Marjorie Taylor Greene seems even more hungry for attention than usual. Georgia congresswoman recently caused a ruckus during House oversight Committee meet while making fun the eyelashes from a fellow Democrat, Jasmine Crockett. (The episode went viral. Of course.) A few days later, Ms. Greene spoke out about the madness, claiming knowledge of a deep state plot to assassinate Donald Trump.
“Biden’s DOJ and FBI planned to assassinate President Trump and gave the green light. Has everyone figured this out yet???!!!!” She job on X. “What are the Republicans going to do about this?”
Um nothing. Because it’s not true. Ms. Greene raged with new details about the government’s 2022 effort to recover the piles of documents Mr. Trump hoarded at Mar-a-Lago and developed a crazy conspiracy theory. So, you know, the usual MTG antics.
Except this: in the wake of Ms. Greene’s affair failed crusade to impeach House Speaker Mike Johnson, his craziest clown act at the carnival appears to have turned into a sad clown party. It wasn’t long ago that people talked about the MAGA radical as a sort of shadow spokesperson, the woman who frightened her party leadership. For weeks this spring, her threats against Mr. Johnson caused reporters to flock to her like flies to… darling. But now? Even MAGA-friendly conservatives I look tired of her.
Three years into her term in Congress, Ms. Greene reached a defining moment. Does she want to remain a fringed, bomb-throwing backseat troll, or will she try to become something more? Thinking about this, I called Newt Gingrich, another Georgia conservative who has already made a major transformation along these lines. The former House speaker had some pointed thoughts on Ms. Greene’s path forward.
She’s like that fussy cousin who comes to Thanksgiving dinner, Mr. Gingrich said. “They’re cute because of the salad.” Then they start getting obnoxious, and by dessert you want to send them out.
At first glance, Ms. Greene seems impervious to derision, isolation, and failure. After all, she comes from a ultra-MAGA district and has become a national celebrity because he is one of the grossest chaos monkeys in Congress. Yet there are signs that she longs for something more than the family member everyone else rolls their eyes at. The question is whether she has the focus or ability to achieve it.
Many politicians burst into Washington as crusading outsiders vowing to overthrow the system one way or another: the Tea Partiers, the Squad, Mr. Gingrich’s Republican revolutionaries. For many of these protest actors, a key part of the job is to serve as a strawberry in the butt of their own party and particularly its leaders. Think about the beginning friction between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi, then president of the time, or that of Mark Meadows main role In conduct Congressional Chairman John Boehner.
As they settle down, many realize that legislating is a collective enterprise. To get things done and gain real influence, you must learn to work productively, even happily, with your teammates – and even, on occasion, with members of the other team. Smart legislators figure out how to do this without abandoning their values or damaging their brand. (See: AOC.) Some end up becoming uber-insiders. (Raise your hand if you remember Mr. Boehner’s first incarnation as a reformer.)
Then there are those who run in the opposite direction, doubling down on political outrage and disruption for the sake of disruption. This is the preferred path of many MAGA followers, and Ms. Greene often seems determined to outdo them all.
As the architect of the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, Mr. Gingrich famously made the journey from jovial, biting backbencher to powerful orator. It is also widely blamed for turning Congress into the hyperpartisan cesspool of dysfunction that it is today, before it was ultimately brought down by political excess and personal scandal (but that’s another saga). He knows how the game is played and has some thoughts on what his fellow Georgian could do to become a serious player.
“It must focus on solutions and not on problems,” he proposed. “She must decide that she is part of a larger group than her own ego, and she must develop enough patience to play a team sport.” Or, more succinctly: “Slow down, calm down, find positive things, and learn to be part of a team.” »
For a minute or two last summer, it seemed as if Ms. Greene was flirting with a different path. She worked with then-President Kevin McCarthy — enough to put her out of the far-right Freedom Caucus — chatting with lobbyists and donors and even cutting deals on legislation. “Well, that’s what we do here. We are negotiating,” she told reporters after voting for the annual defense bill she had spoken out against the day before. “It just moves the bill, which has so many good things in it, to the next phase, where I can actually have a bigger voice.” The Washington Post declared: “a final DC insider.” It was as if she had been replaced by someone who cared about legislating.
But then, like Mr. McCarthy’s leadership, Ms. Greene’s pragmatic and productive phase quickly dissolved. These days, she’s back to being totally weird and disruptive.
“She doesn’t seem to have the patience to last,” Mr. Gingrich told me. “She takes one path, but then she starts to backslide,” returning to “the easy way out” that guarantees her attention and campaign money. If you do this over and over again, he warns, “people decide it’s a trend.” That’s when they get really fed up with your nonsense and you find yourself more and more marginalized. If it’s true power she’s after, she’s unlikely to achieve it this way.
Of course, Ms. Greene doesn’t necessarily need to change anything just to keep her seat. She seems to be doing quite well if her goal is “to become a symbol of the extreme wing of her party” and “if she wants to be isolated and ineffective and ultimately not be a role model that anyone could cite,” observed Mr. Gingrich. “She can survive for a long time doing this.”
Maybe. But God help the rest of us.
