The Bulwark Podcast - Elaina Plott Calabro: MTG Is More Cunning than You Think

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

Marjorie Taylor Greene tried on Jesus and CrossFit before she got to MAGA. Now, the party leadership needs her more than she needs them because the base thinks she's Elvis. The Atlantic's Elaina Plott Calabro joins guest host JVL for a deep look at the how and why of MTG. Show notes: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/marjorie-taylor-greene-congress-georgia-election-background/672229/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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of trivia, I don't know if you know this, Elena, but I believe you're the only person ever to have spent time at National Review and have written for the Pacific Standard. Wait, that's an amazing piece of trivia. I've never thought about it that way, but I have to imagine that's correct. Yeah, so you're a unicorn, basically. I'm a unicorn. So Elena has a giant profile of Marjorie Taylor Greene in The Atlantic this month. And we're going to talk about that for most of the show. But I want to start with the big news from Josh Marshall's Talking Points memo last night. They got a hold of 2,000 or so of Mark Meadows' texts from in and around January 6th. And they published the first tranche of them last night. And what they did is the first tranche is all elected Republicans texting back

and forth with Mark Meadows. And I'm going to just lob a couple matzo balls up here for you, Elena, and you just take swings at them. November 5, Representative Mark Green of Tennessee, who is watching Newsmax, evidently, texts the chief of staff of the White House and says that Dick Morris is saying a state legislature can intervene and declare Trump the winner. On November 6th, the next day, Representative Brian Babin of Texas says, Mark, when we lose Trump, we lose our republic. Fight like hell and find a way. We're with you down here in Texas and refuse to live under a corrupt Marxist dictatorship. Liberty, Babin! He signs his name to

it, not understanding that the text also has his name at the top of it. We then have Representative Greg Murphy, who is reading stuff from Revolver, just copy-pasting and texting the chief of staff and saying, why aren't we doing this? And the best is Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina, who on January 17th, so this is 11 days after the insurrection, three days before Biden's inauguration, texts Mark Meadows and says, Mark, in seeing what's happening so quickly and reading about the Dominion lawsuits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation, we are at a point of no return in saving our republic, double exclamation point. Our last hope, all caps, is invoking Marshall Law, Marshall spelled like George Marshall or Thorogood Marshall or Marshall the College. Please urge our president to do so.

Elena, do you have thoughts? I do have thoughts. I mean, the first thing I would say is having been so enmeshed in Marjorie Taylor Greene's world for the past two months and kind of enduring the mental and emotional damage that has come with that. My first thought was, well, Marjorie Taylor Greene was the first one to recommend Mark Meadows calling for martial law, also spelled like George Marshall. So I just want to kind of make that clear that we don't steal her thunder a bit there, that she did do that first. No, in all seriousness, actually, Jonathan, I, so one, I'm also a huge fan of yours, have been reading you for a long time.

And I think it was either yesterday or the day before when you were talking about kind of Elon Musk's brand of conservatism, which is just sort of very reflexive, very hollow. There's no sort of really ideological anchor there. And that is my first reaction when I'm reading the TPM tranche of texts here, is that this is kind of what the Republican Party has become today, right? This is a group of elected officials, many of whom have been in office a long time. I don't know if you mentioned, I don't think you did just reading now, but if you actually go through those texts, I mean, one of the representatives who's kind of lobbying these

insane ideas at Mark Meadows is Chip Roy of Texas, who for a time was Ted Cruz's chief of staff, for a time was considered a quote-unquote reasonable Republican as far as they went on the more right side of the spectrum. But this has really come to engulf, I would say, a better part of the conference. And again, to your point about sort of Elon Musk, this is all just reflexive. They're watching Newsmax. They're watching those sorts of outlets and just throwing paint at the wall and seeing what hits. There's nothing, you know, principled or substantive that on Breitbart. I mean, for me, the biggest shock is that seeing big parts of the Republican establishment, it's not that they're not operating on the level of Bill Buckley, right? We do not often expect that. We don't often see

it. But they're not even operating on the level of like Tucker. Yes. You know, like this is much closer to gateway pundit. I was just like, wow, I don't know how much experience you've had with lawyers over the course of your life, but lawyers in general are the ones standing in the corner saying, no, you can't do that. Right. You know, the lawyer is always the guy or the gal saying, they're saying, nope, can't do that. No, if you do that, that's dangerous. You could have some exposure. And here we have elected officials, some of whom are lawyers. We have John Eastman and Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, all the legal team. And they were approaching the situation with the exact opposite sensibility,

not the hedging, risk-averse way, but is there any shred that we can find anywhere that'll allow us to justify taking this radical set of actions? I don't know. Maybe we shouldn't care. We should care. And the reason I say that is, I think somebody I've thought about often in the past couple of months is Steve King, the representative from Iowa, who, you know, kind of in the pre-Trump days and then into the first years of the Trump administration, Steve King was sort of considered by most Republicans that I would cover in the House GOP conference as the crazy one, right? The one who would spout off white nationalist talking points and whatnot. But everybody felt that they could safely ignore him because he was not an influential voice whatsoever within the conference. He was not raising a ton of money. He had been there for a long time, yes, but he was not this kind of committee chairman steering really important segments of the day-to-day life of Congress. But that's changed now when you do

have people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan, both of whom, you know, Jim Jordan will most likely be chairman of the Judiciary Committee next year. Marjorie Taylor Greene, should Kevin McCarthy become speaker, will probably have a seat on the oversight committee. I mean, the people who are sort of channeling the more conspiratorial wings of the party now actually have a voice, have influence, and are raising a ton of money because of it. And for that reason, they can't really safely be ignored anymore. Yeah. There are more of them and they have more popular support, right? I mean, that's the other thing. Like, Steve King, you know, had his people in his district supporting him, but that's it. These other people have, like, national

profiles, right? Right. I'm sure you saw that Brett Kavanaugh went to a holiday party over at Matt Schlapp's house. And Matt Schlapp is not the same as like AEI or the Heritage Foundation. Matt Schlapp is a guy who's on the ground in Arizona trying to overturn the election. And once upon a time, at the highest levels of like conservative intellectual elite, there would have been a sense that like, look, this guy is too much. And privately, I'm with him, but I can't hang out with him socially. And now that's gone. Like now it's Ginny Thomas all the way down, you know, and I don't know, this is we're gonna get more of this, I think, because we are now eight days away from getting the January 6th committee report. Do you have thoughts

about the January 6th committee? The last two things two things, and we're going to go to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Do you have thoughts about, just sort of global thoughts about the January 6th committee itself and whether it mattered? I think it's a great question. to the extent that it matters, whether, you know, the American public takes it seriously to the extent that it meaningfully changes the electoral map. And I guess I say that because I think that there were a lot of really optimistic takeaways from the midterm elections with people saying, you know, Americans have signaled that they're tired of the crazies, that the general electorate does care about democracy, is taking seriously the themes that are being introduced in something like the January 6th committee. My more pessimistic takeaway, though, is what we saw in the midterms this year is that nothing about the Republican primary voter has changed. It may be that independents and more centrist Republicans are happy to turn out during the general election and not vote for somebody like, say, Herschel Walker. But that is

not the case with the Republican primary voters. Every day you see a headline, I feel, that says something like Republicans have a Trump problem. Well, no, Republicans have a voter problem right now. And just because somebody like Carrie Lake or Blake Masters lost their elections in Arizona, I'm not convinced that the Republican primary voter is seeing that and seeing that as a reason to not vote for similar candidates in the next primary. And to tie that into the January 6th committee, I mean, I think in terms of who most Americans should want that committee to make an impression upon, I'm not sure the Republican primary voter who is the engine of the GOP right now is going to be, you know, meaningfully influenced by the report. So this is actually a great segue to

Marjorie Taylor Greene, because there is, on the one hand, history is contingent. And on the other hand, you can see Trump as a symptom, not a cause. But the specific case of Marjorie Taylor Greene, I think, makes all of that sort of muddled up. And I want to dig down and sort of get to that as we go. Every once in a while, we get a figure in conservative politics, like a National Review cover story on Michelle Bachman from back in the day in which the headline was Daughter of Liberty. It's a portrait of her like she's either Reagan or Washington. And the funniest bit of that, I don't know how close you looked at it, but the story was written by Bob Costa. Oh, wow. Yeah. Oh, I didn't notice that. Wow. Back in the day. And sometimes those figures burn real bright and then fade away, the way Michelle Bachman did, and Alan West in his own way. But sometimes they jump into

the mainstream, like Newt Gingrich. That's what Gingrich was, basically. And at the heart of everything we talk about with MTG, I want people to sort of keep that in their mind. You know, which of these pathways is she? And I want to start with some audio of Marjorie Taylor Greene at the New York Young Republican Gala, which can you imagine going to that if you didn't have to for your job? And it is theoretically not a place for insane people. This isn't like, you know, a Klan rally in Alabama. Then January 6th happens, and next thing you know,

I organize the whole thing along with Steve Bannon here. And I'm going to tell you something. If Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would have been armed. Yay! Yay! Not to mention, it would have been armed. Yeehaw, I guess. Yeah. I want to start at the macro and then we'll zoom into the micro. What does her future look like?

Her future insofar as House Republicans remain in power, I think is quite bright. I'm going to go back to something I mentioned briefly earlier, which is that Marjorie Taylor Greene raises a lot of money. She is not somebody like Steve King who Kevin McCarthy can safely ignore. She, within the first few months of being in the House GOP conference, was raising almost as much money as leadership, and she was not taking corporate PAC donations. The small dollar donors love Marjorie Taylor Greene. And I'm glad that you brought up, Jonathan, this idea that people kind of burn brightly in the party and then sort of fade out. And I think that does happen in the context of a national campaign. We saw that with somebody like Scott Walker or even Bobby Jindal. I mean, people whose names that you don't even really remember anymore.

But Marjorie Taylor Greene, as long as she stays a member of the House Republican Conference, I think her future is very bright in terms of the influence she will wield. I mean, Kevin McCarthy identified pretty early that if he wanted to secure the speakership, which by the way, I should say that this is the third time in my admittedly brief adult life that Kevin McCarthy has come on the cusp of the speakership and is still having issues kind of landing the plane. But should he actually do that? I mean, he's identified pretty early that Marjorie Taylor Greene is for him a crucial link to the outermost right flank

of the party. So as long as he's speaker, I don't see that changing in any meaningful way. She will be installed on the oversight committee, again, assuming he gets the gavel. And she's made very clear, and I take her very seriously when she says this, that she wants immediately to launch investigations into people like Hunter Biden, various cabinet secretaries. This is a woman who has filed, I think, no fewer than five impeachment resolutions against Joe Biden. So this is not somebody who kind of says what she needs to say to get elected and then sort of, you know, fades into the background to work on appropriations bills.

No, she will try to do all of these things as soon as the new Congress takes over in the new year. And again, as long as she doesn't kind of break out two years later and forego a reelection campaign to try, say, I don't know, to run as Donald Trump's running mate or something to that effect, I do think her future is quite stable and quite bright. I mean, there's a tension here, which is, to the base, she's Elvis. And to the Republican elites, they regard her as, at best, a dangerous fool. They don't like her. You know, Mitch McConnell, you have a great line for Mitch McConnell in your profile of her. I forget what it is off the top of my head.

As you said earlier, the Republican Party has a voter problem. And she doesn't need Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, but they need her. And so I don't think that dichotomy can last. I think eventually the elites will have to accept her. I just don't know that they have a choice. Well, and I think to a large degree, it's already happened. I would urge viewers to go find a clip at this moment, but I don't know if you saw Jonathan the other day during the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony for the Capitol Hill police officers who had kind of endured January 6th. And you have at the front of the room, all of congressional leadership, that is to say, you know, I think Speaker Nancy Pelosi was up there, Mitch McConnell was, Kevin McCarthy was,

Chuck Schumer was, and these police officers and their spouses are going down the line, shaking the hands of these leaders of Capitol Hill. And as soon as they get to Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell has his hand outstretched. They just totally ignore them, totally bypass them, do not even acknowledge really the existence of Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy. What I thought was interesting was that Kevin McCarthy didn't even put his hand out. It was as if he kind of knew they're not going to acknowledge me. But Mitch McConnell tried really hard to, I guess, express his appreciation or try and shake their hands, but was not successful. And there was something in his expression, Jonathan, that led me to think, how much longer is he going to endure this? I mean,

this is someone who, I mean, to be fair, as far as we know, has not had a conversation with Donald Trump since December 2020. He was not like Kevin McCarthy in that right after January 6th, he went down to Mar-a-Lago to break bread with him. At the same time, he is, for better or worse, lumped in with this group now because people like Kevin McCarthy do more so represent the heartbeat of the GOP. And just, again, the expression on Mitch McConnell's face, I mean, I just had to wonder, are these people thinking about their legacies at any point now? And, you know, what it will mean that they're not going to be remembered necessarily for the fact that they didn't have a conversation with Donald

Trump after January 6th. They'll be remembered for the fact that they were part of the Republican Party and had a position of leadership and perhaps were not more adamant about expunging this element from the party. I have to disagree. I think that their calculations are that legacy stuff doesn't matter. All that matters is power. And in the future, at the most, these guys get one line in Wikipedia anyway. And if you become Speaker of the House, then your one line in Wikipedia is that you're a former Speaker of the House and everything else gets airbrushed. I think the clearest way to read them is that

they've decided that power is what matters. And from there, I mean, if you want to give them the most charitable reading, then their view would be the reason they want power is because they want to enact policies which they think will help the common good. I don't agree with that, but that's probably the most charitable way of viewing it. So the big question your piece asks is, how does Marjorie Taylor Greene happen? And you went all the way back, you know, like so many of our populist heroes from the right, like Trump and Tucker and Elon Musk, she grew up rich. So could you give me just the, I don't know, the short version

of the backstory, just bring her up through into her adulthood? Because you also got a hand of her high school yearbook, which was amazing. And I loved all that stuff too. Yeah, absolutely. So Marjorie Taylor Greene grew up in Forsyth County, Georgia. That itself has an interesting backstory, which we can go into later. But basically, she grows up kind of in the northwest suburbs of Atlanta. Her dad owns a pretty successful construction business. And she's, you know, she has a lake house. She's never really known want necessarily.

And by all accounts, she's a pretty, you know, normal middle schooler, high schooler, part of things like the Spanish club and the soccer team. I mean, nothing to suggest the kind of person she's going to become. She goes off to the University of Georgia for four years, majors in business, meets her husband there, or I guess now soon to be ex-husband, but meets Perry Green there and sort of undertakes, and I say this as somebody from the South, you know, a pretty typical road for generally well-off white Southern women, which is, you know, going to the four-year college in your state, marrying the man that you start dating there, and then start having kids, become part of things like the Junior League and whatnot. I don't think that Marjorie Taylor Greene

was specifically part of the Junior League, but you catch my drift. They lived in Alpharetta. So again, staying in the suburbs of Atlanta, had sort of a McMansion by the third kid. They both work for the father's construction company. And it is by all accounts, just a very, very quintessentially normal American suburban life. You know, at a certain point, she kind of breaks and starts to feel that this business that she's been raised up to inherit is not actually all that interesting to her. She doesn't show up to work that much. She doesn't express, you know, much of a passion for it. By the time she turns 40, she has gone off in search of other things to anchor her and fulfill her.

You know, it's funny, as I'm reading your piece, I kept thinking to myself that this is basically the MAGA version of Eat, Pray, Love. Yes. It is a woman who is trapped in a life that just isn't working for her. She doesn't seem super into Mother Hillage. She doesn't seem to be super into her spouse. She sure doesn't like her professional life, but she doesn't know what else there is. And so she goes, you have a great phrase in this. Her life began to assume the dull cast of malaise. You could also read this as like a 1970s feminist tract too. Like, you know, what was the feminine mystique?

Was that the sort of the Betty Friedan version, but the dystopian version of Betty Friedan, where instead of becoming liberated, you become an authoritarian institution? That was in the deluxe version of the book. Yeah, yeah. And so she gets restless, and she tries on a bunch of things. And she starts with Jesus, and then gets into CrossFit, then gets into QAnon, and then finally MAGA. I just want to sort of hop through each of these parts of the journey, because I think they each tell us something about her. And the first is the Jesus stuff. So she is raised Catholic, which surprises me, just because it's the South. And you can go a

long way without finding a Catholic in the South. Yeah, absolutely. So she goes to this large non-denominational church and she gets baptized and then she sort of walks away from it. And you have a great line. Who was it who you talked to who, when you interviewed him, said, you know, Brad Raffensperger has been an active member of this church for a long time, but nobody ever asks me about him. That was an official from the church who I agreed to give anonymity to talk to me about Marjorie Taylor Greene's time at the church. But I'm so glad you brought up the Catholicism because that was pretty fascinating to me too. And because she would not talk to me for this story, I had a pretty, the one encounter I had with her when I

finally was able to find an event that she was at in Georgia, she yelled at me and called me a Democrat activist. And I asked her what she had read that I had written that had given her that impression. And I said, because that's troubling to me. If you've read my work and you think I'm a Democrat activist, I would really love to know what specifically gave you that sense. And she goes, well, I've read your stuff and you are a Democrat activist. And I said, no, Congresswoman, can you tell me specifically what has given you that impression? And she said, well, I can't just come up with something off the top of my head.

And it was just the most bizarre exchange. She's clearly never read anything I've written. And at first was angry at me that I was only then trying to come to talk to her, even though her communications team had basically told me politely to go screw yourself a million times, but then said that the reason they had said no was because they weren't interested in talking to me. So I don't know, it was all just very, very strange. But because of that, and you know, I've profiled a bunch of people, a lot of whom I have had that kind of access to, I did not have the chance to sort of ask her, tell me more about your upbringing and your Catholicism. And the only thing I can think, because like you said, it is pretty rare in the South for a family to be

devoutly Catholic. And her father was originally from Michigan. And I have wondered if he was raised Catholic and sort of brought it down with him to Georgia. But that's really the best sense I can get. Her logic, and she has said this in retrospect, was that once she became a mother, she couldn't countenance sort of all the scandals within the Catholic Church, especially with priests and, you know, altar boys and all of that. And so she really wanted to change denominations. And she finds this megachurch in Alpharetta, which to be clear, is a really wonderful church. It is steeped in the gospel.

The pastor, Andy Stanley, you know, I've read a lot of his work, really, really, I think, wonderful Christian teacher. And she gets baptized there in 2011, becomes really, really deeply involved in the church for three years, and then essentially drops off from there. And I think this becomes the start of a pattern, Jonathan, that we see with her life. She finds something and she clings to it really, really intensely. Like, oh, I finally found my anchor. I finally found the thing around which I can orient my identity. And then it's kind of like a shooting star. It just sort of, you know, fades out pretty quickly and she moves on to the next thing. So there's Christianity. And then it's kind of like a shooting star. It just sort of, you know, fades out pretty quickly. And she moves on to the next thing.

So there's Christianity. And then, as you said, she goes on to CrossFit. You know, in theology, they call people like this seekers, right? People who are moving. And you see, goodness knows, you see people who hop through like seven different religions in the course of their journey. It's because they're seekers, right? They're looking for new things. And when she moves from born-again Christianity to CrossFit, Christianity is about identity as much as it is about theology or spirituality. And there are some this, but reading your account of it, it sounds to me like it's the identity version of the Christianity which attracted her. And CrossFit can fill that same hole.

And I don't think people understand how into CrossFit she was. There were a lot of jokes about her in CrossFit when she first came to Washington. People goofed on her, but she was fully into the CrossFit cult, was she not? Oh, yes. And I do want to say something briefly before we go fully into CrossFit. I'm sorry, are you a CrossFit person? Oh my God, no, no, no. I'm calling it a cult, but I should be nice about it. No, no, but I am a Christian and I wanted to echo what you said about how identity is

a huge part of it because you are finding your identity as a son or daughter of Christ. The difference is the teaching is that that identity is supposed to be enough for you. And, you know, that is a perennial struggle of Christianity, you know, as fallen people. We do have trouble. We are not all like Paul who can find joy even when our circumstances are crumbling around us. But the idea is that our identity is supposed to be rooted so deeply into Christ

that we don't have to keep seeking in that way. But she, like so many other people, had trouble with that, but that path led her to CrossFit. And what it led to her doing is essentially, I think, supplanting the identity that she had found in this Christian community with the CrossFit community. And I don't think cult is too far off a way to describe something like CrossFit, because the people who get really into it, I mean, it does become their whole life. And you're right, she was not just sort of somebody who went to work out a few times a week and hang out with gym buddies on the weekends. I mean, at her peak, I think it was,

she was ranked 47th in the world in her age group among women. She was really, really intent on trying to compete, I think at what's called the CrossFit Games, which is sort of their Olympic version. The CrossFit Games? Yeah. She was at a very, very high level of this. And then she started her own gym. Yes. Like, I mean, this is what it is. When I say it was good, again, I have friends who do CrossFit.

I don't mean to cast aspersions on it. But her experience with CrossFit was not like she found a gym she really liked and went there every day. It was like she got into the CrossFit Games and then got so deep that she became an instructor and then decided she was going to open her own gym. That's a lot. That's a whole lifestyle. Exactly. It's a lifestyle.

It's not something you have in addition to the other things going on in your life, right? You know, it's not the hobby that you do when you get off at work at 5 p.m. or before you go in at 7am or whatever. This was an everyday all-encompassing thing for her. It was her, all of her friendships basically at that time were born out of CrossFit. Her community really was anchored in that gym. And because of that, basically every trial and tribulation she went through in her life at that period of time was filtered through CrossFit. So I just want to make clear to listeners that this is not just

you going to walk on the treadmill to watch Stranger Things. I mean, this is who she is. It's amazing. And this is, I don't want to spend too much time on this. This is where her marriage starts to break up. There are plenty of reasons to look down on Marjorie Taylor Greene. I don't want to do that. So it's as she is exiting this CrossFit moment that she begins to ask herself, why not me? And we know this because she had a blog. Of course she had a blog. And he went and found her old blog.

And it really does sound like she was journaling self-discovery in a very earnest and open way. Yeah. So the premise of this blog I discovered was that in preparation for the CrossFit Games or in trying to qualify for the games, she had hired a coach. And this coach had her start this blog. It was public, but it was sort of just for him to sort of review each week. He would give her workouts to do that week and kind of like a diet and things like that. And she would journal basically how it had gone for her, how, what her experience was like with each workout, how each diet worked for her and things like that. But as the posts go on, she starts to get more into kind of her circumstances more broadly. She gets much more personal and diaristic about

what's going on with her life. And the quote you pulled was really striking to me because that was from a post when I think she had had a pretty hard day of workouts where, you know, she was not quite meeting the times and the pace that she wanted. And she's struggling with these negative thoughts that she says she keeps having. And she said, but confidence is something I've always struggled in. And I finally decided to start saying, why not me? And by this, she means, you know, why can't I be the one who is number one and who goes out there and gets it? And I think keeping that quote in mind was very instructive for me as a reporter as I started going through the subsequent stages of her life, including QAnon for sure.

Then we get into the QAnon stuff. How does that happen? How did she first start bumping up against that? I mean, it seems like she had this sort of personality type that was open to conspiracies this podcast, because we do, you know, have more time than I do on a cable news hit, which is that there's a reason why midlife crisis is a cliche, right? You know, every human being is like kind of, you know, looking for the thing to give them purpose. And Marjorie Taylor Greene was no different from any other human being in that respect. But this is what I think decades from now, in retrospect, we will look back at this time and see the advent of something like QAnon as, a much more kind of widespread hub for conspiratorial thinking that's being accepted, by the way, in the mainstream by the soon-to-be president of the United States. It shouldn't surprise us at all that so many people fall prey to it. A big reason for that is because the way that most people find it

and the way that Marjorie Taylor Greene found it was through Facebook. Oh God, of course. Yeah. So based on my reporting and people who were close to her at the time and interacted with her on Facebook at the time, the Save the Children hashtag was very influential for her. And the Save the Children, for people who might not remember, was this idea that it's kind of the core of QAnon, which is the idea that the world is controlled by a satanic cabal of pedophiles, or the Rothschilds, and George Soros. And Hillary Clinton with her frazzled rip.

Right, exactly. And the idea that companies like Wayfair are sex trafficking children and rolling them up in their rugs. And, you know, that is sort of the heart of it. And that's what things like Pizzagate roll out of. But basically she clicks on that hashtag and the way I envisioned it as I was reporting, it was almost as though like a portal opened for her

and she just stepped through and her world was never the same after that. This gets us to that question that I said at the very top. Is Trump a symptom or a cause? And, you know, in general, my view is tended to be that he's a symptom. You know, Trump doesn't happen unless the culture is already a certain way. But, you know, as with everything in life, with these dualities, the answer is both. And if you look at Trumpism as a third Great Awakening, only, again, like a dystopian version of the Great Awakenings, I don't know that Marjorie Taylor Greene gets radicalized fully and fully activated without him. I think that's absolutely right. Because, again, to this thing we've been talking about over and over, nothing really about the broad contours of QAnon, which is to say conspiratorial thinking or, you know, beyond that racism and anti-Semitism, none of that is new in this country. I think what happens in 2016 and then into his presidency is that people who are sympathetic with those viewpoints finally have, you know, the leader of the free world to attach those views to

and say, oh, wow, I actually have a president of the United States who is affirming every single thing I believe. And it's important, I think, to reckon with the power of that for supporters of his and how it emboldens people to double down on those beliefs and not shy away from them in, say, this idea that, you know, well, I'll just kind of play on my computer at home, but in polite society, I will spurn these ideas. When the leader of the free world is a vehicle for the things you already believe, you no longer feel a need to do that anymore. You write in your post that she welds power much like Donald Trump, doing or saying the

unthinkable because she knows that most of her colleagues wouldn't dare jeopardize their own future to stop her. And my theory, and I'm interested to hear what you make of this, is that part of the reason she has such power with the bass is because she really is authentic. That she's not, I mean, you know, like Ted Cruz, God love him, doesn't believe any of this stuff, but he goes out and will do it, you know, to the moon. And people smell that. You know, like they can smell a Ted Cruz. They can even smell, I think, to a certain degree, a Ron DeSantis. But with Marjorie Taylor Greene, I would not say that she is imitating Trump's style. I would say that she simply has the same makeup. Like that's sort of who she is. Agree or no? And I think even better than Ted Cruz as an example for comparison, think about somebody like Senator Josh Hawley.

Put the two of them side by side. Senator Josh Hawley is somebody who graduated from Yale Law, who is kind of this self-fashioned intellectual and recognizes that the kind of QAnon version of the party is here to stay and tries to play into that. Compare the way that he interacts with voters and the way he sounds and his affect on stage with somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and there's no comparison, essentially. Marjorie Taylor Greene is really the real deal. When she's campaigning for the first time in 2019 in her Georgia primary in the 14th district

there, nothing that she's saying is contrived or coming from a place of working with multiple focus groups and seeing what tests well with Trump's base. It's just actually who she is, and it's a huge part of the reason why she resonates the way she does. Yeah, it's very powerful stuff. But on the other hand, I do wonder, like, how does she achieve escape velocity? Because it is one thing to win a district in Georgia, and it's another thing to win statewide. And, you know, Georgia has a reasonably powerful business establishment in place in the Republican circles, which is why Brian Kemp was able to survive and hang on. Like, where does she go next? Does she go right to Trump 2024 running

mate? Does she, if Trump decides to go third party, does she go with him? What is her sort of next step? I don't see a future for her right now outside of the House. I mean, the minute she decides that she wants to flirt with statewide office or the Senate, I don't for the moment see that happening. I mean, Herschel Walker, for all his flaws, was shrewd enough or was able to listen to his campaign to the extent that he didn't want her campaigning with him. And she actually said recently to Steve Bannon how insulted she was by that. But, you know, even his team and for all the things that he said that we might classify as, you know, just totally off the wall, he did not want her anywhere near him. So right now,

she does not have a future in that sense. But rather than getting caught up in what her next step is and why she can't go anywhere, I think it's more appropriate just to focus on in her lane right now, she can go as far as she wants. That is to say, on powerful committees, wielding levers of power, which do exist in the House of Representatives, and what sort of damage she can do from that. I think one point I'd want to note, which I don't think that most people know, is that actually her chief of staff is, you know, a former top official for Tom DeLay. And I say that to say that she's shrewd enough to know that she doesn't want to just be a talking head on Steve Bannon's war room or on Fox News or anything like that. She actually wants to accomplish things.

And she has tried to pull in a staff who, you know, know the geography of Congress such that she can accomplish those things. And I think that's what matters and what should be focused on right now. So that sets her apart from a guy like Matt Gaetz, right? I mean, Matt Gaetz is basically headed towards having a show on OAN someday, but she has figured out that she can't run for Senator governor, but that she can weld power within the house if she works real hard at it. And that's interesting because she does seem to combine two very powerful things. The first of which is that she is, as you say,

comfortable in her own skin, which is like the most powerful political attribute any candidate can have. You know, whether what you are is good or bad, being totally comfortable with it is really powerful. But as you say, she's also more cunning than you would think for somebody who, you know, is just like a CrossFit weirdo. Absolutely. I mean, she really is in many ways a competent person. I think a good example is, I was actually surprised by how many people didn't realize this before they read my story and reached out to me. She is not from Georgia's 14th district. She, of course, is from the suburbs of Atlanta, which is Georgia's 6th district. And she had initially filed to run in the Republican primary

against Karen Handel in that district. But the team that she had around her pretty quickly disabused her of the notion basically that she had a great shot there if she wanted to keep up all of her QAnon posts and everything like that. Because of course, a general consultant for a campaign has their own internal oppo teams to kind of poke holes in their own candidate to see what they could be vulnerable on. So it wasn't a surprise to people around her that she did have all of these crazy Facebook posts and things like that. She was just adamant that she was not going to delete them. And what she did was instead of sort of reshaping herself to fit what a suburban, you know, leaning left voter in the suburbs of Atlanta would want,

she simply found another district where that brand would fit better. That's so interesting. It's such a great piece. Everybody should go to The Atlantic and read it if you haven't. We'll put a link in the show notes for it. I would like to spend a couple minutes now, just because I have you here, and I love having writer talk whenever I get a chance to bring a great writer in. I said this to you when we were in the green room before it came on. I love you, but I also kind of hate you because you are too good at writing too young. You and Olivia Nuzzi, you're the two people I sit there like, you know, jabbing needles into my voodoo dolls with because you guys are just so

good so young. And I assume that you just wanted to be a writer all your life. Is that true? Yeah, it is. In no small part, because it was the only thing I was kind of good at. I'm very bad at math. On the AP biology exam for one of the essay questions, I drew a ham turkey. That was just not going to be my future in any way. You are destroying my spirit. I'm so sorry. My mom read to me a lot from a young age. She was a stay-at-home mom, and all we did was read. And I did always want to be a writer. I didn't know what kind, but I just liked writing. And when I got to college, I went to Yale, and there was a journalism program there that

I was able to take a class in, and I just fell in love with it. And I specifically fell in love with profiling people. I mean, I just loved getting to know the stories of others. So I would say that that was what it kind of all spun out of. Your profiles are so good. But as they say in baseball, you hit to all fields with power. You can do reporting. You can do explainers.

You did a great profile of my old friend Tucker three months ago, two months ago. Just this week, you did a piece on the Russian hostage, Paul Whelan. What do you look for when you're hunting for a story? What are you looking for that makes you think, yeah, I can get in there and find something? I like to say that the stories that interest me are more politics adjacent than actually about politics. One of my favorite pieces I've ever done is a profile of Heidi Cruz. And that is, of course, about politics. She's the wife of Ted Cruz, who, you know, is as much a mascot of American politics as anyone. But what that piece was really about

was about marriage and womanhood and what it means to be a really successful person in your own right, but then see yourself in society kind of identified just as the wife of somebody else and how you grapple with that internally. So I would say that the premise for a lot of my pieces do start with politics, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, as a political figure. But I wasn't really interested in the machinations of what she's going to do when she gets power as much as I was culturally, how do we explain this person? How do we chart the rise of somebody like this? And that's what gets me more excited than just the daily kind of blow by blow of what's happening on the appropriations committee or

something like that. Yeah, the best politics pieces are never about politics. Right, I totally agree. Who are your writing heroes? I gave you this question before we got on because I didn't want to put you on the spot with it. Because whenever I'm asked this, I always go like, uh, uh, uh. So who are your heroes? You know, Jonathan, I would say that most of my heroes are fiction writers. In my spare time, I mostly read fiction. Fascinating.

Tell me more. Probably right now, my hero far and away is Elizabeth Strout. She wrote Olive Kitteridge that won the Pulitzer several years ago. But she just writes in a style that I'm always trying to emulate, which is very, very spare, never saccharine or indulgent. And I love that about her writing just at a pure sentence level. But what I love about her books, and I encourage everyone to read them because you'll read them in a day, is that they are about the most ordinary people you can imagine. They are not plot driven to the extent of there's a really identifiable narrative arc from beginning to end with a

climax in the middle and all of that. She just writes about people that she comes up with and their very ordinary lives. And the fact that she can make them so enthralling and have her prose just have me not being able to go to sleep at night because I can't stop thinking about it is everything I would hope to accomplish in my own writing. Do you dabble in fiction yourself? No, I think I'd be so bad if I tried to write a novel. Really? Yeah. Why not try? I feel the same way. People have asked me, like, oh, could you do a novel? And I just think to myself, that makes me clench up in terror. How would I do that?

No, it does make me clench up in terror. I don't think I could do it. But at the same time, it's like, look around us. Why would you need to try to make up something right now? I mean, it's just all for the taking with the insanity we have to write about right now that's real. All right. So last question. So Jeff Goldberg has basically turned the Atlantic into the 1927 Yankees.

It's like you and Tim Alberta, both of the Applebaums, Annie and Yoni, Caitlin Flanagan, Mark Leibovich, David Fromm, George Packer, Jen Senior. God, Jen Senior is so good. What is it like to be part of a storied magazine as it is having a new golden age? I'm just a magazine lover. Me too. When I have nothing to do, I'll just go and grab something at random from the New Yorker archives to read. And the romance of magazine life, to be at a place like the Atlantic is just amazing, period. Even if you're there during a fallow period. But to be there when things are

so good as they are right now, what is it like? For one, I mean, it's awe-inspiring, yes, but it's also very intimidating because you just have these legends in the making around you, like Jen Senior, like Mark Glebovich, and you just hope that with every piece you write personally, that you're not chipping away at kind of the aura that they've already created at the Atlantic and in some ways adding to it. I would say that the best thing about it is that you always feel like you're learning from your colleagues. And I love that so much. Mark and I went and grabbed a drink yesterday or the other day after doing a podcast. And I can feel like just in a 15-minute conversation with him, I learned so much about

writing and reporting. And to have that with colleagues that you also genuinely love as people is really, really special. That's awesome. Well, it's another reason I can hate you. Elena, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down and talk with us. Thanks for being such a great writer and practicing your craft with so much care. Elena Plot Calabro, I hope I got it right. You did. Staff writer of The Atlantic and just one of my favorite writers. Thanks for being with us on the Bulwark Podcast. I'm JBL in for Charlie Sykes. We'll be back again tomorrow and we'll do this all over again.