This Friday, just a week after Donald Trump called her “traitor” and “crazy” for supporting the declassification of the Epstein documents and for criticizing the president’s excessive focus on foreign policy issues, Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene surprisingly announced that she is leaving him. It will be Jan. 5, when he resigns his seat for the Northwest Georgia (GA-14) district, which he has represented since 2020.
A member of the party’s toughest wing, the congresswoman – MAGA reference on Capitol Hill, fallen out of favor among her people due to the confrontation with the leader – Greene announced her decision on Friday evening, when Washington had already packed her bags to leave for the weekend. He did this in a video on his message. In his message he also disgraced his party with his desire to cut part of the health coverage provided by the Obamacare law.
In Friday’s video, in which she emphasizes her loyalty to Trump except on certain issues, such as support for Israel in its brutal massacre in Gaza or the dangers of artificial intelligence to American workers, she says she considers it “unfair and wrong” that the president criticized her for her public dissent. “Loyalty must be mutual and we must be able to vote our conscience and represent the interests of our district, because our position is, literally, that of ‘representative,’” he said in the recording, which lasted about 10 minutes.
Greene was facing re-election next year, like the rest of the House representatives, and Trump had threatened to support anyone who wanted to run against her in the primaries. In the latest polls, the Republican had an almost 30-point lead over her Democratic rival, and it was not clear whether her district would stop supporting her despite Trump’s change of heart, who in recent days has been accumulating worrying signs of how his iron grip on the Republican Party in the Capitol is disappearing.
“I have too much self-respect and dignity, I love my family too much, and I don’t want my beloved district to have to endure a painful, hate-filled primary against me by the president we all fought for. In short, win an election that Republicans will likely lose in the midterm,” Greene says in her statement. “This is so absurd and completely unreal. I refuse to be a ‘battered woman’ hoping it will all go away and get better.”
With her arrival in Washington five years ago, the congresswoman has become the symbol of a new generation of MAGA politicians, coming directly from the extremes to the heart of the Capitol. He quickly became a figure in the capital and in its media for his defense of the wild QAnon conspiracy theories, for his skepticism towards public policies to contain the coronavirus and for his unshakable faith in Trump, whose big lie he defended tooth and nail that he did not lose the election to Joe Biden. In his farewell, this Friday he regretted never having managed to “adapt” to the city and its rules.
Shortly after her premiere, the House of Representatives removed her from her duties on parliamentary committees, in what was an unprecedented punishment imposed by the Democratic majority due to the lawmaker’s record. He had only been in Washington a month, but already had plenty of time to embrace conspiracy theories or express his support for violence against his political rivals. Last weekend, Greene said in an interview with CNN, a network on which she had not made a habit of appearing until her recent conversion into a calm critic of Trump’s policies, that she regretted her tense rhetoric in the past.
In recent weeks she has become one of the faces on Capitol Hill for the victims of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, whose documents she has fought to declassify. Together with three other Republicans, the representative from Georgia managed to twist the president’s arm, forcing him to compromise with his people who voted to release the Epstein files. After almost unanimous support in both chambers, the law arrived on Trump’s desk, who had no choice but to sign it, after having opposed for months the dissemination of materials related to the case of the financier, with whom he had been a friend for 15 years.
In a telephone interview with ABC, the US president described his former ally’s departure as “great news for the country”.
Greene’s resignation forces the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, to call a special election within ten days of the congresswoman’s departure. Whoever wins will represent the district until January 2027. But they do not necessarily have to be the candidate in the legislative elections in November next year. Meanwhile, the slim conservative majority in the House of Representatives will be resentful until a replacement for the disgraced MAGA heroine arrives.
