Marjorie Taylor Greene attends a news conference on the Epstein Files Transparency Act on Tuesday.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/The Associated Press
Suddenly American political experts are wondering whether a three-term congresswoman from a bridge-shaped district bordering both Alabama and Tennessee is the canary in the coal mine of the modern Republican Party.
She is Marjorie Taylor Greene, the battle-hardened defender of Donald Trump who in a matter of days was transformed into an unlikely but unabashed symbol of Republican resistance to the 47th President. And now that she’s resigning the Georgia seat she has held since 2021 and disavowing the politics of division that she personified with virtuosity and vigour, the future of the MAGA movement is both muddled – and oddly clarified.
Muddled – because the decision by Ms. Greene, who in recent days has defied Mr. Trump with characteristic flamboyance, has raised questions about the fragility of the MAGA movement as the Republican Party girds for next year’s midterm congressional elections amid sobering poll results.
Clarified – because, with her pressure on Mr. Trump to release documents related to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and then with her high-profile fight with the President, whom she once defended with unflagging passion, the realization that the GOP eventually must go forward without Mr. Trump at its helm has come into sharp relief with astonishing speed.
Thus, the questions prompted by the fevered past several weeks are far broader than the political destiny of Ms. Greene, who has attracted far more attention in three terms in the House of Representatives than John F. Kennedy, who eight years later became president, managed in a roughly similar-length period from 1947 to 1953.
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That is the significance of her rebellion, and then of Mr. Trump’s characterization of her as Marjorie “Traitor” Greene and his dismissal of her, saying, on his Truth Social platform, “all I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!”
The President may have argued that her resignation, scheduled for Jan. 5 – just after she qualifies for generous congressional pension benefits – is “great news for the country.” But it likely is not great news for MAGA, for it shines an unforgiving light on the widening fissures, over issues ranging from AI to overseas engagement, in the movement Mr. Trump began and twice rode to the White House.
There are increasing numbers of isolated but high-profile Trump-affiliated lawmakers wandering, and in some cases bolting, from MAGA orthodoxy.
Some of these rebellions are over the strains Mr. Trump’s policies have caused for his core constituencies, including blue-collar and middle-income voters who, with various degrees of enthusiasm, supported a populist idiom that appealed to their resentment of the prerogatives of the wealthy and the professional elites and to their concerns about job insecurity and food and housing prices.
Nearly a year into his second term, according to the University of Michigan’s respected consumer sentiment survey, almost half of middle-income respondents said their financial situation has worsened. In her latest report, survey director Joanne Hsu wrote that “consumers remain frustrated about the persistence of high prices and weakening incomes.”
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Other MAGA-allied Republican lawmakers are troubled that the President’s policies cutting Obamacare subsidies injure the very people his movement attracted to march under the MAGA standard. As they face 2026 re-election battles, these officials worry that their ties to Mr. Trump will hurt more than help their prospects.
Some of them, including Ms. Greene, have expressed concern about how the administration’s health care proposals are incongruous with the rhetoric of the MAGA movement. Some of them have come to distrust the White House theorists whose ideas about limited government have meant limited service to the movement’s constituents. And many of them believe Mr. Trump’s initial resistance to the release of the Epstein documents is at odds with his anti-elitist profile.
Moreover, the glittery and gaudy White House dinner for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia on Nov. 18 was not in keeping with the movement’s distrust of elites and was incongruous for the kind of populist leader the President presented as his electoral profile.
Ms. Greene sought to place herself on the moral high ground with her break from Mr. Trump in her demand for the release of the Epstein papers.
“Standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men,” she said, “should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the President of the United States, whom I fought for.”
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And yet in the short term, the dispute between Mr. Trump and Ms. Greene – whose Senate aspirations the President refused to support – shows that even though his grip on the movement may be weakening, he continues to have substantial influence.
“This fight underlines the power that Trump still retains,” Alexander Hinton, a cultural anthropologist at Rutgers University who has studied MAGA for years, said in an interview. “Even someone who is hardcore MAGA – and Marjorie Taylor Greene is arguably more MAGA than Trump himself – can’t break the one rule of MAGA: Don’t cross the boss. She crossed the boss and she’s out.”
But, Prof. Hinton argued, “There is no MAGA without Trump, and once he’s gone, it will somehow dissipate.”
Ms. Greene – who said, “I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better” – cast herself as being thrust out of MAGA, adding that her expulsion was symbolic of how “many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well.”
As she contemplates her future, Ms. Green may be channelling Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion: “What is to become of me?”
Ms. Greene also clearly is saying, as Eliza did, that Mr. Trump had “no right to take away my character.” Her reflections, which include the statement “my self-worth is not defined by a man,” may also match this passage from the Shaw play:
Eliza Doolittle: “You wanted me back only to put up with your tempers, and pick up your slippers, and fetch and carry for you.”
Professor Henry Higgins: “I haven’t said I want you back at all.”