Fresh Air - Marjorie Taylor Greene's Puzzling Political Turn, Explained

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

Once a fierce advocate for Trump and his MAGA base, Marjorie Taylor Greene has broken with the president and resigned from Congress. ‘New Yorker’ staff writer Charles Bethea discusses Greene's past — and what may lie ahead. He spoke with Fresh Air contributor Dave Davies. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This week on up first, the Trump administration and Venezuela. Can the U.S. run a foreign government, as the president says? They simply may not adopt the policies that Trump would like to see. It's a complex, fast-moving story. As always, we're working overnight and every night so you can start each morning knowing what matters. Listen up first on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts. This is fresh air. I'm Dave Davies.

Since she was elected to Congress five years ago, No one has been a more combative advocate for Donald Trump than Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Green. No one, that is, until lately. Green defied the president by joining Democrats on legislation to force the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. And she's criticized Trump's policies on tariffs, Israel, cryptocurrency, and not extending subsidies for the Affordable Care Act policies, a key issue in the government shutdown. And on Sunday, a day after President Trump announced the U.S. military assault in Caracas to arrest Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and his wife, Green appeared on NBC's Meet the Press and condemned the operation as exactly the kind of foreign military intervention he and the MAGA

movement have campaigned against. I am not defending Maduro, and of course I'm happy for the people of Venezuela to be liberated, but Americans celebrated the liberation of the Iraqi people. After Saddam Hussein, they celebrated the liberation of the Libyan people after Gaddafi. And this is the same Washington playbook that we are so sick and tired of that doesn't serve the American people, but actually serves the big corporations, the banks, and the oil executives. That was Marjorie Taylor Green on Meet the Press. Trump has condemned Green calling her a traitor to the MAGA movement, and he's rescinded his endorsement of her.

In November, Green made the surprise announcement in an 11-minute video that she would resign from her congressional seat in the middle of her term. Green's last day in Congress was yesterday. Her turnabout is so drastic it's giving political pundits whiplash as they see her appearances on CNN, 60 Minutes, Bill Maher, and the ABC daytime show The View. For some insight into Green's defection and what it means for Washington politics and the MAGA movement, we turn to Charles Bethay. who's been writing about Marjorie Taylor Green since she first ran for office in 2020. Bethay is a staff writer for The New Yorker who focuses on the South in his reporting. Before joining the New Yorker, he wrote for a variety of publications and was an editor at Outside Magazine. His latest story in the New Yorker is titled Marjorie Taylor Green's Big Breakup.

We recorded our conversation yesterday. Charles Bethay, welcome to fresh air. Thanks, Dave. You know, since the president's action in Venezuela over the weekend got so much attention, and as we noted, Marjorie Taylor Green condemned it publicly. Do you have any sense of what this means for the MAGA movement? What it tells us about Marjorie Taylor Green? Well, certainly her place within it, it remains really stunning to hear this woman,

MAGA's longtime conspiracist in chief in Congress, acting as a fact checker. And in doing so, making some pretty fair points, in this case about the contradictions in Trump's rationale for going after Maduro, and the forgotten lessons of Iraq and Libya. I mean, she's not a policy wonk, but you can hear that she's learned some things about American history and policy since arriving in Congress five years ago. As someone at the time who genuinely didn't know who fought in World War I, that's according to a Republican operative in Georgia I spoke to. The thing about Green that hasn't changed is her intuitive and early understanding of what

matters most to the MAGA base of the Republican Party. This is her special talent, which has been demonstrated repeatedly, and is, I think, being demonstrated again with this Venezuelan action and her response to it. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy put it to me recently in this way. He said she's the canary in the coal mine of the GOP. Or put another way, I think you could say she is herself the MAGA base's average voter. She doesn't have to fake it. So there's little to no daylight between what she thinks and what the base wants. So I think you're going to, a theme of my story and a theme of her tenure in Congress is

watching the party move towards her position on a number of things. And I think perhaps we're going to see that with this issue in Venezuela as well. All right. We'll see how it unfolds. You know, you know so much about her. You've written about her for a long time. How surprised are you at this remarkable turn in her political posture? I mean, I am and I am surprised and I'm not surprised.

I mean, if you go back to her, her start in politics, I mean, it wasn't that long ago. Before that, she was somebody who had sort of had this family business that she was kind of loosely connected to a construction business. She worked in the CrossFit world, and we can get into that kind of fascinating part of her life. But she wasn't political, according to the many folks I spoke to in my reporting over the last few years. And so to watch her become political and to sort of take on. challenges as a politician and learn in real time, I think we're just continuing to see now her evolution as a person who's learning and growing in this role, which she also has decided to back away from. But even there, I think that where she is now, as somebody who's leaving

Congress, isn't necessarily the end of her political journey. You're not leaving public life, yeah. No. The split with Trump got a lot of public attention with the dispute over releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files. In September, she signed on to that discharge motion in Congress to force a vote on the bill that would require their release. But I guess for a lot of us, we didn't notice that she was already moving away from Trump on some other issues, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, so there have been some stories in very prominent places recently, which have cast Green as this kind of conscientious objector who's turned on Trump purely due to principle. That principle, that principle.

is portrayed as Christian, and the moment where the scales kind of fall from Green's eyes and benevolent Christianity overcomes her is the murder of Charlie Kirk last September. In this retelling, which Green is encouraged, she recoils from Trump's pretty vicious response to Kirk's death in which he says he hates his opponents, and she instead chooses peace and love. Some have argued, I think, with Merritt, that this is a kind of reputational reframing, even a whitewashing or perhaps greenwashing, if you'll forgive the pun, which allows Green to steer the narrative in her favor towards a kind of martyr role. But I don't really, I'm not particularly compelled by this framing. It feels at best

incomplete. And I say that with both the timeline of her disputes with Trump in mind, as well as reporting both by myself and other outlets on Green's ambition for higher office. So if we go back to the early part of this year, we know, I know from my reporting that she was interested And being Trump's VP, that didn't come to pass, of course. She's interested in becoming his Secretary of Homeland Security. That doesn't come to pass. And finally, he discourages her from the third option, which is her running for Senate this year. He shows her a poll in May in which she's far behind John Ossoff, the Democrat incumbent.

So this, I think, is when she really leaves the MAGA ranch. She posts a long message on X in May in which she critiques Trump's expensive. and interventionist foreign policy. She writes, and I'm quoting now, I represent the base, and when I'm frustrated and upset over the direction of things, you better be clear the base is not happy.

In June, she becomes the first Republican in Congress to call the killing in Gaza a genocide. She says that Trump's AI policy is dangerous. A month later, she says she doesn't want to have anything to do with the Republican Party and so on, building up to the Epstein-file standoff, at which point Trump decides to call.

call her a traitor in November. So I don't think, to be clear, I don't think that Trump's thwarting of her ambition and the resentment that causes is the entire answer for her sort of tacking away from Trump and Trumpism and his policy. But I think it's a big one. Resentment, I know from my reporting of the last five years, has been a strong current throughout her entire story, more than Christian love has been. And I think that spending more time with her constituents this past year, especially during the shutdown, did bring her into a greater awareness of their pains and needs. Right. Now, in the five years she's been in Congress, has she ever made substantive public criticisms of Donald Trump's policies before this year? Certainly not calling Trump out by name.

I mean, she's never been one to throw her weight behind foreign conflict and foreign entanglements. But this year, and really the middle part of this year, is when we hear her with increasing volume and increasing frequency start to make this sort of drumbeat about a number of things, not just obscene, not just foreign policy, health care, all these things. And so my thesis, and this is backed up by my reporting and my talking to people close to her in Georgia and elsewhere, is that this is informed both by learning about the issues and informed by her resentment, increasing in May with that poll that Trump shows are saying essentially, you know, this Senate thing, it's not for you.

Okay. Now, the feud between President Trump and Marjora Taylor Green really becomes more widely noticed in November when she appears with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's abuse at a press conference in front of the Capitol spoke movingly about it all. What is your sense of how those relationships affected her and this move of hers? Yeah, well, just to paint the sort of picture there with that presser in mid-November, right after Trump called her a traitor, She's wearing all black. She's surrounded by Epstein survivors. She says that the fight to release the files has, quote, ripped MAGA apart. And without saying his name, she turns Trump's insult around and calls him a traitor by saying that a real traitor is someone who sells out America's interest for his own gain. At that very moment, Trump was himself preparing to host the Saudi Crown Prince at the White House. As for the question of the sincerity of her commitment to this issue of releasing the files, I spoke with Thomas Massey for my story and Representative Roe Kana from California, Republican and a Democrat, who worked very closely with her, and both stressed the deep sincerity of her connection to this issue. And I think one of the fascinating things about her arc is that the Epstein Files issue is really, it can connect all the way back to the Q&ON conspiracy theory, which is the thing that everyone first heard about in relation to Marjorie Taylor Green. And it's this insane sort of cosmology that essentially boils down to a belief that a pedophilic global cabals is running the world. But it also spoke to this idea that's only sort of, I think, gotten embraced by more and more people, not just Q&N people, that there is a global elite that controls too much and that is abusive. And in this case, the Epstein files sort of bear out that central notion.

So while I think she had real sincere emotion about what had happened to these women, it also didn't fully corroborate her sort of her initial ideology that brought her into politics, this sort of cute, this crazy Q&N stuff. But it did reaffirm the central idea that sort of motivated her from the start. In November, President Trump attacked Marjorie Taylor Green in a social media. Post called her Wacky Marjorie and then went on a whole riff about her at a North Carolina rally. I believe this was in December. Let's listen to a bit of that. She goes around saying, he doesn't call me back. I said, Marjor, I can't call you back. I got two. I think Marjorie, I just can't call you back. I'm sorry. And I wouldn't call her back. And he goes onto a rant, he won't call me back anymore. Sorry about that.

You know, you can only go so far, you know, once a month, once every week or two weeks, but you can't, you know, highly neurotic. Her, not me, but I'm neurotic, too. I think I'm probably very neurotic, too. I always say control neuroses is good. Being neurotic, no good, but if it's controlled, that's okay, gives you some energy. But what the hell happened to Marjorie, Trader Green? It's unbelievable.

but she dropped out because I wasn't going to endorse her and the person I would have endorsed was going to kill her in the polls so she dropped out and then they talk about how brave she has no brave would be to stay and you know it's one of those things but she dropped out I can't believe it that people can change so much but you can't go from being a strong conservative to a stone called liberal unless you were lying And that was Donald Trump in December speaking about Marjorie Taylor Green.

Charles Bethay, it's interesting, you know, he spends more than two minutes focusing on her in that clip. And we actually shortened it. It was a little longer than that. But there's no mention. I don't doubt it. Yeah. There was no mention of the issues that, you know, Green was raising about, you know, Affordable Care Act subsidies or the Epstein files or any of that. says that, you know, Trump says, well, she wanted to be called back too often and she was angry

that he would not endorse her. I'm interested in what your understanding is of how she and Trump communicated over this period, what they said or texted to each other. Well, throughout her two and a half terms, they were in contact pretty regularly texting, calling. You know, she would appear at rallies with him. Representative Thomas Massey from Kentucky, the Republican, who's quite close with her and not one of Trump's favorites, told me that one of the remarkable things about her relationship with Trump up until recently is that she was more honest with him than just about anybody. And I think that the honesty, of course, is what ultimately got her in trouble. And I think here you're not hearing Trump sort of push back on the substance. You're hearing

him use this sort of gendered critique using the word neurotic and neuroses repeatedly as a way of just sort of casting her as shrill and this sort of shrill emotional woman rather than pushing back in any of the issues because on the issues she she made some good substantive points that I think a lot of people in her district and beyond notably pointing to her possible ambition for higher office agreed with and this is why you saw Bernie Sanders and Whoopi Goldberg and all these other people, you know, just coming out of left field to give her compliments throughout this period. And Trump, as I understand it from reporting of my own and reporting I've read, you know,

doesn't, he's not as responsive to her. He's not calling her back. He's not responding to her texts until he really blows up at her in November the last time they have any meaningful communication and ignores. What was that? What did he blow up? What do we know about that in blowing up at her? She has said that he sent her in unspeakable, that's how she put it, an unspeakable text in response to her, I think, very reasonable concerns that she brought up to him about threats being leveled at her son, other family members, her business. Because of Trump's criticism, yeah. Because of Trump's calling her a traitor. I mean, treason. There's really no higher, no worse thing to level at somebody, I would say.

I mean, a politician, to call them treasonous, but she has had something like, by her own account, over 700 threats made over the last four and a half years to her or her family. She carries a gun around with her purportedly does protection. She has lots of big bodyguards. So anyway, when Trump says these things about her, it increases the level of peril that she feels that she goes around in the world. And there was an unspeakable text, as she described it. There was no sympathy from Trump.

I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine Trump being sympathetic, just the person that we've come to know. But she doesn't get any of that. And that's when communication ends. And according to some reporting by the Times, Marjorie says that Trump also expressed concern about friends of his, I think, was how he put it, who would be damaged by the release of the Epstein files. So let's listen to another clip. This is from Marjorie Taylor Green's appearance on CNN speaking to Dana Bash, one of their people. political reporters. Let's listen. Congresswoman, you posted on X that President Trump is, with his comments,

fueling a, quote, hotbed of threats against you. Obviously, any threats to your safety are completely unacceptable. But we have seen these kinds of attacks or criticism from the president at other people. It's not new. And with respect, I haven't heard you speak out about it until it was directed at you. Dana, I think that's fair criticism. And I would like to say humbly, I'm sorry for taking part in the toxic politics. It's very bad for our country.

And it's been something I've thought about a lot, especially since Charlie Kirk was assassinated, is that I'm only responsible for myself and my own words and actions. And I am committed. and I've been working on this a lot lately to put down the knives and politics. I really just want to see people be kind to one another. And we need to figure out a new path forward that is focused on the American people

because as Americans, no matter what side of the aisle we're on, we have far more in common than we have differences. That is Marjorie Taylor Green speaking to CNN's Dan Abash. Charles Bethay, that's not words that we have, heard Marjorie Taylor Green say much that people need to be kind to one another. What was your reaction hearing? Yeah, the kindness, the the humble apology. I mean, it was remarkable. I know that that having talked to some people close to her, that actually really pissed off a lot of people in her camp hearing her sort of like, you know, bow down and sort of own it. It was great. Liberals loved

hearing it. When I heard it, I mean, as with a lot of things that Green says and does, it doesn't entirely square right after she brings up charlie kirk there right after charlie kirk um is murdered she calls for a national divorce uh which is her her preferred term for a civil war um she also says that there's nothing left to say to democrats so she's clearly toggling back and forth in her mind between what i think is perhaps i would argue her more honest response the the national divorce stuff um and then a more sort of like take a deep breath maybe sit down with advisors and decide what to say to CNN as it becomes clearer that she's moving away from Trump. She's building up a little bit more of a following. What's the more

effective political statement in that world? And so that's, I think, there's more of a calculation, I think, there. We're going to take another break. So let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Charles Bethay. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest story is titled Marjorie Taylor Green's Big Breakup. He'll be back to talk more. this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is fresh air. So, Charles Bethay, you've been reporting on Marjorie Taylor Green for a long time. You live in Georgia. I mean, this is kind of home turf for you. She says she grew up in a working class family. Tell us a bit about her background. Yeah, so she's born in Millageville, Georgia, famous for being where Flannery O'Connor, the writer, spent most of her life.

But she grows up in coming, a very white suburb of Atlanta. Her father, Bob, was a son of a Michigan steel worker. Her mother is from Millageville, so that's how they end up in Millageville. But Bob and Dell, her mother, meet in college. Bob doesn't finish school. He heads to Vietnam instead, works a series of blue-collar jobs until he's able to ultimately start a small contracting business in Georgia that becomes eventually Taylor Commercial, a successful, regionally well-known construction company that would later play an important role in his daughter's sort of self-mythology as a business person. She goes on to University of Georgia. She's the first in her family to finish college. She meets her future

husband there. And they spend the next couple decades raising three kids in the suburbs and then eventually taking over this construction company. Now, you know, traditionally, people who are elected to Congress have often spent a long time in local politics. I mean, it's a big deal to win a congressional seat. I mean, it happens sometimes rich people can get seats more quickly nowadays, but still, you don't just walk into Congress. She first made plans to run when she was, I think, 45 or so. So what did she do between, you know, getting married and becoming a political aspirant? So in 2011, she gets baptized in Atlanta megachurch. I think she's looking, according to people who knew her at the time, she's looking for sort of a rootedness in her life. So she tries

religion. She gets baptized. She talks about martyrdom during the ceremony. Then she sort of goes into this, I would say, a religious version of exercise, which is the CrossFit phenomenon, which was kind of becoming a global, a huge global thing in 2012. At that time, she, she has this sort of remarkable meeting with this guy named Jim Chambers. Chambers is the son, or grandson rather, of the media billionaire Anne Cox Chambers, now deceased, who is a huge donor to the Democratic Party. Chambers himself was a socialist revolutionary who would have an anti-cop tattoo on his neck and prohibit capitalists and police and active military from his gyms. So, you know, sort of stating the obvious, a very unusual boss for the person we know as

MTG to have at this stage of her life. But Chambers told me that she really had no politics back then, and she certainly wasn't bothered by his revolutionary politics. He describes her to me as a wealthy housewife who seemed a little bored. So she's trying to quench this boredom, I think, through competitive exercise, through pool parties, and through affairs with a few men at the gym where she's working at Chambers' gym, who also tell me that she has no obvious political interest, never talks about politics. Instead, she's blogging about fitness, about her routines, and also about her state of mind, which in a few posts she describes sort of having low self-confidence and struggling with that, and then looking for a way to flip a switch as she

puts it. So she finishes, I think, 62nd in the world in her age group in the CrossFit games in 2015, and then makes this shift more towards this sort of online life where she begins writing for a variety of very far-right websites. You mentioned extramarital affair, And you're right that you spoke to two people who confirmed that they had had extramarital affairs with her. You actually wrote about this before she was elected to Congress, I believe, in October of 2020. I mean, you learned about some of this. Some folks would say, you know, that's kind of personal business, really. Does it belong in political reporting?

Why did you feel this was important to include? Well, I think, as Chambers put it to me, it's only relevant insofar as it, as a commentary on her purporting. Christianity. She runs for office as a Christian, and she's living a life that for a while there undermines that. I mean, the church that she went to, the pastor actually, was known for his sermons about marital fidelity. So it's this sort of, you know, living one way and talking another way, and it's that hypocrisy that was important. But it was still something of a footnote in my original reporting, but I think it was something that stuck with her and upset her. So, like, between roughly 2017 and 2019, she goes online and kind of discovers what? I mean, she discovers what a lot of folks would soon hear about this thing, the QAnon conspiracy theory, and a lot of these kind of insane theories that are becoming popular online at the time, you know, purports that there's this global cabal of pedophiles that's running the world, that's preying upon children, and that there's this anonymous patriot, Q, who will sort of drop these clues under the internet that will sort of create a path and lead the way to defeating this cabal. And as soon as Trump becomes president, a lot of folks,

including her, are involved in the Q&ON conspiracy theory, believe that he has sort of been sent. This messiah-like figure has been sent to defeat that cabal. And so she describes his presidency as a, quote, once-in-a-letime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out. So in 2019, she gets seriously interested in politics and becomes sort of a citizen activist. She goes to Washington, for example, and taunts David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland high school shootings from Florida, who is in Washington lobbying for gun control and Marjorie Taylor Green gets a camera person and films her kind of hectoring him about his failure to stand up for gun rights. Somehow she gets from that posture to winning a seat in Congress, which is not easy to do. How did she get there? Well, when she's there in D.C., I think this helps to explain her motivation. She gets turned away from the offices of a number of senators.

She only actually is successful in getting a meeting with Congressman Thomas Massey, who would become a friend of hers. She hands in her business card and says she plans to run for Congress. A few months later, she meets with a consultant about running in a district close to Atlanta. this consultant is struck by a few things. He's struck by the sort of volatility that he reads in Green's appearance and her demeanor in a lot of the things she's saying, particularly this video that she shows him of this teenager, of her walking behind the teenager and sort of harassing him. He sort of interprets everything that she says in their first meeting is suggesting that

she thinks that like Trump, she's uniquely positioned to save him. America from socialism. That's how she'll put it in her first campaign. And then eventually she tweaks that to communism. However, she wants to run in a district that the sixth district in Georgia at the time that is fairly diverse, well educated, and probably isn't going to be as interested in or turned on by these videos that she's kind of best known for where she's harassing people. And that's a district that she lives in at the time. It's the district. She losing at the time naturally so it's it's close to Atlanta and so you know this seems like it's going to be a real push to get her to win but but he signs on and they work together for a few

months and in the main tack that he takes with her to try to make her candidacy work is to tell her to tie herself as best she can to her father's company which as I mentioned earlier she and her then husband had purchased from her father it was a successful company it was on the advertisements were on the radio. If you were a Republican, you probably heard these ads and could thus sort of intuit from them and her purported connection to them that this was a successful business person. Well, according to the consultant and others that I spoke to, she was not a business person really at all, other than the sort of signing her name on the documents filed with the Secretary of State's office saying that she was connected to this

company. And so she gets lucky, I think. I mean, it's not all luck, but she gets very lucky in that a seat in another district, one much better aligned to this person, Marjorie Green, opens up when the longtime Congressman Tom Graves decides to retire from the Georgia's 14th district. And she immediately makes her move. She moves there. She finds a house there. And she doesn't have to run from the kind of paranoiac, conspiratorial stuff that she's found. to following with online, she can lean into that. And so she does. And she leans into not just that, but also implied violence towards the left in the campaign ads that she puts out, one of which sees her holding a gun standing next to members of the, the leftist members of what's called the

squad, including AOC. And that really appeals to a constituency that feels, I think, marooned and left out and on an island and wants a powerful, even angry avatar. We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Charles Bethay. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest story is titled Marjorie Taylor Green's Big Breakup. We'll continue our conversation after this short break.

This is fresh air. So Marjorie Taylor Green arrives in Congress in January of 2021, which is right when the January 6th assault on the Capitol occurs, in which Donald Trump is contesting the previous year's election. You know, typically when freshmen arrive in Congress, they're encouraged to spend some time learning the procedures, the politics, the committee structure, all of that. Not exactly was, that wasn't her approach, was it? No, no. She immediately tries and fails to impeach Joe Biden, not for the only time. She'll do this a few times, this time for his supposed abuse of power and allowing his son Hunter to serve on the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company when Biden was vice president.

And then she moves into, you know, a whole bunch of sponsoring or co-sponsoring a bunch of bills that give you a sense of her priorities. And I think this would hold true for the first few years. These bills have names like the Fire Fauci Act, the English Language Unity Act, and the Old Glory Only Act, which sought to prohibit the flying of pride flags at U.S. embassies. These were all, I would say, kind of feelings-oriented legislation that point towards her eventual. introduction of the Gulf of America Act that I'm sure listeners are more familiar with. This was actually quite recently, and it laid claim to the Gulf of Mexico. But of course, this and all of those other ones, most of which were stalled in their journey through Congress, did little to nothing to change any material reality for her constituents.

In 2021, she was stripped of her committee appointments, right? Now, why did that happen? she was stripped and this required uh democrats were joined by i think 11 or 12 i don't remember the exact number of republicans notably republicans who were no longer in congress but people like adam kinsinger who really staked out a sort of line of demarcation they wouldn't cross with people like green and with trump and they pointed to all of the offensive and troubling things that she'd said prior to congress there were i think over a hundred statements that they said were disqualifying for somebody I mean they couldn't of course kick her out of Congress but for

someone to hold a committee seat in Congress these were things that were you know a bridge too far rhetorically and so she she was she was effectively removed right so losing your committee for a congressperson to lose her committee appointments would take away all of their cloud in normal times in the normal you know course of business not her no I mean because thinking of her as a traditional legislator misses the point. She pushes a shift in Congress towards brand building, narrative shaping, headline making, over legislative productivity. Second only to maybe Trump, she normalizes a more confrontational, attention-driven model of politics. It really prioritizes, as I said,

conflict and provocative rhetoric over everything else. So she acts almost as an avatar. And for people in her district, I have to say, for many of them, not all of them, but many of them be having an avatar who is speaking the language of their resentment um thumbing her nose in the direction that they want to thumb their nose this feels satisfying they don't expect much from politics and this is this is a narrative that aligns to with i think a lot of how trump's base has felt about him but she does more than that this this idea that i mentioned earlier of her being the canary in the coal mine of the gop this is another reason why she's able to I think gain stature in her party well what do you mean by that so

Kevin McCarthy the former house speaker just described her this way to me when we spoke from from my story in the New Yorker this framework the canary in the coal mine he meant that she'll often take up an issue before the rest of the party frequently drawing criticism at least initially for doing so and then the party will follow her there so for instance she was among the very first to visit the January 6th, insurrectionists in jail to protest their supposedly poor treatment there. She visits them in early 2023. She does this investigation.

She puts out this report unusually cruel is what it's called an eyewitness report from the D.C. jail. A lot of other Republicans really stayed away from such overt sympathy for the people who stormed the Capitol and attacked police officers there. But as we know, eventually history is revised on the right and J6, become sort of martyrs in the eyes of many, and Trump pardons them. So there's that example. There's also the example of trans issues.

She's one of the first, when she arrives in Congress, she puts a sign outside her door that proclaims there are only two genders. That sign, I should note, is still there as of a few weeks ago when I last walked past her door. Many other Republicans, including folks who are now closely aligned with Green, like Nancy Mace, were initially strongly in support of LGBTQ rights and equality, but they follow green on this issue. And Mace is now using slurs for trans people. Trump, of course, uses transphobia to help return to the White House. So, you know, in all these ways, she's getting

out front and in doing so, sort of being vulnerable and opening herself up to criticism, but ultimately, I think she's proven to have sort of a very keen sense of where the base is and what the base wants. And this is true, too, of the Epstein files. do you know if she still believes the 2020 election was stolen I think she does that's one of the things that she has not come back around on that would be fascinating it doesn't seem now outside of the realm of the possible but no I've I've not seen her come around on that one yeah and that is a good point to bring up I mean as as these kind of hagiographies if you will take hold in which she's portrayed increasingly as this martyr who can somehow sort of straddle the political divide She still holds on to a lot of ideas that are easily factually disprovable and a lot of notions that are grounded in hate, such as her positions on trans issues. We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you.

We are speaking with Charles Bethay. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest story is titled Marjorie Taylor Green's Big Breakup. We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is fresh air. So we're kind of left with what to make of all of this. Is this a sincere change of heart? Is it political expediency?

And, you know, you write about some Democratic members of Congress whose views of Marjorie Taylor Green changed as they worked together on the Epstein files. And an example is Debbie Dingell, the congresswoman from Michigan. And that's particularly striking because in September of 2021, she was having a news conference with Nancy Pelosi and others about women. Women's Health, and Marjorie Taylor Green shows up on the Capitol steps and just shouts at them for like 10 minutes, and finally Debbie Dingell comes back and gives it back to her, and they yell at each other from 15 to 20 feet away, and this gets reported in the news. And this is what struck me was Marjorie Taylor Green's post afterwards aimed at Debbie Dingle. She writes, all House Democrats are evil and will kill unborn babies all the way up to birth and then celebrate.

You might fall down the stairs when you're unhinged and hypocritically preaching of. about being civil, going to church and killing babies. You're a joke. That was September of 21. And then more recently, after they collaborated on the Epstein legislation, they hugged on the House floor. Rokana, the Democrat from California, seems to speak kindly of her. What do you make of these relationships now? I sat in the House chamber on the day that the Epstein Transparency Act was passed. And I saw not just Dingell. but a whole host of other Democrats walk over from their side of the chamber to the center where she sat, where Green sat, often alone, wearing black, which felt like a choice, and offering, I couldn't hear what they were saying. I talked to some of them afterwards, though, and they were offering thanks, appreciation, words that acknowledge the bravery and the courage that Green had exhibited in doing what she did, which, of course, brought her into Trump's crosshairs. think that the embrace of the Epstein issue, I want to give her full credit for the sincerity

that seems to be at the heart of that. As I've already said, it connects back to the Q&ON stuff, but I think it also connects to the relationships that she formed that Rocana spoke to me about with the survivors. He's not somebody who has any natural affinity for Greens politics, obviously, but he was an eyewitness to relationships that he saw between Green and these women that were real. She wasn't willing to give up on them in their fight for some kind of justice. So you give her full credit for sincerity on the Epstein survivors. You did talk to people in Georgia and other political operatives about what might be behind this.

For example, does she have plans for higher office? She says no, right? She says no, but she also doesn't entirely rule it out. I mean, if you read closely her resignation letter, Green noted the sort of prerequisite for a potential return to politics, which struck the kind of populist tone she's been using over the previous few months. She wrote, the common American people would need to, quote, finally realize and understand that the political industrial complex of both parties is ripping this country apart. So she's obviously setting herself outside of that complex, outside of Trumpism, and pointing in a new direction towards an appealing place without partisan rancor and violence, or at least so it seems. But how serious is she about coming back into the political arena? I did speak to someone close to her who said that she was done with all that.

He pointed out that she can now enjoy an outdoorsy and exercise-filled life, which we know she enjoys. She also has a lot of money, something like $25 million in the banks, some of that from her construction company, some from well-time stock trades. So she can enjoy that life, but she has this platform that she's built. She has more followers than any other female Republican in Congress online. And so it seems hard to believe that at age 51, with that following, with this sort of successful, I would say so far, movement to at least open the doors to an, another path and a way out of MAGA, this America First, America only path, that it seems compelling to believe that that's open to her. And I did hear, and I don't want to put too much emphasis on this because it essentially qualifies as rumor, but I heard from someone

close to her who said that she was thinking of running. Thinking was how he put it, thinking of running for president in 2008. I obviously don't know the answer, and it's quite possible that she doesn't either. As Marjorie Taylor Green kind of steps away from Trump, I mean, one might think that she would anger her MAGA base, might anger her own constituents. How is she thought of in her district now, do you know? Yeah, well, one of the last appearances she made as a congressperson was in Murray County, a rural county in northwest Georgia, to protest alongside about a thousand of her constituents, the proposed building of a bio-waste facility. facility that could potentially cause significant harm to the air, the water, certainly property values. So I went up and saw her speak in a community center in early December.

And it was really something to see the demagoguery at work and to see how passionate her constituents remained for her. I ran across no one whose anger at her for leaving eclipsed their love of her as a representative. And in fact, there were chants, don't leave us. And I saw people screaming for selfies. It was almost like a retiring rock star kind of vibe. And she gave this rousing, 11-minute, demagogic speech in which she leaned into ad hominem attacks on the panel of experts who've been assembled to defend this facility. She went after what they were wearing. She tried to undermine the science.

And she just got a thrilled response from all of the people. there. And it was nothing about that suggested to me that her days as an effective politician are over. And if anything, I think people left there, some of whom hadn't voted for her before thinking, this is a person I could vote for again or for the first time. So I don't think we've heard the last of her. Charles Bethay, thanks so much for speaking with us. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Charles Buffet is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest story is titled Marjorie Taylor Green's Big Breakup. Our interview was recorded yesterday. On tomorrow's show, investigative reporter Eric Lischblow says we're seeing a national surge in violent bigotry

and white supremacy, encouraged by incendiary rhetoric from Donald Trump. Lishd Blow's new book, American Reich, examines the trend through events in Orange County, California, including a murder committed by a young neo-Nazi. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what on the show and get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Mier Baldinato, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challoner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly

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