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Marjorie Taylor Greene is many things. Unpredictable, unrelenting, and defiant are just a few terms that come to mind when describing the Georgia congresswoman. But the one thing MTG surely is not is scared.
“I’m not going to stand there and keep talking the talking points when my own adult children can hardly afford health insurance premiums,” stated MTG while wearing a big, bright USA-flag sweater during a Tuesday appearance on Real America’s Voice. “I don’t see why the government needs to be shut down. If Republicans learned to govern, they can open up the government and we can get back to work for the American people.”
While the majority of President Donald Trump’s best foot soldiers are busy casting blame on Democrats for the government shutdown that is now creeping into its second full week, MTG is finding her own, unique voice and pointing her finger at the two foremost Republicans in Congress. “I’m not putting the blame on the president,” MTG told CNN on Thursday. “I’m actually putting the blame on the Speaker and Leader Thune in the Senate. This should not be happening.”
Greene’s comments are just one of a recent string of critical statements regarding AIPAC, Jeffrey Epstein, and health-insurance premiums that have exposed a major, widening rift in Trump’s so-called populist political movement. As House Speaker Mike Johnson claims it is Democrats who refuse to reopen the government, Greene has used the shutdown as an opportunity to highlight the failure of Republicans to seek consensus and lead the way forward on a host of issues plaguing the American public.
Asked if she believes Johnson is stalling a return to Congress to delay a procedural vote on the release of the Epstein files, Greene said she couldn’t conclusively state whether that is the case. But MTG did condemn Johnson for refusing to swear in Democratic Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva more than two weeks after her special election victory in Arizona’s 7th Congressional District.
“If it’s to avoid the discharge petition, why drag this out?” MTG pondered during her appearance on CNN. “That is going to have 218 signatures.” Speaking later with NewsNation, MTG admitted she has never received more pressure from constituents than on the push to release the Epstein files. “There has not been another issue where I have ever received more pressure than that one, and I’m pretty much shocked by it,” MTG said. “I think when it comes to women being raped, especially when they were 14 years old, that’s pretty black and white.”
MTG’s support for the release of the Epstein files has ruffled the feathers of Trump who at one time was friendly with the convicted sex trafficker. Though Trump has argued he kicked Epstein out of his Mar-A-Lago estate upon learning of the late financier’s sex crimes, photo evidence of the pair living the high life over the years has done little to thwart suggestions that the two were closer than advertised.
Trump is desperate to keep the files from being released, a reality that became evident when Johnson recessed the House early in late July to avoid Democratic-backed motions related to the Epstein files. Instead of spending time in their districts, Johnson and a cadre of Republican Congresspeople then boarded a plane and visited Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, a vacation that did not go unnoticed by MAGA voters or Greene herself who is now among the loudest Republican critics of the Trump administration’s support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Greene’s decision to buck Trump’s desire to bury the messy Epstein affair has created a fault line with the White House. “What’s going on with Marjorie?” Trump reportedly asked two senior Republicans according to sources with direct knowledge of recent conversations. What’s going on with Marjorie is plain to see for anyone on the right who is willing to remove their MAGA-drunk goggles for even one second. MTG answered the president’s question in a recent interview.
“I’m not some sort of blind slave to the president, and I don’t think anyone should be,” MTG said. “I serve in Congress. We’re a separate branch of the government, and I’m not elected by the president. I’m not elected by anyone that works in the White House. I’m elected by my district. That’s who I work for, and I got elected without the president’s endorsement, and, you know, I think that has served me really well.”
Serving the people of her own district is what makes MTG distinctly different from the preponderance of Republicans and Democrats who line the lobby-ridden hallways of Washington, DC. MTG is taking calls from common people, the likes of whom inserted Trump into office in the first place with the hopes that he could break the impenetrable fourth wall of American government.
Trump, so far, has failed to live up to those promises. As the 47th president drones on and on about how he’s vanquished inflation, and how gas prices are plunging, and how he’s making a dent in the prices of an “old-fashioned” term called groceries, the American people are on their last leg. Credit scores are falling at the fastest pace since the Great Depression. Google searches for “help with mortgage” haven’t been this high since 2009. As gold, silver, the stock market, and a plethora of useless cryptocurrencies continue to record record highs, the average Joe, the men and women in the trenches of America who are now using Klarna to purchase groceries with payment plans, are not seeing the returns on Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again.
“Prices have not come down, that is a reality,” Greene told CNN. “People’s wages have not gone up, that’s another reality. So Americans are continuing to have a very difficult time getting by. I’ll go a step further, I’m a mom, so when it comes to what is affecting my adult children’s lives who are 22, 26, and 28, I’m going to be 1000 percent fighting for them over any politician and any party. I can tell you right now, they are barely making it and they’re very hopeless for their future.”
Speaking of unmanageable prices for Americans, MTG also pointed to the raging debate around healthcare costs in the United States which threaten to leave many of our countrymen either without coverage or struggling to pay premiums on the care they do receive. “I’m getting phone calls from people that are saying if the ACA tax credits expire, they aren’t gonna be able to have health insurance,” MTG admitted to CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer. “They’re going to have to drop it."
As Johnson attempts to pin the blame on Democrats who he argues just want healthcare for illegal aliens, MTG is pointing to the real source of contention in our America—the high cost of living for legal Americans and the failure of Republicans, who were voted in to solve such a crisis, to address the widening gap between the haves and the have nots.
“I don’t think it’s good advice that Republicans ignoring the health insurance crisis is going to be good for Midterms,” Greene told CNN. “I think that not staying focused on America First policies is detrimental as well.” Losing sight of the America First message that drove Trump into the Oval Office for two terms is part of the reason the president is experiencing some of the worst polling numbers in the history of the American presidency.
As The American Conservative’s Executive Director Curt Mills noted during his appearance on Tim Pool’s podcast earlier this week, the bombardment of Gaza by Israel and Trump’s willing involvement, represents “the whole political capital of the administration right now.” As Americans, especially young Americans, drift further and further away from the ideological cause of Israel, Greene has also become more animated in her insistence that America’s disruptive role in Middle East affairs and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people is out of line with the messaging that delivered Trump the White House.
“The relentless bombing of the Palestinian people,” MTG said on Wednesday, “many of them have just been innocent people. They’re not Hamas. They’re literally women and children. And you can’t unseen the amount of pictures and videos of children that have been blown to pieces and they’re finding them dead in the rubble, those aren’t actors, that isn’t fake war propaganda, it’s very real.”
From her opinions on rising healthcare and grocery costs to Epstein and the chaos in the Middle East, Greene is carving out a voice that is uniquely her own and separate from the Trump Oval Office. Ironically enough, it’s Greene who sounds more in line with the concerns of everyday Americans than the sleepy president who promised he would be a vessel for their helpless cries.
“Let’s take off our Democrat jerseys, let’s take off our Republican jerseys, and do something responsible for the American people,” Greene told CNN’s Manu Raju this week. And it’s that very message of unity, for all the American people, that is the great driving force that can propel our country to live up to its greatest promises. The vast majority of Americans, the ones who don’t spend every waking hour trolling Democrats in the pain palace formerly known as Twitter, are desperate for the kind of policy that impacts their day to day lives. Greene, for all her missteps in the past, has found that lane—the lost highway of real MAGA. Here’s hoping she can steer Trump and his merry band of high pranksters in the right direction, the one that leads back to America, the heartland, and her people most in need.