The Problem of Marjorie Taylor Greene
“There’s going to be a lot of investigations,” Marjorie Taylor Greene said, describing what she anticipates if the Republicans regain the House majority this November. “I’ve talked with a lot of members about this.”It was early September, two months before the midterm elections, and Greene, the first-term congresswoman from Georgia, was sitting in a restaurant in Alpharetta, an affluent suburb of greater metropolitan Atlanta. Among the fellow Republicans with whom Greene said she had been speaking about these investigations was the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy. Just a couple of weeks later, on Sept. 23, Greene sat directly behind McCarthy in a manufacturing facility in Monongahela, Pa., as he publicly previewed what a House Republican majority’s legislative agenda would look like. Among the topics she and her colleagues have discussed is the prospect of impeaching President Joe Biden, a pursuit Greene has advocated literally since the day after Biden took office, when she filed articles of impeachment accusing Obama’s vice president of having abused his power to benefit his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. “My style would be a lot more aggressive, of course,” she told me, referring to McCarthy. “For him, I think the evidence needs to be there. But I think people underestimate him, in thinking he wouldn’t do it.”In Greene’s view, a Speaker McCarthy would have little choice but to adopt Greene’s “a lot more aggressive” approach toward punishing Biden and his fellow Democrats for what she sees as their policy derelictions and for conducting a “witch hunt” against former President Trump. “I think that to be the best speaker of the House and to please the base, he’s going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway,” she predicted in a flat, unemotional voice. “And if he doesn’t, they’re going to be very unhappy about it. I think that’s the best way to read that. And that’s not in any way a threat at all. I just think that’s reality.”Though the 48-year-old self-described “Christian nationalist” possesses a flair for extreme bombast equal to that of her political role model Trump, Greene’s assessment of her current standing within the Republican Party — owing to the devotion accorded her by the party’s MAGA base — would seem to be entirely accurate.Over the past two years, Greene has gone from the far-right fringe of the G.O.P. ever closer to its establishment center without changing any of her own beliefs; if anything, she has continued to find more extreme ways to express them. When she entered electoral politics in 2019, she had spent much of her adult life as a co-owner, with her husband, of her family’s construction company. (Her husband, Perry Greene, recently filed for divorce.)She threw herself into her first campaign, that May, with almost no strategic planning or political networking, and a social media history replete with hallucinatory conspiracy theories. When she switched to a more conservative district in the middle of the 2020 campaign and won, she was roundly dismissed as an unacceptable officeholder who could be contained, isolated and returned to sender in the next election. And yet in 2021, her first year in Congress, Greene raised $7.4 million in political donations, the fourth-highest among the 212 House Republicans, a feat made even more remarkable by the fact that the three who outraised Greene — McCarthy, the minority leader; Steve Scalise, the minority whip; and Dan Crenshaw of Texas — were beneficiaries of corporate PACs that have shunned Greene. (As Trump did during his candidacy, Greene maintains that it is in fact she who refuses all corporate donations.)In another measure of her influence within the national party, Greene’s endorsement and support have been eagerly sought by 2022 G.O.P. hopefuls like the Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and the Ohio U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance. Within the House Republican conference, McCarthy has assiduously courted her support, inviting her to high-level policy meetings (such as a discussion about the National Defense Authorization Act, which sets Department of Defense policy for the year) and, according to someone with knowledge of their exchanges, offering to create a new leadership position for her.McCarthy’s spokesman denies that the minority leader has made such an offer. When I asked Greene if the report was inaccurate, she smiled and said, “Not necessarily.” But then she added: “I don’t have to have a leadership position. I think I already have one, without having one.”Greene’s metamorphosis over the past year and a half from pariah to a position of undeniable influence presents a case study in G.O.P. politics in the Trump era. The first time I saw Greene in person was on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021. She was barreling down a crowded corridor of the Longworth House Office Building, conspicuously unmasked at a time when masks were still mandated by U.S. Capitol rules. Her all-male retinue of staff members striding briskly beside her were also maskless. In the late hours after that day’s insurrection — one that the Georgia freshman arguably had egged on with her innumerable claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen and her assertion to a Newsmax interviewer that Jan. 6 would be “our 1776 moment” — Greene stood on the House floor and objected to the Michigan election results, a move that was promptly dismissed by the presiding officer, Vice President Mike Pence, because the congresswoman had no U.S. senator to join her in the motion as the rules prescribed.The day after the insurrection, Greene sat in a corner of her office in the Longworth building, being interviewed for a right-wing YouTube show by Katie Hopkins, a British white nationalist who had been banished from most social media outlets for her Islamophobic and racist comments (the channel that carried her show has since been taken down by YouTube). The Georgia freshman reflected somberly on the events of the previous day: “Last night and into the early-morning hours was probably one of the saddest days of my life. Scariest and loneliest days of my life. On the third day on the job as a new member of Congress, um, just having our Capitol attacked, being blamed on the president that I love, and I know it’s not his fault; and then having it blamed on all the people that support him, 75 million people — 75-plus million people that have supported President Trump and have truly appreciated all his hard work and America First policies and everything about Make America Great Again.” (Trump received 74.2 million votes in 2020.) “It was extremely lonely in there, watching, basically, the certification of the Electoral College votes for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, even though we know the election was stolen, and the Democrats were working so hard on it, but Republicans too, there were Republicans also.”Hopkins listened attentively, her face knotted with anguish, and observed, “It’s almost as if you’re one of them — you’re almost like one of those who could’ve been at the rally.”“I am one of those people,” Greene said emphatically. “That’s exactly who I am.”Hastily, as if realizing the implication of what she had said, she added: “I’m not one of those people that attacked the Capitol yesterday. I completely condemn that. I completely condemn attacking law enforcement; I support our police officers. And I thank them for their courage yesterday in keeping us safe. I know there were bad actors involved and investigations are underway — and it’s Antifa.” (In subsequent months, Greene would blame the F.B.I. for possibly instigating the violence on Jan. 6. She also voted against awarding police officers who defended the Capitol that day the congressional gold medal, its highest honor.)Greene also said to Hopkins, “I’m not a politician.” Like much of what she said during their interview, this statement was not altogether accurate. Her precocious gift for offending and demonizing qualified her as a natural for the trade as it had come to be reimagined by Trump and his acolytes.Greene at a rally in Mesa, Ariz., in October.Adam Riding for The New York TimesStill, days after her swearing-in, Greene came off as a somewhat desperate attention-seeker with nowhere to go but down. Some in her own party mocked her for her past allegiance to the QAnon conspiracy theory, made public in Facebook posts and videos that have since been deleted, and for her abiding fealty to a disgraced former president. Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee and a Trump ally, would soon publicly describe some of Greene’s comments as “atrocious.” The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, would refer to her views as a “cancer” on the party. Her victory, in the mostly white and rural 14th congressional district of Georgia, was cast as a kind of epochal fluke, a wrong turn that would surely be corrected with the next election, not a foretelling of where the Republican Party was headed in the wake of Trump’s presidency.A month later, I sat in the House Press Gallery as Greene was stripped by the Democrat-controlled House of her two committee assignments after several of her past outrageous social media posts surfaced. But Greene had learned from Trump the value of never admitting wrongdoing or asking for forgiveness. I attended her news conference the next day, at which she declared: “The party is his. It doesn’t belong to anybody else.” The committeeless freshman proceeded to spend her ample available time on right-wing media outlets, like Newsmax and the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. An early sign that she was not an ineffectual outlier came that April, when she reported raising a staggering $3.2 million in her first quarter, a majority of it coming from small donors.In the wake of Trump’s departure from the White House, Greene fulfilled a yearning from the MAGA base for a brawler who shared their view that the left had stolen its way to victory and was bent on destroying America. In May 2021, I attended an “America First” rally in Mesa, Ariz., featuring two of the state’s well-known congressmen — the House Freedom Caucus chairman Andy Biggs and the veteran right-winger Paul Gosar — along with Greene and her fellow MAGA foot soldier Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. As she paced the stage, Greene’s hold over the Arizona audience that night was confirmation that her constituency extended well beyond northwest Georgia. “Who do you think won Arizona on November 3?” she asked the crowd. When they replied by chanting Trump’s name, Greene said: “That’s how we feel in Georgia, too. As a matter of fact, that’s how Michigan feels. Pennsylvania. Wisconsin. I think that’s how at least 74-plus million people feel. As a matter of fact, no one went out for Biden. Did you see rallies like Trump had?”By this time, I had visited her district and had begun getting to know her top aides. In February, they persuaded Greene to meet with me in Rome, Ga., for an off-the-record lunch. Three months later, I watched her campaign in her district just before the Georgia primary as she ran for re-election. She and I spent more than an hour talking one on one on the record that day. Subsequently, we met three times in Washington and once in Alpharetta for on-the-record interviews, and once more in her Washington office, also on the record, so that I could see her interact with her congressional staff and colleagues.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Arizona’s Governor’s Race: Democrats are openly expressing their alarm that Katie Hobbs, the party’s nominee for governor in the state, is fumbling a chance to defeat Kari Lake in one of the most closely watched races.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but members of his party have learned to tolerate his behavior.Throughout this 18-month span of reporting, Greene’s messaging machine achieved a kind of wall-of-sound inescapability. Her daily litany of often-vicious taunts, factual contortions and outright falsehoods on social media and behind any available lectern depicted a great nation undone by Biden’s Democrats, with allusions to undocumented immigrants as rapists, transgender individuals as predators, Black Lives Matter protesters as terrorists, abortion providers as murderers and her political opponents as godless pedophilia-coddling Communists. The Trumpian media ecosystem where these phantasms originated saw Greene as their most able exponent, while Trump himself, in a news release earlier this year, proclaimed her “a warrior in Congress,” adding, “She doesn’t back down, she doesn’t give up, and she has ALWAYS been with ‘Trump.’” The latter distinction mattered. By they end of 2021, the House G.O.P.’s most powerful female member, the conference chairwoman Liz Cheney, had been booted out of her leadership position and demonized by the base for condemning Trump. Two months into 2022 — barely over a year into her career as an elected official — Greene told me that she and the former president had already discussed the possibility of her being his running mate in 2024.“I would be honored,” she said of this prospect, though she also acknowledged that G.O.P. advisers would urge Trump to think twice about a candidate as divisive as herself: “I think the last person that the R.N.C. or the national party wants is me as his running mate.” Regardless of her future prospects, Greene’s observation to me in September that she didn’t need an official leadership position to enjoy an unofficial one seems beyond dispute.What has received far less discussion than the outrageousness of her daily utterances is what the sum total of them portends for America under a Republican majority with Greene in the vanguard. In recent months, she has continued to insist that Trump won the 2020 election. She maintains that America should have a Christian government and that open prayer should return to classrooms. She has called for the impeachment of not just Biden but also Attorney General Merrick Garland and the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas; for the defunding of the F.B.I., after the agency searched Mar-a-Lago to retrieve secret government documents that Trump took from the White House; for the expulsion from Congress of those she claimed were Communists (and among those she has referred to as Communists are the progressive icon Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the Jan. 6 Committee member Jamie Raskin of Maryland); and for a congressional investigation into the business activities of Biden’s son Hunter. She has introduced legislation to suspend all immigration into the United States for the next four years, as well as a bill that would impose up to 10-to-25-year prison sentences on medical specialists who provide hormone treatment or surgery to transgender youth under 18.Greene believes that abortion should be banned and that gun-control laws should be overturned. She favors eliminating any and all regulations that were intended to address climate change because, in her view, “The climate has always changed, and no amount of taxes and no government can do anything to stop climate change.” In late September, and hardly for the first time, she excoriated a number of her Republican colleagues, suggesting they were abettors to a globalist conspiracy in tweeting “21 Republican Senators just voted with the woke climate agenda” by ratifying an international agreement to phase down the use of hydrofluorocarbon pollutants in coolant systems.More than once, Greene has insisted to me that her “America First” agenda, divisive at its core, nonetheless commands a vast following, including some Democrats who may not care for her coarse rhetoric but still embrace one or more of her precepts. “I’m speaking for so many people,” she told me in Alpharetta, two months before an election that may give voters a preview of an America under an army of Marjorie Taylor Greenes.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wearing a “Trump Won” mask during a joint session of Congress to certify the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021.Stefani Reynolds/Getty ImagesHer political career began in the early months of 2019, when then-citizen Greene began showing up on Capitol Hill — in part to boost her social media standing by posting YouTube videos of her harassing Democratic staff members but also to try to lobby G.O.P. senators against gun-safety legislation. Greene was outraged to see the 18-year-old Parkland school-shooting survivor David Hogg — who, in one of her more notorious videos, she taunted while chasing him outside the Capitol — sauntering in and out of several Senate offices. Greene had considerably less success scoring appointments with Republican senators. “I had zero,” she lamented to her social media followers. “Guess what: I’m a gun owner. I’m an American citizen, and I have nothing. But this guy, with his George Soros funding, and his major liberal funding, has got everything. I want you to think about that.”Greene was certainly thinking about it. She was thinking about it as she got turned away from the offices of Republican senators like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and her own Georgia senators, David Perdue and Johnny Isakson. She was thinking about it as she stood in a line in March 2019 to attend a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to consider gun-control legislation — a lone opponent surrounded by gun-safety activists. “I’ve been feeling really outnumbered and really sad standing in this line,” she confided to her Facebook Live audience.A month later, Greene acknowledged to a fellow right-wing YouTuber, Alex Madajian, that not all the progressives she encountered were funded by Soros. Many of them, like her, “were just showing up. And they took off work to be there, too. I think conservatives have got to stop making the excuses.” She went on: “Conservatives are going to have to get over themselves. Conservatives, we’re so selfish in so many ways. We will spend, spend, spend on our very nice handbags and we will spend on our golf clubs.”Less than a month after that April interview, Greene, who had previously identified herself on Federal Election Commission donor forms (as a contributor to the Trump campaign) as, variously, a construction firm owner, a CrossFit gym owner and a homemaker, decided to run for elective office to represent Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, where she resided. It was a story she would tell friends — how she, a taxpayer and job creator who cared about the Constitution, had been turned away by Republicans whose salary she paid. That was why she decided to run for Congress.On May 30, 2019, Greene announced her candidacy on a conservative talk-radio show, followed by a Facebook Live post. A local Republican activist, Lawton Sack, happened to catch the announcement on Facebook Live. Wondering who Greene was, Sack started searching the internet. He came upon several of her Facebook videos, including one posted two years earlier in which Greene suggested that the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas was staged by leftists as a pretext for seizing Americans’ guns. Sack posted on his website GeorgiaPol.com that same afternoon under the headline “Las Vegas Shooting Conspiracist Running in GA-6.”Sack’s post went unnoticed. Despite Greene’s preternatural talent for attracting attention, her obscurity in the political world worked to her benefit in the early months, when her principal competition in the Sixth District’s Republican field was its former congresswoman, Karen Handel. As soon as Greene announced her campaign, she pledged her allegiance as the Trumpiest candidate in the primary: “Everyone knows I support @realDonaldTrump. Always have, right from the start!”The last part was untrue: Greene did not vote in the 2016 primary, nor did she contribute to Trump’s campaign until a few weeks before he was elected president. What was true was that “right from the start” of her own campaign, Greene was telling local Republicans that she intended to run just as Trump had: all heat and hyperbole, reliant on small online donations and her personal wealth rather than the establishment Republicans who wanted nothing to do with her. Like Trump, she described herself as a successful business owner. His campaign slogan was “Make America Great Again”; hers was “Save America Stop Socialism.”Few believed she had any chance of winning — probably not against Handel, and almost certainly not in the general election against the incumbent Democrat, Lucy McBath. Then Greene received a decisive break. That December, Tom Graves, the G.O.P. congressman representing the 14th District in northwest Georgia, announced that he would not run for another term, one in a growing number of establishment Republicans who had made for the exits during the Trump era. An open seat, in a district that Trump carried by 53 points in 2016, was suddenly up for grabs. Though Greene had made a virtue of her residency in the Sixth District — even telling the local podcast host Ben Burnett just a couple of days before Graves’s surprise announcement: “I understand our district. I understand it uniquely, because it’s where I’ve always lived, and it’s where I’ve raised my family and worked for so many years” — she would now cheerfully run as a carpetbagger.Instantly, her political fortunes changed. Running as a Trumpist firebrand in a suddenly vacant seat, Greene received pledges of support from the most prominent conservative in the G.O.P. House, Jim Jordan of Ohio; and Debbie Meadows, the wife of Trump’s eventual chief of staff, Mark Meadows and founder of Right Women PAC. Greene’s campaign staff immediately printed a flyer highlighting Jim Jordan’s seal of approval. Her first campaign ad began with “AOC wants to plunge us into Communism,” referring to Ocasio-Cortez, and ended with “President Trump needs more support in Congress.” After a Black man, George Floyd, was killed by a Minneapolis police officer on Memorial Day and nationwide protests erupted, some leading to violence and significant property damage, Greene posted on June 2 on her campaign website a video of herself holding a custom AR-15 pistol, accompanied by these words: “Here’s my message to ANTIFA terrorists: Stay the HELL out of NW Georgia. You won’t burn our churches, loot our businesses, or destroy our homes.”Already covering two races that could determine control of the Senate, the Georgia media took little notice of the congressional race in the state’s northwestern corner — much less of the wealthy far-right conspiracist who didn’t even live in the district. But in her thousands of doorstep conversations in the 14th District, Greene did not encounter indifference. No one was laughing in her face for describing AOC and Antifa as enemies of America. No one lectured her on the imprudence of wielding a military-style weapon in campaign ads. On the contrary: Walking door to door throughout northwest Georgia, Greene could see very early on, she would tell me more than a year later, that its constituents saw the world through the same lens that she did. Within days, she was certain that a majority of these voters would be hers.On June 9, 2020, Greene came in first in the G.O.P. primary, 19 points ahead of the establishment Republican who had been expected to win, the neurosurgeon John Cowan. Trump tweeted his approval: “A big winner. Congratulations!” In the August runoff, Greene thrashed Cowan (whose endorsers included the House minority whip, Steve Scalise) by 14 points. At her victory party in Rome that evening, the exultant winner said of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “We’re going to kick that bitch out of Congress.”The next day, Greene received a congratulatory phone call from the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who later told a confidant (according to that person), “Clearly, I’m going to have to sit her down and tell her that you can’t call the speaker a bitch.” Instead, Greene tripled down. The day she received congratulations from McCarthy, she memorialized her “kick that bitch out of Congress” sentiment on Twitter. The day after that, she told a Georgia radio interviewer: “In a fired-up moment, I did call her a dirty name. But I don’t back down. I don’t apologize.”In November 2020, during the weeklong orientation period for newly elected members of Congress, Julie Conway, the director of the prominent conservative women’s political action committee VIEW PAC, hosted a reception at the G.O.P.-affiliated Capitol Hill Club for the 30 or so House Republican women it had endorsed. A single uninvited guest arrived, one who happened to be the only maskless person in the room, according to multiple attendees with knowledge of what took place..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“Julie,” one of the women whispered in Conway’s ear, “she’s coming at you.”Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced herself. Then she added, in a voice both hurt and defiant, “I know that you and VIEW PAC weren’t supportive during the campaign.”Conway replied: “Well, to be fair, no one here was. But look, Marjorie, you’re part of the team, if you want to be. It’s a legislative body. If you don’t want to work together, well, that’s your choice.”Greene had arrived in Washington for freshman orientation on a red tide of grievance. Just the week earlier, she upbraided Crenshaw, her fellow Republican member and a former U.S. Navy SEAL, on Twitter for what she termed his “loser mindset” in not challenging the 2020 election results, prompting Crenshaw to fire back: “You’re a member of Congress now, Marjorie. Start acting like one.” Also on Twitter, she complained that because of the pandemic and what she termed “Democrat tyrannical control,” no local gyms were open. (“There is literally a gym around the corner from the hotel she is staying at,” Ruben Gallego, a Democratic congressman from Arizona, tweeted in response.) But something else occurred during that same orientation week that would alter Greene’s trajectory and ultimately that of the Republican Party as well. At what was intended to be a perfunctory congratulatory meeting in the Oval Office with three new G.O.P. congresswomen — Greene, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Yvette Herrell of New Mexico — Trump met Greene for the first time. She immediately launched into what she later told me was a preconceived strategy about how and where Trump needed to campaign in Georgia to help swing the two U.S. Senate runoff elections there into the Republican column. According to a person familiar with the meeting (and who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly): “She owned that room with Trump. Boebert and Herrell are not pushovers. But 90 to 95 percent of the conversation was Marjorie and the president.”In June, I asked Greene about reports I had heard that McCarthy had vowed to award her plum committee assignments in exchange for her support for his bid as House speaker. “Robert, I don’t believe anything until I see it,” she told me. “I’m pretty smart. I’ve been around people. People take me for granted a lot. I’ve been around the block one too many times to be handed a load of [expletive], so to speak.”Later, she told me what her committee preferences would be. “I would like to be on Oversight,” she said. “I would also like to be on Judiciary. I think both of those I’d be good on.” When I observed that serving on both committees — high-profile investigative perches that had elevated Republicans like Darrell Issa, Trey Gowdy and Jim Jordan into household names — constituted a pretty big ask, Greene shot back: “I completely deserve it. I’ve been treated like [expletive]. I have been treated like garbage.”In a statement for this story, Representative James Comer, the Oversight Committee’s ranking member and most likely its chairman should the Republicans win back the House, said, “If Americans entrust Republicans with the majority next Congress, we look forward to the Steering Committee adding new G.O.P. members to the committee like Rep. Greene with energy and a strong interest in partnering with us in our efforts to rein in the unaccountable Swamp and to hold the Biden Administration accountable for its many self-inflicted crises that it has unleashed on the American people.”But Greene’s comments about what she deserves and how she feels she has been treated reveal a deeply personal grievance against her fellow Republicans that abides to this day, despite the party’s accommodations to her. It extends back to when she was denied an audience with Republican senators as a visitor to the Capitol in 2019; then to her being shunned by the G.O.P. establishment during her 2020 campaign; and finally to what she views as a less-than-fulsome defense of her a month into her congressional tenure, when House Democrats along with 11 Republicans voted to strip her of her committee assignments. This event, a rarity in the history of Congress, was prompted by the surfacing, late that January, of more of her previous social media posts. They included her outlandish suggestions that the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., was staged, and that a wildfire in California that same year was ignited by a laser beam shot from space by a prominent Jewish family, the Rothschilds, the subjects of many antisemitic conspiracy theories. Such delusions were commonly embraced in the community of QAnon followers.A week after Greene’s past musings were disclosed, the House G.O.P. conference convened to discuss whether to remove Liz Cheney from her leadership post after she voted to impeach Trump. But midway into the four-hour discussion, the other elephant in the room stepped up to the microphone.“Well,” Greene began, according to a recording of the meeting I obtained, “many of you I’ve enjoyed getting to know in my one month that I’ve been here in Congress. But there’s also many more of you that I haven’t gotten to meet yet, and you haven’t gotten to know me. Some of you attack me every single day, and usually I find that it’s those of you attacking me are the ones that don’t know me, and that’s unfortunate.”Greene then tried to explain how it was that she came to embrace the conspiracy theories of the QAnon community that now scandalized the Republican Party and jeopardized her political career. “I was upset about Russian collusion conspiracy lies that I was seeing on the news every single day,” Greene recalled to her colleagues. “So I looked into the internet — and was like, ‘What is going on?’ I stumbled across something called QAnon. Yep, I did. I read about it, I posted about it, I talked about it, and I asked questions about it.”Here, more precisely, is what she did: By the summer of 2017, Greene had made contact online with a counselor in the New York public school system who shared her affinities for both President Donald Trump and dark conspiracy theories. That July, she began writing for the counselor’s online publication, American Truth Seekers, under her great-grandmother’s name, Elizabeth Camp.Greene’s argument was that the “Russian collusion conspiracy lies” had created a kind of permission structure in her mind. As she would say on the House floor, “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true.”In this passive-voice explanation, Greene was “allowed to believe” that a Democratic staff member named Seth Rich had been murdered by Hillary Clinton’s top adviser, John Podesta, in order to cover up the fact that it was Rich, not Russia, who had leaked Democratic emails to WikiLeaks. (Later, Greene would modify this conspiracy theory: It was the Latino gang MS-13, “the henchmen of the Obama administration,” who had murdered Seth Rich.) Greene was “allowed to believe” that Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump’s ties to Russia, was actually quietly working to bring down the Clintons. And that “many in our government are actively worshiping Satan.” And that Trump was single-handedly battling evil — that, as she reposted from the website MAGAPILL, “thousands of Pedophiles and Child Traffickers have been arrested since Trump was sworn in.” This “Global Evil,” she was allowed to believe, was all being funded by the Saudi royals in concert with Jewish billionaires: George Soros and the Rothschild family.Greene believed all this, she claimed, not only because the media had made up lies about Trump but also because in some dark corner of the internet, an anonymous person claiming to have military intelligence “Q clearance” had said so.She concluded her monologue to her new G.O.P. colleagues with an admonition: “Let’s make sure we keep our eyes on the enemy. Because they’re really wanting to take all of us out.” About a third of her colleagues rose to applaud her as she took her seat among them.Not everyone in the conference was moved. “The headline tonight,” warned the South Carolina freshman Nancy Mace, “is that we tried to kick out Liz Cheney, and we gave a standing ovation to Marjorie Taylor Greene.”Tom Reed, a moderate from New York, spoke before Mace and was even more pointed. “I’m committed to winning the majority,” he told his colleagues. “So how is this going to look if we kick out Liz Cheney and keep Marjorie Greene? How is this going to play across the United States of America? How am I going to stand in front of my kids and go, You know what you did, Tom?” He went on, “‘Dad, you kicked out a person who stood on her conscience and voted for impeachment, but you retained an individual’ — and this is what the perception’s going to be, Marjorie, and I don’t mean to offend you — ‘that stood for white supremacy, that stood for a laser in the sky that supposedly the Jews controlled to start a fire in California.’”The question now confronting McCarthy, the House minority leader, was whether he could dissuade the Democratic majority from stripping Greene of her committee assignments. The day before the Feb. 3 Republican meeting, according to a source with knowledge of the exchange, he contacted the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer — the only Democratic leader with whom he had a relationship, as Pelosi spoke openly of her lack of respect for McCarthy — and asked, “What if we just put Marjorie on the Small Business Committee?” Hoyer advised McCarthy that this would probably not fly with the Democrats.On the morning of Feb. 3, according to the same source, McCarthy called Hoyer once more. Hoyer conveyed his caucus’s view that if McCarthy wasn’t going to take care of his party’s Marjorie Taylor Greene problem, then the Democrats intended to do so.McCarthy was apoplectic. “You mark this down in the history books,” he said heatedly, threatening that once the Republicans took back the majority, they would strip Democrats of committee assignments with impunity.“Kevin,” Hoyer replied, “you mark this day down. This is the day I told you that your pandering for Trump is bad for your party, bad for the country and bad for your career.”Greene emerged from the episode unrepentant and unburdened of lawmaking responsibilities — and enjoying the continued support of Trump, who called to offer solace the day her committee assignments were taken away. Greene did not sense the same allyship from House Republican leaders like McCarthy. “I think they stood back and said, ‘Let it happen,’” she asserted to Steve Bannon on his podcast a few weeks later.There remain some Republicans — albeit fewer who still hold office — who believe that, far from being “treated like garbage,” as she sees it, Greene has been coddled by Republican leadership. A former longtime moderate Republican member, Charles W. Dent of Pennsylvania, told me that he recalled saying on CNN in 2020 that the G.O.P. should have explicitly marginalized Greene from the moment she won her election: barring her from the House conference, offering her no committee assignments and immediately endorsing a 2022 primary opponent. “They obviously chose a different course,” Dent said with evident chagrin. “Letting her into the tent to some extent normalized her.”And, Dent went on to say, granting extreme elements like Greene so prominent a role in the party was almost certain to make life harder for Republicans in swing districts, starting with the 2022 midterms, which were shaping up to be less of a certain win for the G.O.P. “If the Republicans underperform in the midterms,” Dent told me, “then maybe they’ll start realizing you can’t just throw away these seats. Maybe losing is what it’ll take to course-correct.”This September, on a Wednesday afternoon in Greene’s office in the Longworth building in Washington, I bumped into Ed Buckham, an unassuming 63-year-old man who seemed out of place amid the walls covered with fan notes written to Greene from all over the nation. Buckham has been the Georgia freshman’s chief of staff for nearly a year. “She’s been so great to work for, an absolute pleasure,” he told me, adding that his last job on the Hill was two decades earlier, when Buckham served as chief of staff for the Republican House majority whip, Tom DeLay, one of the most effective legislative operators in modern times.“I hired him because I want to be a very serious legislator,” Greene told me later that evening, after she had cast a succession of “no” votes to various bipartisan House resolutions. (One of them established a National Center for the Advancement of Aviation.) “I want to be a very serious member of Congress. And it’s because I have true goals in Congress, and then also for the Republican Party. I think our party needs a lot of work.”Greene had previously and notoriously hired as a staff assistant the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who had become a leper in conservative circles after remarking approvingly in 2016 of “relationships between younger boys and older men.” (Greene quietly parted ways with Yiannopoulos earlier this year.) By contrast, the fact that Tom DeLay’s former top lieutenant was now her own had received no attention.Among Ed Buckham’s virtues that Greene enumerated for me was that he was “a strong Christian.” Greene has recently identified herself as a “Christian nationalist”; this, she maintained to me, meant nothing more and nothing less than a Christian who loves her country. “I didn’t even know there was a history with that phrase,” she insisted. This past summer, she stood on a stage during a live broadcast of the religious-right program “FlashPoint” and was prayed over by the right-wing Christian author Dutch Sheets, who has stated, “Don’t separate God and government,” and who concluded his prayer over Greene with “You are highly favored, you will not fail, in Jesus’ name, Amen!” Two months ago, at a Turning Point USA event, another far-right pastor, Rob McCoy, concluded an interview with Greene by saying, “Someday, please God, may she be president of the United States.”Greene told me that while she wasn’t advocating that Christianity become America’s national religion, she believed that “right now, Christianity is practically persecuted in America.” She wants to see teachers leading students in prayer and to see American presidents set a Christian example. Invoking Jesus, Greene said: “He fought against what was wrong. He ran the money changers out of the temple. He threw their tables over. So he stood strongly against things that were wrong.”Though she readily volunteers that she is “a sinner,” Greene has frequently used the word “godless” to describe Democrats, including Pelosi, a practicing Catholic. (Greene told me that Pelosi’s support of abortion rights essentially disqualifies the House speaker from being a true Christian. She does, however, ruefully admire how Pelosi wields power, and she recently told the conservative activist Charlie Kirk on his podcast that if she ever managed to hold that same position, “I would reign with an iron fist.”) When I mentioned this to Emanuel Cleaver, a 77-year-old United Methodist pastor from Missouri who has been a Democratic member of Congress since 2005, he replied: “I believe that she actually believes that about us. But as I remind myself all the time, sincerity alone does not make a weak doctrine strong.”Cleaver went on to say: “We are in an era of nationalism, all across the world and here at home. And there’s a symbiotic relationship between nationalism and religion. Human beings often mix their political belief with religious fervor. It allows them to think that they’re God’s agent.” Cleaver told me that he had been unable to forget the video clip from the Jan. 6 insurrection in which a QAnon adherent named Jacob Chansley joined other rioters in storming the vacant chamber of the Senate. Chansley, the so-called Q Shaman, stood at the rostrum and led others in prayer, saying: “Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the Communists, the globalists and the traitors within our government.”“It doesn’t take much theology to understand that what many of them at the Capitol that day believed was that they were an army of God,” Cleaver told me. “And that’s what scares me about Christian nationalism here in America.”Greene with former President Donald Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., in July.Doug Mills/The New York TimesGreene’s political operation is committed to the goal of reflexively demonizing nearly anyone and anything she opposes, regardless of what it costs her. Twitter has permanently suspended her personal account for repeatedly spreading untruths about Covid vaccines. Her refusal to wear a mask on the House floor during the pandemic resulted in Greene’s being fined more than $100,000. Her appearance onstage in February with the avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes caused Bannon to cancel a public appearance with her in Georgia. (Bannon has since brought Greene back on his podcast.) Earlier this year, she traveled with a bodyguard (which, as The Times reported, Greene paid for with campaign funds) because of threats that she says have been made against her. In August, according to the local police, her house in Rome, Ga., was repeatedly “swatted” — someone claimed to a 911 operator that a violent crime was taking place in Greene’s household, compelling a SWAT team to enter her home — apparently by someone who objected to her anti-transgender rhetoric, according to a report she obtained from the police and released.But the attention economy manifestly rewards her performative combativeness, both in online donations and in social media ubiquity. That this was not just some happy coincidence, but in fact an assiduously strategized core of Greene’s political machine, became evident more than a year ago, when I met two of her seniormost advisers (who, as a precondition for our conversation, requested anonymity so that they could speak freely about their boss) at a restaurant in the Atlanta suburbs.One of them challenged me: “Who do you think are the top five Republicans in the House, other than the ones in leadership?” The adviser then clarified that this was not a Beltway lobbyist popularity contest. “I’m not talking about who K Street wants. I’m talking about, if you had five House Republicans on a national ballot, who would the public vote for?”It was a revealing question. Tom DeLay had once told me that there were three career paths for any member of Congress: to be in leadership, to be a committee stalwart or to be a tireless advocate for your district. Greene had chosen a fourth path. Her ambition was to be a national figure.She has achieved this distinction in part through an extremist posture that may well be earnestly felt but is also politically calculated. In May, I accompanied Greene on a 13-hour primary-campaign swing through her district. Two years earlier, her campaign slogan was “Save America Stop Socialism.” Now her yard signs read: “Save America Stop Communism.” Her senior adviser Isaiah Wartman said, “We’ve moved the needle.”That Greene honestly believes America has now fallen prey to a Communist regime seems unlikely. (When I asked her about a claim she had made that Jamie Raskin is a Communist, Greene responded: “Yes! Have you read about his father?” Marcus Raskin was a longtime progressive government staff member and never a member of the Communist Party.) It has therefore been tempting for her detractors, and for that matter many Washington journalists, to regard her as pernicious but ultimately unserious — and, like her political godfather, Trump, as someone who appears more attuned to what works as an applause line than what fits her core beliefs. I tended toward this view in my early appraisal of Greene, particularly after she accosted Ocasio-Cortez on the House floor and challenged her to a debate in April 2021, promoting the hashtag #MTGvsAOC and a month later chasing the Democrat down a corridor of the Capitol, yelling in full view of reporters: “Alexandria! Alexandria! Why won’t you debate me?”But enough time spent in her orbit revealed that Greene’s ceaseless quest for attention did not prove or disprove anything about her right-wing fervor. Her commitment to the MAGA agenda equals if not surpasses Trump’s. More significant, she has every intention of enacting what her Republican colleagues failed to ratify of Trump’s agenda.“I’ve said it to them at conference,” Greene told me in May in the back of her black S.U.V., headed to a campaign event in the northwest Georgia town Ringgold. “I’ve said it over and over: ‘The whole reason I ran for Congress was, you basically [expletive] the bed when you had your chance. You didn’t fund and build the wall. You didn’t repeal Obamacare — you didn’t do anything about it. You call yourselves pro-life, and you guys funded Planned Parenthood. You can’t fail any worse than that!’ So, no: I literally ran for Congress because they failed so badly that Nancy Pelosi became speaker again.”Among the questions facing Greene is whether the pugnacity she displays toward her fellow Republicans is politically sustainable. “When you ask yourself how things could end up for her,” Brendan Buck, who served as counselor and chief communications adviser to the former speaker Paul Ryan, said to me, “one likely possibility is that it ends when you start becoming a problem for your colleagues. Steve King became a problem for his colleagues, and so did Madison Cawthorn.” Buck was referring, respectively, to the former Iowa congressman who was marginalized by the House G.O.P. for expressing white-supremacist views, and to the freshman from North Carolina who was defeated by a Republican primary challenger after a series of incidents that included claiming that fellow Republicans had invited him to cocaine-fueled orgies. Buck continued: “It’s very easy to see her becoming a problem as well, whether it’s continually claiming they’re not conservative enough or them continually having to respond to her craziness. That’s the quickest way to see yourself out of the chamber.”Even without alienating her Republican colleagues, Buck said, Greene faced an additional conundrum. “The driving dynamic among members like her has been the battle for relevance,” he told me. “Everything revolves around making your voice matter and making your voice heard in the conservative media ecosystem writ large. Turning the party in the direction you want requires your viewpoint being echoed hundreds of thousands of times.”Greene once told me that when the Georgia G.O.P. establishment first encountered her in 2019, “They looked at me like I was a three-headed monster.” This was hardly the case anymore. Every Republican candidate in her state — and more across the country — seemed to be mimicking her. Georgia’s 10th Congressional District, to take just one example, had been vacated by the Republican incumbent Jody Hice and subsequently had a field of candidates that included three Greene wannabes. One was a demolition-company owner whose kickoff ad featured the candidate bashing various walls and doors with a sledgehammer while promising to “crush the woke mob and their cancel culture.” A second pledged to introduce articles of impeachment against Biden on his first day in office, just as Greene had done. A third, Mike Collins, who ended up as the nominee, vowed during his announcement speech, “I’ll make a great teammate for Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.”When I brought this up to Greene, she replied, “It’s almost cookie-cutter for some of these candidates.”She didn’t look or sound especially happy to be the recipient of such flattery. I thought I understood why. “If everybody starts acting like Marjorie Taylor Greene,” I said, “then Marjorie Taylor Greene is no different from anyone else. And in the view of some people, this is Trump’s problem now.”“Too much Trump?” She asked it rhetorically; it was clear that the question was one she had already been pondering. Neither of them was an inside operator like Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell. Both derived their outsize influence in the G.O.P. from their ability to command the airspace of the right-wing ecosystem. They achieved this not simply by being the most outrageous voices in the room but also by being more outrageous today than they were the day before. They were competing against themselves and against their adoring mimics. Their rhetorical one-upmanship was increasingly dark and violent. At a Trump rally in Michigan on Oct. 1, the former president claimed, “Despite great outside dangers, our biggest threat remains the sick, sinister and evil people from within our country.” Greene, as part of Trump’s warm-up act, was willing to get even more ominously specific: “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they have already started the killings.” The previous month, sharing an image of a darkly lit Biden speech in which the president warned that some on the right were threats to democracy, Greene tweeted, “Joe Biden is Hitler,” with the hashtag #NaziJoe.Such was the dangerous game of relevancy that Greene was pursuing. In victory, her voice might well become drowned out amid the growing chorus of MAGA supplicants. Impeach Biden? When she first proposed it in January 2021, eyes rolled. Now it was all but a given that a G.O.P. House majority would seize upon some rationale to swiftly begin impeachment proceedings. Democrats were not just radical socialists but Communists? Greene had begun making this assertion about Democratic members of Congress back in June 2021. Now even the National Republican Congressional Committee — the House G.O.P.’s official political organization — has solicited donations warning of creeping Communism under Pelosi’s Democrats.Greene’s message was prevailing. What her inflammatory rhetoric might consume or ignite, and whether that would bring her ever closer to the center of power or lead to her being cast out, was yet to be known. “Part of my problem is,” she said quietly as her S.U.V. rolled through northwest Georgia, “I’ve been too early.”This article is adapted from “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind,” published this month by Penguin Press.Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind,” from which this article about Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is adapted. Stephen Voss is a photographer in Washington known for his portraits of political figures. His photographs are held in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress. More
