roots or party ties to hold her in place. Her loyalty has been to Trump, and having been discarded by him, she may find that she has to start thinking, critically, for herself.
It may be an exercise in delusion to imagine that this most hostile and paranoid of politicians may choose a path of moderation. But it’s no more far-fetched than her political career up until now. In MTG, Maga may just contain the hayseed of its own destruction.
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Born May 1974
Alma mater University of Georgia
Work Politician
Family Divorced, three children