Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene seems to be craving more attention than usual. The Georgia congresswoman recently caused a stir during a House Oversight Committee meeting when she mocked her Democratic colleague Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s eyelashes (naturally, the episode went viral). A few days later, Greene followed up with even more insanity by claiming to know about a deep state plot to assassinate Donald Trump.
“The Biden DOJ and FBI planned and gave the green light to assassinate President Trump. Does everyone get it yet???!!!,” she posted to X. “What are the Republicans going to do about this?”
Well, nothing. Because that’s not true. Greene was just spreading a wild conspiracy theory by dishing out new details about the government’s 2022 effort to retrieve the trove of documents Trump has stored at Mar-a-Lago. In other words, the usual MTG shenanigans.
However, after Greene’s failed bid to unseat House Speaker Mike Johnson, her carnival-crazy clown act seems to have been reduced to a sad clown party. Not long ago, people were talking about the MAGA extremist as the shadow speaker, the woman who scares the party leader. For weeks this spring, reporters flocked to her like flies to honey over her threats against Johnson. But now? Even MAGA-friendly conservatives seem tired of her.
Now in her third year in Congress, Greene is at something of a defining moment: Does she want to remain a bomb-throwing, radical troll on the House floor, or does she want to be something more? Thinking about this, I called Newt Gingrich, the Georgia conservative who once made a big move in this direction. The former Speaker of the House offered some astute comments about Greene’s future path.
She’s like the cranky cousin who comes over to Thanksgiving dinner, Mr. Gingrich said: “She’s cute while you’re eating your salad, then she starts getting cranky, and by dessert you want to kick her out.”
At first glance, Greene seems immune to ridicule, isolation and failure. After all, she comes from an ultra-MAGA district and has risen to national prominence as one of Congress’s crudest disruptive monkeys. But there are signs she wants to be something more than a family that everyone else rolls their eyes at. The question is whether she has the focus, or the ability, to get there.
Politicians like the Tea Party, the Squad, and Gingrich’s Republican revolutionaries have all descended on Washington as reformist outsiders vowing to upend one system or another. For many of these dissidents, a big part of the job is to be a thorn in the butt of their own party, especially its leaders. Think of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s early feud with then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or Mark Meadows’ leading role in ousting Speaker John Boehner from Congress.
As senators become more comfortable, they come to realize that lawmaking is a collaborative effort. To get things done and accumulate real impact, they need to learn to work productively, if not always happily, with teammates and sometimes with members of the opposing team. Smart senators figure out how to do this without abandoning their values ​​or tarnishing their brands. (See AOC.) Some even evolve into super-insiders. (Raise your hand if you remember Boehner’s early days as a reformer.)
Meanwhile, others are running in the opposite direction, embracing the politics of chaos and anger for chaos’ sake – the preferred path of many MAGA followers, and Greene seems hell-bent on outrunning them all.
As the architect of Republican control of Congress in 1994, Gingrich famously rose from a loudmouth congressman to powerful speaker, and is widely blamed for turning Congress into the hyper-partisan dysfunctional cesspool it is today, before ultimately being brought down by political excess and personal scandal (but that’s another story). Gingrich knew how to play the game, and he had some ideas about what his Georgian compatriot could do to become a serious player.
“She needs to focus on solutions, not problems,” he suggested. “She needs to decide she is part of a larger group above her own ego and learn to be patient enough to play team sports.” Or, more succinctly, “She needs to slow down, calm down, find the positives, and learn how to be part of a team.”
For a few minutes last summer, Greene seemed to be exploring a different path. She worked with then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy and even pitted herself against the far-right Freedom Caucus. She was cozying up to lobbyists and donors, even negotiating bills. “Well, that’s what we do. We negotiate,” she told reporters after voting for the annual defense bill she had voted against the day before. “This just moves a bill that has a lot of good points to the next stage, where I can actually have a bigger say in it.” The Washington Post called her “the ultimate Washington insider.” It was as if she’d been replaced by a pod of people who didn’t care about legislation.
But then, like McCarthy’s leadership, Greene’s pragmatic and productive period faded quickly, and in recent days she has reverted to being downright eccentric and destructive.
“She doesn’t seem to have the patience to have any staying power,” Gingrich told me. “She goes down a path, then she starts to back away” – back to the “easy path” that guarantees her attention and campaign funds. If you do this enough times, he warned, “people will decide that’s a pattern. Then people will get really sick of your nonsense, and you’ll become more and more alienated. If it’s real power that she wants, she’s not going to get it this way.”
Of course, Greene doesn’t need to change anything to keep her seat. If her goal is to “become a symbol of the far right wing of the party” and “not become isolated and ineffective and ultimately become someone that everyone holds up as a role model,” she seems to be doing pretty well, Gingrich noted. “That’s what will get her going for a long time.”
Maybe, but God help the rest of us.
