Marjorie Taylor Gone
MTG is gone, at least temporarily, while she regroups for the next round of bizarre and crazy. It’s the kind of thing we have come to expect: floridly awful Republican officeholders who never really exit the stage. It took years for Sarah Palin to fade, rocking tight leather jackets all the way down. It was a bad decision on the part of her campaign, but the jackets communicated a certain mediagenic toughness. The hapless George Santos is already back, pardoned by his troll master and repositioned in the party. My guess is that he will succeed Cash Patel if for no other reason than he is a champion grifter. Would he ask an FBI agent to do an errand for his lover? There isn’t even the shadow of a doubt.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is somehow different. She’s independently wealthy, so she doesn’t need the grift, and her personal life seems to be remarkably steady. Her offense is rather the nature of her politics. The sign outside her office proclaims her loathing for trans folk, as if they were somehow a danger to the Republic. This isn’t just a quirk; it’s how she meets her public. She aligned herself loudly with the January 6 traitors and trained her fire on a duly elected president, braying her disapproval during his last State-of-the-Union. Joe Biden clearly saw it coming, but it could not have been a welcome interruption.
My personal favorite was her war against the Jews. She actually announced that the world was in danger thanks to nefarious Jewish space lasers mounted by the Rothschilds. I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say this is one for the ages, a conspiracy theory to rival the very worst. A generation from now, people will still be talking about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Rothschild Space Laser Plot Against America. If Q-Anon still exists, MTG is being prepped for sainthood.
But maybe—just maybe—there is more to this story, just as there seems to be more about MTG. She is clearly capable of enormous loyalty, especially to the Sun King who raised her to prominence. Despite her earlier misgivings about Trump worship, she dressed herself in the school colors of MAGA and displayed a reckless courage in advocating for Dear Leader.
But then she had a change of heart, discarding her career with a kind of thrilling abandon. The turning point seems to have been Charlie Kirk’s assassination, when she heard Donald Trump say that he hated his enemies. It was wrong, she said, a repudiation of Jesus and the forgiveness she sees at the heart of Christianity. But it came together with other disappointments: her party’s callous lack of commitment to health care, Trump’s tariff policies and their impact on businesa, along with his avaricious embrace of cryptocurrency and AI.
But the top of the list was the Epstein Files. I wouldn’t have taken MTG for a feminist, but she has what we would call in Oklahoma a heart for young women. Like many members of the MAGA camp, she latched onto the Epstein scandal as a defining example of the way underage women have been manhandled by elite men. And when Trump abruptly switched sides on the issue, flipping from advocate for political transparency, to the grubby incarnation of Jabba the Hut, she threw her MAGA medals into the Potomac. Donald Trump will never forgive her.
But I have personally opened a space in my heart. There are ideologues who go to their graves as fanatics and others who remain available to reconsideration. Will Marjorie Taylor Greene come back as a Democrat? I’m certain the answer is no to that one. She’s as likely to alter her fundamental commitments as I am to go door-knocking for J.D. Vance. But there seems to be something alive in her soul: a radical willingness to recalibrate her commitments in the face of obvious and calculated wrongdoing. I’ll be watching closely for further developments, but if MTG repudiates space lasers, I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.