More MAGA Than Trump

Marjorie Taylor Greene finds her independent streak

Last week, the co-hosts of The View had their views radically reframed. So did CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. The occasion was a rare moment of agreement with perennial bogeywoman and MAGA firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Resembling someone celebrating the medieval tradition of the Feast of Fools, where for a short time normal social rules are suspended and the world flips upside down, Blitzer said to the congresswoman, “You’re a courageous politician, but more important, a loving mother.” Joy Behar said, “I feel like I wanna have laser treatment with her.” And a stunned Whoopi Goldberg asked, “What the hell is goin’ on?”

The spectacle followed Greene’s unexpected announcement that she would not be “towing [sic] the party line” in the shutdown debate about extending Biden-era health care subsidies. Instead of referring to the “Schumer shutdown” like her Republican colleagues, the congresswoman aimed her fire at her own side of the aisle: “Not a single Republican in leadership… has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!” Describing it as “absolutely shameful, disgusting, and traitorous, that our laws and policies screw the American people so much that the government is shut down right now fighting over basic issues like this,” she declared, “Our country… never does anything to help the American people!!!”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene

Greene’s independent streak is not new. In recent months, she has dissented from the president on a number of high-profile issues where she perceives him as deviating from what the MAGA base wants. But her moves don’t herald moderation or bipartisanship. Rather, they suggest that her politics flow from the MAGA movement, not its leader, and that she is nobody’s lackey — not even the president’s.

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Before the debate on insurance subsidies, Greene’s most public split with the White House was over the Epstein files. The president campaigned on releasing them but seemed to change his mind after Attorney General Pam Bondi informed him that his name appeared in them. Greene’s position never changed, and in September — aligned no longer with Trump but rather with the MAGA base — she backed a procedural move to force a House vote on releasing the files, even amid threats from an administration official that doing so would be viewed as a “hostile act.”

Speaking to The Hill about the White House’s pressure campaign against releasing the files, Greene said she was “shocked by it,” adding, “I think when it comes to women being raped, especially when they were 14 years old, it’s pretty black and white.” She told Trump’s team, “You didn’t get me elected. I do not work for you; I work for my district.”

Greene has also broken with Trump on foreign policy. Earlier in the summer, she condemned the administration’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities and asked why the country was “getting involved in a hot war that Israel started.” Disagreeing with Trump in this way, she said, was not “disloyalty” because “critical thinking and having my own opinions is the most American thing ever” and because she and Trump were both elected by America First voters to whom they’d promised “no more foreign wars” and “no more regime change.”

In other words, the congresswoman didn’t think she was turning on Trump. Rather, she believed it was Trump who was turning on MAGA in these instances.

And as younger MAGA voters became skeptical of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza, so too did Greene. This summer — while President Trump denied that Israel’s military campaign amounted to genocide — Greene became the only Republican in Congress to describe it with that word. On X she wrote, “Oct. 7 in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.”

When the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israeli lobbying group, accused Greene of spreading un-American, anti-Israel smears, Greene doubled down on the America First attitude. She shot back, “The REALITY is AIPAC 1,000,000% serves and lobbies for a foreign country, Israel!! I’m as AMERICAN as they come! I can’t be bought and I’m not backing down!! I’m fighting for my children’s generation and for AMERICA ONLY!!!! Bring. It. On.”

Trump has reportedly been dumbfounded by MTG’s stances. According to reporting by NBC, he started calling senior GOP officials to ask, “What’s going on with Marjorie?”

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In a more politically normal time, it wouldn’t be shocking for an elected representative to occasionally cross party lines — Sen. John McCain made a career of it. But in a moment when loyalty — not to policy or even party, but to the president — is the GOP’s litmus test, Greene’s defections garner outsized attention and leave Democrats hoping against hope for a crack in the president’s firewall.

But Greene’s maverick streak is different from McCain’s, aiming toward right-wing populism more than moderate bipartisanship. That’s true even of her support for extending health care subsidies. In the same post, Greene advised Republicans to abandon the Senate filibuster in order to force the government to reopen. She vowed not to “vote for illegals to have any tax payer funded healthcare or benefits.” And she told her followers, “You don’t HATE your government enough.”

Greene undoubtedly knows that Affordable Care Act subsidies are supported by a majority of the voters who propel the MAGA movement. According to a recent KFF poll, 78% of Americans favor extending the credits for purchasing health insurance through the ACA marketplace, including 59% of Republicans and 57% of those who claim alignment with the MAGA movement.

There’s reason to believe those numbers are even higher in Greene’s district, a poor and rural area of Georgia where the subsidies have in recent years led to increased ACA enrollment. Nationwide, enrollment has more than doubled since enhanced subsidies (in the form of tax credits) were made available as part of the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act.

Regardless of her views on health care premiums, Greene remains a MAGA culture warrior and conspiracy theorist to her core.

The day before deviating from Trump over the subsidies, she asked Congress to make English the official language in response to Bad Bunny’s advice that Americans learn Spanish ahead of his Super Bowl halftime show. In the days since, she has posted on X about discovering Antifa activists in January 6 footage and requesting that FBI Director Kash Patel locate them. And throughout, she has asserted that elites use geoengineering to control the weather. In other words, she’s still the onetime QAnon follower who suggested that wealthy Jewish families were using space lasers to start wildfires in California.

So while it may be a pleasant dream for those watching The View or Wolf Blitzer to imagine Greene moving toward the center, the reality is that she views herself as the vanguard of MAGA, even if that means leaving Trump behind.

Joy Behar may have to cancel that laser treatment.