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You can tell something — or someone — is getting to Donald Trump when his insults start getting lame. “The only reason Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown (Green turns Brown under stress!) went BAD is that she was JILTED by the President of the United States,” he posted on Truth Social on Monday, after former Maga maximalist Marjorie Taylor Greene told CBS’s 60 Minutes that fellow members of Congress make fun of the president behind his back.
“Certainly not the first time she has been jilted!)” Trump continued, showing off his trademark respectfulness towards women. “Her ideas are, NOW, really BAD — She sort of reminds me of a Rotten Apple!”
Not his best work. But probably easier for Trump to call the firebrand congresswoman from Georgia a rotten apple than to admit what she really represents: a newly sprouted and very bothersome thorn in his side who is not afraid of making him look bad in public (and indeed on television, the place he holds most sacrosanct).
“I will be no one’s battered wife,” Greene told 60 Minutes, repeating a phrase she used in last month’s announcement that she would resign from Congress in January. This followed Trump withdrawing his support for her and labelling her a “ranting lunatic” who was calling him every day. “I won’t allow the system to abuse me any more.”
She didn’t hold back on her criticisms of Trump during the interview, as well as revealing that his response to her getting death threats was “extremely unkind”, and saying that “it would shock people” to hear how some Republicans talk about him when he’s not there. She called him out on passing a crypto bill that merely “helped out the crypto donors”, listed all the people he had been cavorting with while describing her as a “traitor”, and accused him of siding with “neocons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, military industrial war complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class”.
Greene used to be one of Trump’s most devoted and pugnacious foot soldiers. She backed his claims that the 2020 election was stolen and compared him to Jesus Christ when he was convicted of paying hush money to a porn star. “The man that I worship is also a convicted felon,” the ardent Christian said at a campaign rally last year (where does one even start?).
But her commitment to the Make America Great Again movement was always more fervent than that of Trump, who treats Maga more as a personal slogan to sell merch with than a true doctrine requiring anything so inconvenient as ideological purity. In fact, last year I argued that Greene was too Maga for the president, who failed to stick up for her when she was booed in Congress after trying to oust the Republican speaker over a bipartisan deal that she felt did not go far enough on conservative priorities such as border security.
When CBS anchor Lesley Stahl asked Greene whether she was still Maga, she replied that she was “America first”. But it is her uncompromising dedication to some of the things that the movement was meant to represent — staying out of wars overseas, prioritising domestic economic issues over foreign affairs, sticking up for the common man rather than for wealthy elites — that have led her to where she is now. She has proposed stopping military aid to Israel, criticised the strikes on Iran and repeatedly called out Trump for his failure to release the files pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein.
You need not forgive Greene for the “toxic politics”, the insane conspiracy theorising or the many antisemitic comments to acknowledge that she has courage in standing up to Trump in such a public fashion. When Stahl asked whether Republicans’ deference to the president was driven by fear that they might also receive death threats she replied that “they’re terrified to step out of line and get a nasty Truth Social post on them”. This seems about right and says something about the pathetic nature of the current moment.
Greene has shown no such fear. Given Trump’s frequent sexist comments, as well as his promotion of many glamorous women, standing up to him in this way feels particularly gutsy coming from a woman who does not fit into the Trumpian mould of former TV anchors and models. Jimmy Kimmel once called her a “Hulk Hogan-headed honey-baked ham and legs” (one can imagine the response if he had said the same thing about a Democrat woman).
You might not like her politics but you surely have to admire her thick skin and her boldness. Even if her resignation is a career move, as many have suggested, she is presumably not alone in noticing that Trump only has another three years. Others could have made similar manoeuvres: MTG just happens to be the only one who has the balls.
jemima.kelly@ft.com
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