Marjorie Taylor Greene Makes Her Move
It's a pivot to the mainstream. Just don't look too close.
Welcome to The Flashpoint, and Happy New Year!
Before we get to today’s commentary, on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s rebrand and future goals, I wanted to give an update. As you know, I’m being sued over the content of my book on tech billionaires and the media by one of the subjects, Matt Taibbi.
I’ve been asked about how people can support me at this moment.
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Thanks! With that out of the way, on to MTG.
Don’t get fooled again
Marjorie Taylor Greene is leaving Congress on Monday, the end of a five-year career in the chamber marked by controversy and far-right extremism. What’s next?
I think she’s going to try to run for president in 2028, and her moves to soften her image for a more mainstream audience are in service of that effort.
Making moves
After Greene publicly broke with President Donald Trump over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, some centrist and liberal media institutions have begun to present the Georgia Republican as a more reasonable representative of the MAGA movement.
She gave something of a mea culpa to CNN in November as part of a media blitz rewriting her public image.
The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger noted that Greene is making a calculation by taking on the president, because “if Trump continues to falter, the power vacuum he will begin to create will be gargantuan. Plainly, Greene senses the opportunity to put herself forward as the leader of a possible successor faction. Well, so far so good for her.”
Greene’s always been savvy. As I wrote at The Intercept earlier this month:
This crossover appeal can pay off, and it’s one tactic for conservatives, jaded by Trump, looking for a way to appeal to the broader public. Greene appeared on “The View,” the A+ daytime women’s talk show, where she called for decency in discourse, got the liberal crowd to applaud her, and prompted co-host Sunny Hostin to marvel at horseshoe theory: “I’m sitting here just stumped, because you are a very different person than I thought. You’ve gone so right, it’s like you’re on the left now.”
The New York Times, which profiled Greene days after Christmas, presented her in a somewhat flattering light, a sign of how the MAGA superstar is beginning to broaden her appeal and be taken seriously rather than as a crank.
That’s not to say that the story was wrong about her.
“Greene did harbor a genuine conspiratorial streak, often even wondering if this or that person wore a wire,” Robert Draper wrote. “But she was also becoming an increasingly shrewd and acerbic observer of life on Capitol Hill.”
Under the surface
With the caveat that 2028 is a long way away, and a lot could change, it’s hard to look at Greene’s attempt at respectability and moderation as anything other than an attempt to rebrand ahead of loftier goals than state office or Congress.
The reality is a little more complex, of course. Greene hasn’t moderated in anything of substance; to the extent she’s “changed,” it’s purely superficial.
Me at The Intercept again:
Despite laundering her reputation on certain issues for liberals, Greene has stayed true to her core principles of demonizing immigrants and maintaining a virulent anti-trans position, just last week introducing legislation to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors. The moderate pivot to addressing a general audience isn’t a wholesale reversal of her previous positions. She’s still America First but feels Trump has lost his way; she’s still a Christian nationalist, but believes Trump is not serving that purpose anymore.
We’ll see what happens. Greene is a smart politician and there’s exactly zero chance she fades away. But where she goes from here—and how much success she has in whatever path she takes—remains an open question.