Greene, Straying From Trump, Reflects an Emerging MAGA Split

 

Greene, Straying From Trump, Reflects an Emerging MAGA Split

 

The right-wing Republican congresswoman from Georgia has grown disillusioned with her own party and with President Trump, and increasingly willing to say so.

 

Annie Karni

By Annie Karni

Annie Karni, who covers Congress, interviewed Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene in her office on Capitol Hill.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/us/politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-maga-split.html

Sept. 28, 2025

 

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the right-wing Republican from Georgia, did not appreciate being threatened by the White House over her backing for a bill ordering the release of the Epstein files.

 

So after a Trump official put out word that doing so would be viewed as a “very hostile act,” she called a top West Wing aide to push back.

 

“I told them, ‘You didn’t get me elected. I do not work for you; I work for my district,’” she recounted recently during a wide-ranging interview in her office on Capitol Hill. “We aren’t supposed to just be whipped on our votes because they’re telling us what to do with this scary threat, or saying ‘We’ll primary you,’ or that we won’t get invited to the White House events.”

 

“Me personally? I don’t care,” Ms. Greene went on. These days, when she encounters tactics like that from Mr. Trump’s team, she added, “I’m like, ‘[Expletive] you.’”

 

After arriving in Congress in 2021 as something of a joke and a pariah in her own party, known for making bigoted remarks and amplifying QAnon conspiracy theories, Ms. Greene evolved into a team player. She still sometimes spouted groundless claims and racist remarks, but also wielded some measure of influence by aligning herself closely with former Representative Kevin McCarthy, then speaker of the House, who in turn reined in her more extreme impulses.

 

But those days are all now behind her. Ms. Greene is no longer a team player for Republicans in Congress. And she is no longer seen as a joke.

 

She is now operating as a powerful free agent with considerable self-regard and a big chip on her shoulder. She appears to feel no obligation to anyone in Washington — certainly not to Speaker Mike Johnson, whom she tried to oust last year for allowing a vote on continued U.S. aid to Ukraine, and increasingly not even to Mr. Trump.

 

On a variety of topics including the release of documents related to the case against the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the war in Gaza, artificial intelligence and America’s involvement in Iran and Ukraine, Ms. Greene has broken sharply with the man she still calls “my favorite president.”

 

But Mr. Trump in recent months has tested the limits of the unflagging loyalty that his base has previously shown him. And Ms. Greene’s stalwart positions have revealed a fraying at the edges of the MAGA movement.

 

“From where the base is, she’s right on every issue — and pushing things, going where the puck is going,” said Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser and host of the “War Room” podcast.

 

Many Republicans in Congress still act giddy when Mr. Trump calls them by their first names, and dutifully fall in line with his every pronouncement. But Ms. Greene, long one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal allies, no longer appears to have stars in her eyes about the president.

 

“It changes when someone goes into office,” Ms. Greene said, choosing her words carefully to avoid criticizing the president directly. “Any president — they’re in a cone of information that they’re being provided. That’s a serious factor happening.”

 

She added: “If I can move President Trump out of there, I think he’s on the right page. I think it’s a matter of who is talking in his ear.”

 

But recently Ms. Greene has been willing to point out when Mr. Trump has strayed from the MAGA messages and positions that got him — and her — elected, leading to high-profile breaks with a president to whom she has displayed loyalty that has not always been returned.

 

“I didn’t get elected with a President Trump endorsement,” she said, noting that she had won her 2020 primary “on my own.” Mr. Trump eventually endorsed her in the general election, but by that time, Ms. Greene was already coasting to victory.

 

“It felt really bad at the time, but honestly it’s been the best thing for me,” she said. “I get to be very independent.”

 

On a recent Thursday morning in her Capitol Hill office, where a giant portrait of Ms. Greene hangs over the receptionist’s desk, her boyfriend Brian Glenn, the Real America’s Voice correspondent known for asking President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine why he was not wearing a suit in the Oval Office, was visiting her at work, as he often does.

 

Ms. Greene, her white-blonde hair pulled back in a tight, high ponytail, was rushing back from House votes and finishing up a call with Sergio Gor, who runs the presidential personnel office. She settled in to chat about her evolution in Congress under a wall of framed photographs of the most important people in her life: her children, herself and Mr. Trump.

 

“I have sincerely tried to do my job in different ways,” she said. “I tried everything from fighting leadership to working with the speaker. I think over time I’ve earned respect maybe because I haven’t changed. And they’re finding out, ‘She has real convictions.’”

 

Mr. Glenn, who has close relationships with top officials in the White House, said “there is no moving her” on the issues she cares about. “It doesn’t matter what I say. She’s very strong in her beliefs,” Mr. Glenn said, describing Ms. Greene as a “modern-day feminist.”

 

Ms. Greene’s stance on the Epstein files — she is one of just three Republicans who have signed onto the petition to force a floor vote on the issue — and other issues like the war in Gaza have earned her strange new respect from Democrats who have been somewhat horrified to find themselves agreeing with Ms. Greene on, well, anything.

 

“Marjorie Taylor Greene is winning my respect,” Zaid Jilani, a progressive writer who has worked for left-leaning political action committees and think tanks, wrote in an recent opinion essay for The Washington Post.

 

Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who is helping to lead the charge to release the Epstein files, said that “despite strong differences, she is willing to work on areas where there may be common ground.”

 

In July, Ms. Greene became the first Republican in Congress to describe the situation in Gaza as a “genocide,” breaking sharply with her party.

 

“You can’t un-see dead children,” she said in the interview, describing what made her do so. “That’s not fake. It’s not war propaganda. They’re not actors. And journalists getting murdered and blown up? I don’t see that happening in any other war, and that’s shocking to me.”

 

Ms. Greene, a self-described Christian nationalist, added: “I spoke to several Christian pastors. They’re saying this is really a genocide, innocent people are being killed. That was easily enough for me.”

 

That was around the same time that Ms. Greene harshly criticized Mr. Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and his abrupt turnabout on sending weapons to Ukraine, calling both violations of a key promise he had made to voters to end American entanglement in conflicts overseas.

 

Ms. Greene has also criticized the administration’s bid to expand artificial intelligence capacity in the United States, writing online that an executive order Mr. Trump signed “demands rapid A.I. expansion with little to no guardrails and breaks.”

 

Days before that, Ms. Greene offered an amendment to cut $500 million in defense assistance to Israel. It failed spectacularly on the House floor: Just six members voted in favor, and 422 against it.

 

The move, unsurprisingly, has made her a top target for AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel group. Marshall Wittmann, a spokesman for AIPAC, said that Ms. Greene’s views were aligned with “Ilhan Omar and Bernie Sanders while being completely contrary to those of President Trump and her Republican colleagues, who solidly stand with the Jewish state.”

 

The group is now exploring the possibility of financing a candidate to run against her next year. “We have not made a decision on this race,” Mr. Wittmann said.

 

Ms. Greene said she was not worried. What she said she heard in the supermarket aisles when she returned home to her northwest Georgia district for recess and stepped back into “normal life mode,” was that the voters were on her side.

 

“It would surprise everyone. This is the Bible Belt — Deep South conservative Christians,” she said. “They said, ‘Marjorie, we agree with you that it’s a genocide.’”

 

If some progressives are finding unexpected reasons to admire Ms. Greene, the feeling is not mutual. After the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, she called for a “peaceful national divorce” from the left.

 

But she has not tried to hide her disdain for her own side, either.

 

She accuses Mr. Trump’s political team, including his consultants and officials at his political action committee, of trying to sabotage her chances of running for Senate by releasing data — she calls it “fake polling” — that showed her losing to Senator Jon Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent, by 18 points.

 

The finding by Mr. Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, was in line with other public polls, including one from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that found her losing to Mr. Ossoff by 17 points. But Ms. Greene said it was an attack by an all-male G.O.P. establishment that has tried to sideline her.

 

“I live in a state where the good old boy, country-club Republican men run the system down there and I feel underappreciated,” she said. “Those guys are mad at me because I’m not writing them checks. I’m not stupid.”

 

These days, her take on the 2026 midterm election cycle sounds like it was pulled from Democratic talking points.

 

“The cost of health care is killing people,” she said. “That should be the top issue. Cost of living, electrical bills haven’t gone down, they’ve gone up. They’re dramatically higher, cost of food has gone up.”

 

She added: “In Congress, I don’t think these are the things we are prioritizing. It’s been border, immigration. Democrat candidates are talking about those things.”

 

Ms. Greene, who voted for Mr. Trump’s Medicaid-slashing domestic policy law, does not blame the president’s policies for the current economic landscape.

 

“It’s a question of how long does it take for those policies to take effect,” she said.

 

But her disillusionment is vast and growing.

 

Last cycle, Ms. Greene helped some of her House Republican colleagues by donating to their re-election campaigns. At the moment, that appears unlikely to happen next year.

 

“It’s all back to the same old Republican crap that I hated to begin with,” she said. “I’m not inclined to really endorse anyone right now.”

 

Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.