A Change of Mind

Lotta MTG hate out there.

But there’s a lot to pay attention to in the NYT profile of Marjorie Taylor Greene. I did not say “you gotta hand it to her.” I did not say that I am now a fan. I did not say that I agree with all her politics. (I don’t.)I agree that the profile left out a lot of stuff her anti-fans would like to see. But let’s see what the profile does say.

Overall, it’s an awakening narrative. It says right up at the top, ‘I Was Just So Naïve,’ and that’s the story she wants to get out. It’s appealing and useful if she decides to get back into politics. It seems to me that it is mostly genuine, with the embellishment that any human might put on such a narrative. At least, I see no obvious warning signs that it isn’t. She actually says she was wrong about a number of things, including the politics of resentment.

She had increasingly taken stands apart from the president and the Republican Party: declaring the war in Gaza a “genocide”; objecting to cryptocurrency and artificial-intelligence policies that, from her perspective, prioritized billionaire donors over working-class Americans; criticizing the Trump administration for approving foreign student visas, for enacting tariffs that hurt businesses in her district and for allowing Obamacare subsidies to expire.

What has most led to her breach with Donald Trump is her support for releasing the Epstein documents.

“The Epstein files represent everything wrong with Washington,” Greene told me in December. “Rich, powerful elites doing horrible things and getting away with it. And the women are the victims.”

She is calling out the contradictions between Trump’s campaign promises and his actions in office. In response, Trump has attacked her in social media posts, and his followers have sent death threats. She is open about this, unlike the genteel Lisa Murkowski, for example, who is only willing to hint at it.

She is critical of Mar-a-Lago body

“I never liked the MAGA Mar-a-Lago sexualization. I believe how women in leadership present themselves sends a message to younger women.” She continued: “I have two daughters, and I’ve always been uncomfortable with how those women puff up their lips and enlarge their breasts. I’ve never spoken about it publicly, but I’ve been planning to.”

And she has supported the women Jeffrey Epstein abused.

After the hearing, Greene held a news conference at which she threatened to identify some of the men who had abused the women. (Greene says that she didn’t know those names herself but that she could have gotten them from the victims.) Trump called Greene to voice his displeasure. Greene was in her Capitol Hill office, and according to a staff member, everyone in the suite of rooms could hear him yelling at her as she listened to him on speakerphone. Greene says she expressed her perplexity over his intransigence. According to Greene, Trump replied, “My friends will get hurt.”

When she urged Trump to invite some of Epstein’s female victims to the Oval Office, she says, he angrily informed her that they had done nothing to merit the honor. It would be the last conversation Greene and Trump would ever have.

Rather than back down, Greene did something she had never done before as a congresswoman: She teamed up with a Democrat, Representative Ro Khanna of California, as well as the Republican maverick Thomas Massie, on a legislative maneuver that would compel the Justice Department to release all documents pertaining to Epstein. To say that Khanna — a progressive Democrat who had joined his colleagues four years earlier in voting to strip Greene of her committee assignments — did not regard Greene as a natural ally was an understatement.

She is also critical of Speaker Mike Johnson’s shutting down the House of Representatives at Trump’s behest.

The whole story reads like that of a person who started out critical of an organization in a highly oversimplified way and found something different when she actually did the work.

It’s something to think about. I am not advocating making her an ally, although that might be the case on some issues, like impeachment. You can still be suspicious of her and watch carefully. But every former Trumpie makes it easier for others to defect. Let’s encourage that.