Marjorie Taylor Greene really wants us to believe she’s done with politics. That’s what the retiring Georgia GOP congresswoman told journalist Robert Draper for his lengthy end-of-year profile he wrote for the New York Times. For years, she has been one of the loudest members of Congress, but in November, Greene dramatically announced her plan to resign from the House this month. Now she has claimed to a credulous Draper that she is leaving the arena for good and returning home to marry her fiancé Brian Glenn of the far-right media outlet Real America’s Voice.
The addition of the engagement ring helps sell the story. Greene has long preached a fundamentalist view that women are the “weaker sex,” created by God as servants for men. Continuing to be more powerful and famous than her soon-to-be husband, a third-rate propagandist, is hard to square with her ideology. But Greene, like most Republicans, tends to ignore her stated beliefs when they don’t suit her ambitions. What’s more interesting than her words are her actions, namely the relentless media tour she has been on — including this New York Times profile — over the past few months. Most notably, she has appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher” and “The View,” both far cries from her usual environs of MAGA media outlets and Christian right podcasts.
By expressing contrition over her long history of trolling, which is how she rose to fame in the first place, Greene has been catching big headlines. Claiming she is “tired of the toxic politics,” she even apologized to CNN’s Dana Bash for “taking part” in the GOP’s culture of conspiracy theories and schoolyard insults that was created by Donald Trump. Her apparent remorse amounts to a shocking about-face for a woman who used to film herself screaming invectives at school shooting survivors and who dressed like a knock-off Cruella de Vil to heckle President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address in 2023.
The likelier explanation is that Greene is plotting a return, possibly to run for president in 2028. She’s betting that, after a decade of Trump, voters are finally getting fed up with the insult strategy that served her and Trump so well.
Greene’s shift is unlikely to be a true change of heart. A penitent would be far more likely to simply retreat from public life, instead of doing a full media blitz while also marrying a man whose entire job is pushing far-right lies and conspiracy theories. The likelier explanation is that Greene is plotting a return, possibly to run for president in 2028. She’s betting that, after a decade of Trump, voters are finally getting fed up with the insult strategy that served her and Trump so well — that even Republican voters are sick of all the mud-slinging, and are ready to back a candidate who keeps serving all the red meat far-right politics, but without the childish behavior. That the era of the MAGA troll is finally over.
Looking at the MAGA movement from an outside perspective, that might seem preposterous. The coalition has always been fueled by trolling and a desire to “trigger the liberals,” but never more than now. The influencers winning the online traffic wars on the right are increasingly those who are willing to say the most vile things: using racial slurs, denying the Holocaust, praising Adolf Hitler and peddling conspiracy theories so preposterous they fall apart given a moment’s thought. Meanwhile, much of the White House staff models itself on Trump’s trolling, from Vice President JD Vance trading insults with progressives on X to deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller blaming “third world” immigrants for an alleged post-1960s slow-down of technological advances and a lack of new Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra movies. Miller seems unaware that the internet, which he used for his rant, is a post-1960s creation, and that Martin and Sinatra died of old age, not immigration. For his part, Vance is going all-in on trolling as his 2028 presidential strategy.
But from a distance, there’s a reason to think Greene has a point. The race to the bottom in MAGA circles now looks very much like people locked in an increasingly desperate struggle for diminishing returns.
Getting attention by triggering the liberals is a lot harder than it used to be. Back in 2020, you could score some outrage from progressives with a snooty “all lives matter” meme or telling feminists to settle for marrying Republican men. Now, getting a reaction often means dropping the N-word on video, declaring that women should lose the right to vote or categorically accusing LGBTQ+ people of “grooming” children for sexual abuse. Before his death, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was frequently lambasted by his online media competitors who often saw him as too moderate. But he too was engaging in sickening rhetoric that included denouncing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as “awful,” and telling girls they don’t need an education and should instead “submit to your husband.”
This escalation continues to provoke reactions, but it also seems to be alienating a huge chunk of voters that the GOP needs. Republicans are gearing up for massive midterm losses in November, with a desultory vibe that suggests it will be far worse than the usual shift away from the president’s party. Trump’s approval ratings continue to slide downhill. Even the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, who spent September praising Kirk and arguing that Democrats should pander to MAGA views, admitted last week that “[t]he Trump vibe shift is dead.”
But what will replace it? Klein argues that what comes next will be “open, friendly and assertively moral.” He sees this shift coming from Democrats like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani or Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico, a state representative who is outspoken about his progressive Christianity.
Greene appears to believe she can put a conservative spin on these same vibes. She is not backing down from her right-wing views on policy, and just this month she introduced a radical bill that would criminalize doctors who provide medically recommended gender-affirming care for transgender youth. But Greene appears to believe that if she sells these inhumane policies with a humble demeanor and language about “having a sincere Christian faith,” it will win over voters who are turned off by crass language.
Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Sign up for her free newsletter, Standing Room Only, now also on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
I’m more skeptical. I agree with Greene’s apparent belief that people are finally getting sick of all the showy MAGA cruelty. But it’s not at all clear to me that the public is ready to return to George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” which pretended that hate was okay as long as you called it “love.” The GOP swerve toward trolling isn’t just an artifact of Trump’s odious personality. In my 2018 book “Troll Nation,” I argued that the right embraced trolling because they simply ran out of other options. They can no longer persuade most people of their validity of their policies and ideas; the left has conclusively won the argument on questions ranging from “is racism bad?” to “is climate change real?” Trolling, I argued, is all they have left.
Having no ability to defend their views on the merits, conservatives instead turned to a nihilistic rhetoric. Instead of trying to win on facts and reason, the right decided to turn the left’s correctness on the issues into a liability. They painted progressives as know-it-all nerds that need to be taken down a peg. Being wrong on the merits turned into a badge of pride under Trump, a way to stick it to all those liberals who annoy you by being right about everything. Sure, climate change is real — but, the MAGA movement promised, you should blow coal smoke in liberal faces as punishment for making you feel bad about it.
After a decade of Trumpism, it does feel that trolling is losing some of its vengeful pleasure, especially as real world problems just keep getting worse on Trump’s watch. With him as a leader, the right was able to distract enough voters by propping up liberals as these annoying nerds to whom you really want to give a wedgie. But they still don’t have an answer for their deeper issue, which is that the public really hates right-wing policies. Loathing Democrats for perceived sanctimony is all the GOP has. Running candidates who are even more sanctimonious — but about Christian right policies — isn’t going to make Republicans more popular.
Trump worked for so long because he made people feel good about being bad. He gave voters permission not to care about equality, the environment or showing basic decency to others. It was fun for a lot of people for a long time. Hopefully, that mirth is starting to wear thin. But the right has no idea what else to offer voters, and Marjorie Taylor Greene sure isn’t smart enough to figure that out.
Read more
about this topic
