Marjorie Taylor Greene is quitting Congress in the middle of her latest term.
The Georgia congresswoman hasn’t brought great credit to the institution, and her exit — abruptly, for purely political reasons — is par for the course.
The Georgia congresswoman had lost Trump’s favor and was facing, if she didn’t find a way to reconcile with the president, a potentially career-ending, Trump-endorsed primary challenge. It’s understandable that she didn’t want that fight, but simply announcing that she wasn’t going to run again would have sufficed. Instead, she’s quitting on the people who thought they elected her to represent them in Congress for a two-year term and making Speaker Mike Johnson’s job marginally more difficult during the gap between her resignation on January 5 and a special election.
In her resignation statement, she lamented that loyalty isn’t a two-way street with Trump and complained that members of Congress should be able to vote their conscience. Well, sure. But what movie has she been watching the last several years? Trump practices a highly personal style of politics and demands near-total fealty to his dictates within his movement. This was the business Greene had chosen.
But she went her own way in recent months, especially on the Epstein files. She and a handful of other Republican dissenters achieved an extraordinary victory for their purposes, forcing the entire Republican Party and Donald Trump to embrace a measure to release the files. On the merits, it’s a bad idea to make public raw investigative materials, but Greene’s stance took considerable gumption.
Trump, though, wasn’t in a mood to forgive and forget. He withdrew his endorsement. In MAGA terms, this made Greene a little like a medieval monarch that had been excommunicated by the pope. It would have been an interesting test case to see if Greene could have made her new political identity work; it was an unlikely combination of a good-government, “can’t we all get along?” pitch that suddenly earned her strange new respect during appearances on CNN and The View with conspiratorial obsessions and a fierce anti-Zionism. Now, we’ll never know (although she could revive her message for a long-shot 2028 presidential campaign).
The biggest lesson of her rapid, unexpected flameout is that for all the talk of splits within MAGA, President Trump still unquestionably runs the movement, and for all the talk of the president beginning to become a lame duck, he still has the power to vaporize entrenched Republican members of Congress, even if they have their own well-established political identities.
As for the voters in her district, it’s hard to imagine that they can do worse. Despite what everyone says, sometimes politics is about addition through subtraction.