‘I Was Just So Naïve’: Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump

 

‘I Was Just So Naïve’: Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump

 

How the Georgia congresswoman went from the president’s loudest cheerleader to his loudest Republican critic.

 

Robert Draper

By Robert Draper

Robert Draper covers politics for The Times. For this article, he conducted two lengthy interviews with Marjorie Taylor Greene and spoke to close associates, congressional colleagues and White House officials.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/magazine/marjorie-taylor-greene-trump-maga-split.html

Dec. 29, 2025

 

Eleven days after Charlie Kirk was killed in September, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the third-term Georgia congresswoman, was watching his memorial service on TV as the luminaries of the conservative movement and the Trump administration gathered to pay tribute to the young activist.

 

What stayed with Greene long afterward were the last two speakers who took the stage. First there was Kirk’s widow, Erika, who stood in white before the crowd filling the Arizona stadium, lifted her tear-filled eyes and said that she forgave her husband’s killer. And then there was President Trump. “He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose,” he said of Kirk. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”

 

“That was absolutely the worst statement,” Greene wrote to me in a text message months after the memorial service. And the contrast between Erika Kirk and the president was clarifying, she added. “It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.”

 

It also, Greene said, clarified something about herself. Over the past five years, as Trump’s most notorious acolyte in Congress, she had adopted his unrepentant pugilism as her own. “Our side has been trained by Donald Trump to never apologize and to never admit when you’re wrong,” she told me in her Capitol Hill office one afternoon in early December. “You just keep pummeling your enemies, no matter what. And as a Christian, I don’t believe in doing that. I agree with Erika Kirk, who did the hardest thing possible and said it out loud.”

 

Greene’s reaction put her in a distinct minority among influential conservative figures. Almost immediately after Kirk was declared dead, many of her comrades on the right — the billionaire Elon Musk, the Fox News host Jesse Watters, the podcaster Steve Bannon — labeled the killing an act of war by the left and exhorted their audience to think in similar terms.

 

But Greene — who for years took a back seat to no one when it came to reactionary rhetoric, going so far, before she was in office, as to accuse Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of treasonous conduct and adding that treason was punishable by imprisonment or death — realized that she had suddenly lost all appetite for vengeance. She later told a friend, who confirmed the exchange: “After Charlie died, I realized that I’m part of this toxic culture. I really started looking at my faith. I wanted to be more like Christ.”

 

That was when the stress fracture that had been steadily widening between Greene and her political godfather became an irrevocable break. 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.

 

Most significant, she defied the president and compliant House Republican leaders as she argued that all investigative material pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein should be released. “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.”

 

As Greene made her opinions known, first to Trump and his team and then publicly, she tested the affection of the man who once said of her in a posted statement endorsing her re-election: “Marjorie Taylor Greene is a warrior in Congress. She doesn’t back down, she doesn’t give up, and she has ALWAYS been with ‘Trump.’”

 

Now the cascade of perceived transgressions culminated in the president’s tarring her as “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Green” in a social media post on Nov. 15. Six days later, she announced in a video that she would resign from Congress on Jan. 5, a year before her term ends.

 

In early December, as she prepared to make her exit, I met Greene for the first of two long interviews in which she was remarkably forthcoming about her frustrations with the president — and his anger with her.

 

I have covered Greene, who is 51, extensively over the past five years, and it was evident during this recent visit that on one level nothing had changed. Just outside the front door of her office stood the familiar placard blaring, “There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE.” One sign on the door warned visitors that “NO FOREIGN LOBBYING” was allowed; another featured the image of Charlie Kirk. Hanging on the wall inside the waiting area were fan letters from all over America, some dating to 2021, her first year in office. The television was, as always, set to Fox News, though Greene told me she no longer watched the network because she found it factually unreliable.

 

‘After Charlie died, I realized that I’m part of this toxic culture. I really started looking at my faith. I wanted to be more like Christ.’

 

The fact that her office remained the same reflected Greene’s sense of where she stood: She continued to be faithful to Trump’s campaign promises. If anything, she said, her sin was to have regarded them as more than slogans. “That’s what I’m guilty of,” she told me. “That’s what made me, in the president’s words, a traitor — which was truly believing in Make America Great Again, which I perceive to be America First.”

 

Greene’s last exchange with the president was by text message on Nov. 16. That day, she received an anonymous email in her personal Gmail account that threatened her college-aged son: “Derek will have his life snuffed out soon. Better watch his back.” The email’s subject heading used the nickname Trump had given her the day before: “Marjorie Traitor Greene.”

 

Greene promptly texted that information to the president. According to a source familiar with the exchange, his long reply made no mention of her son. Instead, Trump insulted her in personal terms. When she replied that children should remain off limits from their disagreements, Trump responded that she had only herself to blame.

 

In response to detailed questions and a request for comment, Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, wrote in a statement: “President Trump remains the undisputed leader of the greatest and fastest growing political movement in American history — the MAGA movement. On the other hand, Congresswoman Greene is quitting on her constituents in the middle of her term and abandoning the consequential fight we’re in — we don’t have time for her petty bitterness.”

 

The president’s banishment of Greene can be viewed as the most recent of several cracks in a MAGA coalition that seemed shatterproof after Trump’s re-election in 2024. The president’s brash Inauguration Day prediction of a “golden age” has not borne out for most Americans. With polling increasingly showing a drop in his approval ratings and in the Republican forecast for next year’s midterm elections, a few voices on the right have dared to openly question the president’s judgment, even while fighting among themselves over how best to interpret and execute “America First.” Among them, Greene may be the least likely of Trump’s conscientious objectors.

 

It has been tempting for some observers to predict that the meteoric crash and burn of the MAGA movement’s loudest champion signals the beginning of the end for its leader as well. But it is Greene who is exiting the stage, while Trump continues to dominate it, as he did through impeachments and indictments and other controversies that no other politician would have survived. Greene acknowledged to me that her abrupt ejection from Trump’s orbit is unlikely to diminish his stature with his party or its base. “He has trash-talked so many people,” Greene told me. “I promise you, I don’t hold myself up as more special than others he’s done this to. I get it. This is Trump. This is what he does.”

 

Still, her five-year trajectory on the national scene — from the president’s embrace to her excommunication — serves as an apt parable for this political moment. If Trump engendered loyalty on an unprecedented scale, Greene was his most fervent high-profile loyalist — and now, his most unlikely apostate. She arrived in Washington as one kind of misfit and departs as another, all while remaining more or less herself but also changing in ways that compelled even her detractors to give her a second look. None of this is normal, like the rest of the Trump era. But because it represents an evolution for Greene, she may yet again prove to be a harbinger of a sea change in the movement she once helped lead.

 

Greene arrived in Congress during its weirdest time, as its weirdest character: a former believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory, a CrossFit competitor and a wealthy co-owner of her family’s construction firm with no political experience, now jetting around on Air Force One with the president of the United States, endeavoring to overturn the 2020 election results. Three days after Greene was sworn into office in January 2021, the Capitol fell siege to rioters trying to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. According to Greene, she found herself sequestered with other House members in a conference room and arguing with another Republican freshman, Kat Cammack of Florida.

 

“B.L.M. and antifa have broken into the Capitol!” Greene insisted.

 

Grabbing Greene’s shoulders, Cammack replied firmly: “Marjorie. They’re wearing MAGA hats.”

 

Early that February, I stood outside the Capitol watching Greene hold a news conference. The day before, 11 Republicans joined with a unanimous Democratic House majority in voting to strip Greene of her committee assignments for the incendiary remarks she made before running for office. Now she defiantly proclaimed, against all conventional wisdom, that her adversaries had it wrong about Trump’s demise and that the base had not deserted the exiled former president: “The party is his. It doesn’t belong to anybody else.”

 

At the time, frankly, I thought she sounded nuts. But as the year wore on, Greene’s prescience would become as evident as her emerging star power in the MAGA ecosystem, and I became convinced that in order to understand that ecosystem, it was essential to understand this figure at the heart of it. After months of background interviews with her top aides, I got word that she was willing to meet with me.

 

Early in 2022, I traveled to Rome, Ga., in the northwestern corner of the state, where the congresswoman lived. When her aides nervously buttonholed me in the doorway of the restaurant where Greene and I were due to meet and muttered that everything would have to be off the record, I realized how tenuous the situation was. Greene, a prolific user of the term “fake news media,” had never sat down with a Times reporter before. It occurred to me that the sum total of what she knew about this news organization, and others like it, came from Fox News and the confederates in her impermeable MAGA bubble. In her world, mainstream media outfits were perpetrators of the “Russia hoax” and were in league with the Democrats. She ignored them and distrusted them.

 

“What brings you to Rome?” she asked as she shook my hand. When I replied, “I’m just here to see you,” she blinked in surprise. It seemed to be a source of relief, if perhaps somewhat discombobulating, that I also had a Southern accent and was more interested in her current political beliefs than her previous statements. That none of her off-the-record remarks to me that day appeared in print or on social media further reduced her wariness.

 

Other on-the-record interviews soon followed — a few in her office, one back in her district and a couple in Washington restaurants. One autumn evening in 2022, I ventured to ask just how she thought the 2020 election was stolen. Did she really think that a grand conspiracy, perhaps masterminded by the Obamas and the C.I.A., had secretly rigged the results?

 

“Robert,” she replied with a searching look, “do you really think Joe Biden got 81 million votes without even campaigning?”

 

“Yes,” I said. “They counted all the votes. That was the final tally. Why wouldn’t I believe it?” The look she then gave me, which I will never forget, was one of bottomless pity.

 

I soon became accustomed to the “Is she as crazy as she seems?” queries from the same friends and peers who 15 years earlier had asked me, while I was spending time with President George W. Bush, if he was as stupid as he appeared. The answer was a qualified no. Greene did harbor a genuine conspiratorial streak, often even wondering if this or that person wore a wire. But she was also becoming an increasingly shrewd and acerbic observer of life on Capitol Hill. By January 2023, the Republicans had reclaimed the House and Greene had developed a strong alliance with the new speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who bestowed on her an unofficial seat at the leadership table.

 

Through it all, Greene remained a Trump die-hard. She first visited him at Mar-a-Lago in March 2021, a time when many other elected Republicans were keeping their distance. Three months later, when Trump staged his first rally since leaving office, Greene was there as his warm-up act in Ohio, declaring: “As a matter of fact, he’s the greatest president this country has ever had. And he should be our president right now — but the dirty, rotten Democrats stole the election!” Trump gushed in return: “She’s loved and respected, and she’s tough and smart and kind.”

 

‘Our side has been trained by Donald Trump to never apologize and to never admit when you’re wrong.’

 

While others in her party kept their options open as Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, entered the field for the 2024 presidential election, Greene’s allegiances were not up for debate. And Trump took notice. By early 2022, she would tell me, Trump had floated the idea of her as his 2024 running mate. That rolling discussion continued into the summer of 2024, she says, but Trump, she claims, was bothered by her steadfast opposition to abortion, which she has called “murder.” (A White House spokeswoman said that Greene was never under consideration. Vice President JD Vance also opposes abortion, but has deferred to Trump’s preference to leave the matter up to the states.) She ultimately joined Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr. as early advocates of Vance, then a first-term senator from Ohio. According to an aide, Greene would end up spending roughly $1 million from her own war chest to campaign for Trump’s re-election.

 

Greene’s fidelity to the MAGA cause masked some private misgivings, she now says. Some of Trump’s devotees struck Greene as worshipful in the extreme: “For a lot of MAGA, Trump is a savior, and he’s like a god to them.” She also disliked the unctuous, hedonistic posturing at Mar-a-Lago. In particular, she told me recently: “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.”

 

Still, for everything that gave her pause about Trump and the MAGA faithful, there was always the left to remind Greene of what she found truly appalling. By 2024, Greene had become more politically sophisticated and also less inclined to vilify the news media. But she continued to characterize Trump’s Democratic opponents, and their positions, in the direst of terms: “radical communist Kamala Harris,” “the perverted trans agenda against children that is an attack directly on God’s creation,” “the party of pedophiles.” The day after the assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania that July, just days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where he would receive the party’s official nomination, Greene described the stakes on X as “a battle between GOOD and EVIL.”

 

I had plans to meet Greene for a drink on the second day of the convention. An hour before we were to get together, she texted me to say she received a better offer: Trump had asked her to sit next to him that evening. As she sat beside the man she called in her own convention speech “the founding father of the America First movement,” Greene’s status as the Athena figure in that movement was on display for all to see.

 

In turn, Greene’s belief in her MAGA Zeus was nearly absolute. Shortly after Trump secured the nomination, I convened a dinner with Greene; her boyfriend, Brian Glenn, now the White House correspondent for the right-wing outlet Real America’s Voice; and two of my fellow Times reporters. At one point, I mentioned Trump’s pledge to enact “retribution” against his perceived enemies. Greene’s demeanor turned icy. President Trump, she crisply informed me, was focused on saving America, not payback. Any suggestion to the contrary was asinine. She warned me that if my colleagues and I continued to pursue this ridiculous line of inquiry, she would get up and leave.

 

More than a year after that dinner, I asked Greene: “Was there ever a point before 2025 where you thought: You know what? Trump acts like a man of the people, and he talks about the forgotten men and women of this country, but I’m not so sure.”

.

“I was just so naïve and outside of politics,” Greene said with a wince of a smile, “that it was easy for me to naïvely believe.”

 

The year that would end with a seismic political rupture between Greene and Trump began with nothing but good vibes. “I can’t wait to get to work!” Greene announced in a news release on Jan. 17, 2025, three days before Trump was sworn in for the second time. She was newly elected to a third term herself and had been named chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, or the DOGE subcommittee, which was set up to work in lock step with Elon Musk’s fund-slashing agency to downsize the federal government. Now, at last, Republicans controlled both the executive and legislative branches. Greene’s brash assessment of Trump in early 2021 that “the party is his” was, if anything, an understatement.

 

Greene’s eagerness to get to work became all too evident to the new administration. She sent long, insistent text messages to Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, along with her deputy, James Blair, and cabinet members. Greene’s congressional staff had long been accustomed to her I-will-not-be-ignored tactics, a playbook they jokingly referred to as “bitch, bully and bulldoze.”

 

But these recipients were the most powerful government officials in America, and in retrospect, the personal slights between her and them may have foreshadowed the ill feelings that would ensue. According to a person with knowledge of the matter, Greene’s missives could come off as pushy, unconstructive and at times disrespectful. “She wasn’t as prolific with me as she apparently was with others,” Wiles told me. “I would sometimes know when she texted the president because I’d be dispatched to do something she was asking for. I couldn’t get to all of her texts, but I acted when I could.”

 

From Greene’s perspective, the new White House team consisted mainly of latecomers to the MAGA movement, not Day 1 Trumpists like herself. Greene harbored suspicions that Wiles and Blair were a little too cozy with the billionaire donor class — and that in a contest between competing interests, the president’s MAGA faithful would be left out in the cold.

 

Greene was also chagrined to discover that the Republican-controlled House, under Speaker Mike Johnson, seemed to have no say in Trump’s agenda. “I want you to know that Johnson is not our speaker,” she told me in December. “He is not our leader. And in the legislative branch — a totally separate body of government — he is literally 100 percent under direct orders from the White House. And many, many Republicans are so furious about that, but they’re cowards.”

 

Hardly the first to discover that the House had in recent years become a marvel of inaction, Greene nonetheless began to wonder whether serving in it was worth all the family events she had missed and the death threats she had incurred. She considered running against Senator Jon Ossoff but announced in May that she had decided not to.

 

Greene’s stated reasoning at the time was that “the Senate is where good ideas go to die.” But the week after her announcement, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had shared with her a survey from his pollster, Tony Fabrizio, projecting that Ossoff would beat her by 18 points. Later, Trump would claim in a Truth Social post that their split “seemed to all begin” when he sent her the poll — suggesting, in effect, that Greene was pouting over his lack of support: “All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!” Greene insisted to me, “It wasn’t about a Fabrizio poll.” She added: “I never had a single conversation with the president about it. Instead, he told me all the time, ‘You should run for governor — you’d win.’”

 

Still, Greene told me, it began to dawn on her that when it came to the president, loyalty is “a one-way street — and it ends like that whenever it suits him.” Being disabused of the idea that subservience would be rewarded appeared to have a liberating effect on her.

 

In June, Greene did an about-face on the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill after conceding that she voted for it without realizing that it contained a provision that would prevent states from enforcing restrictions on artificial intelligence for a period of 10 years. If the Senate did not strike the moratorium from the bill, Greene publicly warned, “when the O.B.B.B. comes back to the House for approval after Senate changes, I will not vote for it with this in it.” On July 1, the Senate voted to sever the provision from the bill, which Trump signed into law three days later.

 

Greene broke again from Trump on July 17, arguing on X that his cryptocurrency bill could permit a future president to “TURN OFF YOUR BANK ACCOUNT AND STOP YOUR ABILITY TO BUY AND SELL!!!!!” This time, Trump made his displeasure known to her — and to her peers.

 

That same day, Greene and roughly a dozen other House Republicans who also had reservations about the bill were summoned to the Oval Office. In Greene’s recollection, Trump focused his wrath on her. “When you have a group of kids,” she said, “you pick the one that is the most well behaved, that always does everything right, and you beat the living shit out of them. Because then the rest of them are like: ‘Oh, man, holy shit. If Dad does that to her, what would he do to me?’” A White House spokeswoman disputes that the meeting was contentious. “Not surprising to me at all,” Greene replied when I informed her of this. “They have major problems, and it’s only starting to build.”

 

Greene believed that she was being true to the candidate, the ideals and the voters she campaigned for. “What have I been doing since he became president? I’ve worked very hard to keep everybody inside the guardrails of what we campaigned on: ‘No, this is what we said. This is what we promised. Now we have to deliver. And not through executive orders or red-meat rants on social media.’ And I always go back to the people that showed up at his rallies, because those are the people that should matter. Those people should matter over those big crypto donors or the A.I. big-tech people.”

 

Greene had other reservations about the administration’s agenda. While she was initially supportive of Trump’s tariffs, she became fretful when carpet and flooring companies in her district said they were now less able to procure certain chemicals that were available only overseas. She complained that the hundreds of thousands of college student visas being issued by the administration to Chinese nationals gave them an unfair leg up on American students. And though Trump campaigned on ending transgender medical care for children, as president, she says, he offered little support to Greene’s bill, the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, which would do exactly that. Only when Greene threatened to oppose the continuing resolution in September to fund the government did the House majority leader, Steve Scalise, promise to bring her bill to the House floor in exchange for her vote.

 

Such acts of obstinance probably got under Trump’s skin, Greene told me. “But,” she then said, “it was Epstein. Epstein was everything.”

 

During the 2024 campaign, Trump indicated a willingness to release all files pertaining to his former friend Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges. Greene now says it didn’t register with her at the time that Trump never exhibited much relish for the subject — and, for that matter, that numerous photos had circulated showing him palling around with Epstein.

 

The reason for her lack of concern, as Greene explained it to me, might seem improbable to anyone who is unfamiliar with how the mainstream press and the right-wing media cover the same story differently — or not at all. “The story to me,” she said, “was that I’d seen pictures of Epstein with all these people. And Trump is just one of several. And then, for me, I’d seen that Bill Clinton is on the flight logs for his plane like 20-something times. So, for people like me, it wasn’t suspicious. And then we’d heard the general stories of how Epstein used to be a member of Mar-a-Lago, but Trump kicked him out. Why would I think he’s done anything wrong, right?”

 

For Greene, the decades that Epstein spent eluding justice for exploiting and sexually assaulting countless girls and young women while amassing a fortune, and the seeming efforts by the government to cover up the injustice, “represents everything wrong with Washington,” she told me. This September, Greene spoke with several of Epstein’s victims for the first time in a closed-door House Oversight Committee meeting. She knew that the women had paid their own way to come to Washington. She saw some of them trembling and crying as they spoke. Their accounts struck her as entirely believable. Greene herself had never been sexually abused, but she knew women who had. In her own small way, Greene later told me, she could understand what it was like for a woman to stand up to a powerful man.

 

‘Am I going to get murdered, or one of my kids, because he’s calling me a traitor?’

 

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.

 

“I had the same caricatured opinion of her as everyone,” Khanna told me. “I saw her heckling President Biden at the State of the Union address. I thought she was a person on the fringes. But my view of her completely changed. At our press conferences, she didn’t even seek to speak. She was genuinely moved by the survivors, so much so that we hugged each other during one woman’s testimony. I found her to be a person of integrity and courage, considering the pressure she faced from the White House.”

 

The effort by Greene, Khanna and Massie to force the release of the Epstein files stalled in October, when a budget impasse caused the federal government to shut down. (For Speaker Johnson, who was allied with Trump in opposing the release of the Epstein files, the shutdown enabled him to avoid seating Adelita Grijalva, a newly elected Democrat from Arizona who would have provided the decisive 218th vote to ratify Greene’s legal maneuver.) Congress had already been in recess from July 28 to Sept. 2. Now the Capitol was shuttered until Nov. 12. Greene spent most of this extended time back home in Georgia. “For the entire eight weeks,” she recalled, “I am raging. I am losing my mind. And when I would come back up here, I would give everybody in leadership hell. This is the most absurd thing I’ve ever seen. The American people work every day. Why are we not working?”

 

From conversations with her constituents, she told me, she could tell that the issue of affordability was not, as Trump would term it, “a con job” perpetrated by Democrats. Reading construction-industry newsletters, Greene learned that private-equity firms were buying up neighborhoods in Georgia and across America, which in turn was driving up housing costs. Her two adult daughters informed her that their health-insurance premiums would double if Greene’s party did not yield to the Democrats and extend the Obamacare subsidies that had been significantly expanded by the Biden administration.

 

Greene told me that she began to worry that her beloved MAGA movement was going off the rails. Its leading figures were no longer preoccupied with the pressing economic needs of her constituents. Instead, they were bickering over the Epstein files. “How did all of this end up to a point,” she recalls wondering at the time, “where it was about releasing files about women who were raped, and not the serious things that I think truly matter about helping to get our economy stabilized again? Help reduce the cost of living, fix the housing market, fix health insurance — for the love of God, what the [expletive] is the matter with these people?”

 

Greene decided to go public with her grievances. Her options were limited, however. She still had limited relations with the mainstream press. And while she had once been a regular on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News and had occasionally appeared on others, the right-wing media giant had otherwise kept her at arm’s length — perhaps because, Greene told me, “I’m not for their foreign wars. I won’t say, ‘Kill everybody in Gaza.’” She added: “And I said the election was stolen. Oh, and I said I’m against Covid vaccines, and all their ads are big pharma companies.” (A Fox News source confirmed Greene’s suspicion that her appearances had been held to a minimum by the network. A Fox News spokeswoman said that Greene appeared on the network a few times earlier in the year and had been invited to appear on “Fox & Friends” the day after she announced she was resigning from Congress.)

 

But a few unlikely venues had reached out to Greene, and now she responded to them. On Oct. 31, she appeared on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” the Friday night HBO show hosted by the contrarian commentator who had frequently lampooned her. Greene had never watched the show and did not know that she would be facing a live audience. “Brian” — her boyfriend — “said I looked like a deer in the headlights” when she appeared onstage, she told me. But Greene quickly regained her composure. “Yeah, I disagree with that,” she said flatly when Maher raised Trump’s $40 billion bailout to Argentina. Asked about Trump’s desire to resume nuclear testing, Greene replied, “I would vote no to that.”  When Greene criticized her party for failing to offer a viable alternative to Obamacare, the audience erupted in applause.

 

Four days later, she joined the hosts of “The View,” ABC’s popular morning show that takes a mostly liberal stance. One person who was on the set told me that the hosts were braced for combative dialogue, but Greene told me that she instantly felt comfortable in their company. “Those women were the same type of women that have always been my friends. College-educated, affluent suburban women — that’s who I am. So I couldn’t wait to talk to these ladies. I was so tired of the toxic politics.”

 

Still, Greene told me, she had no illusions about how her media mini-tour would be received in the White House. “All of a sudden, I’m in places” — Greene made her voice sound stern to mimic disapproving Republican leaders — “‘that you’re not supposed to be, little M.T.G. You get back in your little [expletive] box in the kitchen and shut up and cook us dinner and stay there.’”

 

On the evening of Nov. 14, she and Brian Glenn were at her home in Rome when Trump’s Truth Social post rescinding his endorsement of her popped up. The next morning, they read Trump’s new post calling her a “traitor” in shared disbelief. “Traitor,” she says she told Glenn. “Traitors are put in prison or put to death. That’s what he just called me.”

 

Later that day, a bomb threat was called in to her family’s construction firm in Alpharetta. The day after that, Rome police officers informed her of a pipe bomb threat to her house. After texting the president with the information about the threat to her son and receiving his hostile reply, she sent it to the vice president. “He was very sympathetic and kind,” Greene told me. She reached out to others in the administration as well. In one text that a White House official read to me, Greene wrote, “Trump replied in the worst kind of way.” The president had endangered her family, she went on, “and none of you even gives a shit.”

 

That same day, Nov. 16, Greene appeared on the CNN program “State of the Union,” co-hosted by Dana Bash. The congresswoman was uncharacteristically somber, describing the threats she received. Bash referred to a recent post by Greene on X saying that Trump had unleashed a “hotbed of threats” against her. The CNN host then pointed out the long history of Trump’s attacks on others. “And with respect,” Bash said, “I haven’t heard you speak out about it until it was directed at you.”

 

“Dana, I think that’s fair criticism,” Greene replied. “And I would like to say, humbly, I’m sorry for taking part in the toxic politics.”

 

I asked Greene in December to specify what she was referring to. There was a manifestly pugnacious side to her, I said, and I referred her to the period when, just before running for office, she was a far-right social media influencer practicing what she called “confrontational politics.” She harassed the 18-year-old gun-control activist David Hogg on the street and roamed the halls of Congress, writing “You’re a traitor” in the guest book outside Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office and barging into Pelosi’s office to chant “Lock her up!” “We were terrifying everyone,” she boasted at the time in a video she posted on Facebook. And she went further, posting more videos that called Pelosi a “traitor” who deserved to either face prison or “suffer death.”

 

Was that the toxic politics she meant? “Yeah!” she exclaimed. “I was an angry citizen. An angry American.” She thought, she continued, that “Americans have to go through all this crap, constantly being lied to.” She went on: “And when I got here to Congress, I was attacked relentlessly and was enduring real pain in my personal life” — referring to her father’s brain cancer, which proved fatal, followed by the dissolution of her marriage. “And my emotions were just really raw.”

 

“And so, when you were apologizing about your role in the toxic politics,” I asked, “you were thinking about the times when your anger got the better of you, like the stuff about A.O.C. and Pelosi?”

 

“Yeah!” she exclaimed again. “Because a Christian shouldn’t be that way. And I’m a Christian.”

 

If Greene’s apology to Bash struck some as belated or insufficient, many on the right saw it as the sort of contrition that was unbecoming of a true MAGA warrior. Greene’s sudden isolation became evident on the afternoon of Nov. 18, when the Epstein Files Transparency Act finally made it to the House floor — after Trump abandoned the fight in the face of pressure brought by Greene, Massie and two more Republicans, Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert.

 

“They brought Lauren Boebert into the Situation Room — that was so weird,” Greene recalled of the White House attempts to persuade the holdouts to cave and cast their votes against bringing the bill to the floor. “And they were calling Nancy Mace nonstop. She’s running for governor. She has an endorsement on the line. I give them both a lot of credit.” That Massie was the only male Republican to side with Epstein’s victims on the vote was notable, Greene added. “There’s a significant reason why women overwhelmingly don’t vote Republican,” she said. “I think there’s a very big message here.”

 

In what should have been her moment of triumph (after Trump relented and threw his support behind the bill, it passed 427 to 1), Greene sat by herself in the House chamber. Melanie Stansbury, the ranking Democratic member of Greene’s DOGE subcommittee, took notice. Though the two women agreed on very little, Stansbury told me, “I think it was very brave for her to stand up to the president and to stand with the victims. And the way the president went after her, in my opinion, was very similar to the way those women were attacked. So when I saw her sitting alone, I went and sat with her on the floor, and I checked in with her to see if she was safe.”

 

Greene wasn’t entirely sure. “Am I going to get murdered, or one of my kids, because he’s calling me a traitor?” she wondered. She also wondered about her political options. A part of her relished the prospect of destroying a Republican opponent anointed by Trump in the 2026 primary for the seat she held. But to what end? She thought of her constituents, like her neighbor across the street, a nice lady who supported both Greene and Trump but would soon be inundated with TV ads demanding that she choose one over the other. She thought of what it would be like to return to Washington as a marked woman, in what would most likely be a Democratically controlled House, in a legislative branch that accomplished nothing, in a city that she despised.

 

She was still turning things over in her head on the morning of Friday, Nov. 21, as she flew back home from Washington. By early afternoon, she was at home in Rome, typing on her laptop. Glenn sat beside her, offering a few edits. She called her three children and her chief of staff, Ed Buckham — and no one else. Then Glenn helped load up her text on a teleprompter. She sat on her living-room couch and spoke to the camera for 14 minutes. The second take felt right to her. Greene posted it at 8:01 p.m. Glenn forwarded it to me — along with other members of the media — two minutes later.

 

Though Greene knew that her announcement would amount to major news, she did not anticipate the full breadth of the reaction. Her phone lit up with messages from former friends, former in-laws, third cousins and others she had not heard from in years, since she had left her life behind to become a MAGA warrior. “And,” she recalled, “they were like: ‘Hell yeah! [Expletive] Trump!”

 

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Greene told me in mid-December, contemplating her future as she sipped a glass of red wine over dinner at a restaurant in downtown Washington. Almost to herself, she added, “I need a break.”

 

Sitting beside her was Glenn, who in a few days would become her fiancé and start making plans to move to Georgia from Washington. I agreed not to quote him, given that his job as the White House correspondent for Real America’s Voice has been to show unflagging support for Trump — and he was not in the mood to stay on script. More than any other journalist, Glenn has enjoyed extraordinary and sustained proximity to the president over the past year. It’s fair to say that nothing Greene has said or done in recent months has been met with his stern disagreement.

 

Some have wondered if Greene is conducting something of a redemption tour to reposition herself for the future. Such speculation presupposes that she has a kind of master plan in mind — and, for that matter, an abiding interest in politics as a vocation. But weeks after announcing her intention to resign from Congress, Greene emphatically maintained that she was leaving that world for good. “I hate politics,” she texted me — then added, “Hate it!!!” Even if Greene reconsiders her antipathy down the line, she acknowledged to me that she is, for the moment at least, politically homeless. “I’m, like, radioactive,” she said of her House colleagues on both sides of the aisle.

 

Instead, she spoke longingly of the day when she could walk unnoticed into a restaurant or a grocery store. Recalling a conversation she had with the host of “60 Minutes” who interviewed her, she said: “The funniest thing was when Lesley Stahl said, ‘You know, it’s hard to give up the limelight.’ I’m looking across at her, and I’m thinking, ‘I don’t ever want to be like that when I’m her age.’”

 

And yet Greene was showing no sign of withdrawing from political life. She continued to post on social media about her concerns on immigration, Covid vaccines, foreign interventions and the prospect of stolen elections. She was also still paying close attention to Trump, if from a more jaded perspective than before. During dinner, when Glenn brought up the president’s interactions with the White House press corps that day, Greene noted Trump’s amiable exchange with a female reporter — after several recent instances of his responding with insults to questions from women. “It’s because he knows he has a woman problem,” she said.

 

‘I haven’t changed my views. But I’ve matured.’

 

His overall behavior in recent months, she told me, was that of a president who would stop at nothing to remain in office even after his second term expires. “In my opinion,” Greene predicted, “we’re going to see more war. Because what do you do when you really lose power, when you become a lame duck? How do you cling to power? You go to war.”

 

Even without another campaign on the horizon or a donor base to rile up — even without being M.T.G., in other words — she was leaving Washington as the same polarizing figure who arrived in town five years earlier. When I asked Stansbury, the Democratic congresswoman, if she felt at all wistful about Greene’s abrupt departure, given that the two had developed a mutual respect and that other Democrats were interested in working with her, she paused for several seconds before finally saying: “I don’t think that’s an answerable question. What I can point you to is that just this week she used her remaining policy leverage on the vote over the N.D.A.A. to advance a bill that is anathema to the basic core values of civil rights in America.”

 

Stansbury was referring to the fact that a few hours before sitting down to dinner, Greene announced that in exchange for her vote to allow the National Defense Authorization Act to fund the Pentagon to come to the floor, the House leadership had agreed to finally bring her bill banning gender-related care for minors to the floor a week later. (It passed, 216 to 211, though its fate in the Senate is tenuous at best.)

 

That should have been all the information Stansbury needed to be glad that Greene was resigning. What complicated the matter was that Stansbury had come to see other qualities in Greene, including ones she finds commendable; Greene had treated her respectfully and had stood by Epstein’s victims when few Republicans would. “At the end of the day, members of Congress are just human beings,” Stansbury concluded. “They deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, even when you disagree with them.” It is likely that Stansbury, who like Greene entered Congress in 2021, would have been much harder pressed back then to muster empathy for the self-styled “angry American” and MAGA foot soldier.

 

But perhaps even to her own surprise, Greene was not that person any longer. “Everyone’s like, ‘She’s changed,’” Greene said to me. “I haven’t changed my views. But I’ve matured. I’ve developed depth.” And there was more, she said, to the education she’d received. “I’ve learned Washington, and I’ve come to understand the brokenness of the place. If none of us is learning lessons here and we can’t evolve and mature with our lessons, then what kind of people are we?”

 

Robert Draper is based in Washington and writes about domestic politics. He is the author of several books and has been a journalist for three decades.