The Scariest Thing About Marjorie Taylor Greene

She's proof that the terrible tropes of Trumpism aren't going away.

SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty

On January 3, 2021, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was sworn into office. One month later, she was removed from all her House committee assignments. Perhaps it wasn’t a huge shock that the representative who began her political career in 2017 writing about the “Clinton Kill List” for the now-defunct blog American Truth Seekers and then ran on the lie that Democrats were part of a satanic cabal (QAnon) would have so much trouble fitting in at the storied institution.

But Greene has not had any trouble fitting into Trump’s Republican Party. If anything, she’s become one of the most prominent voices in the GOP’s antidemocratic iteration. Her permanent suspension from her personal Twitter account this week confirms as much. While Republicans with a slightly better hold on reality like Representative Adam Kinzinger and Representative Liz Cheney are called “RINOs” and subjected to death threats, Greene is celebrated on Fox News. Greene even joined Tucker Carlson on the May 5 episode of his Fox Nation streaming show, Tucker Carlson Today, to make fun of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for sharing an apartment with Republican pollster Frank Luntz, saying, “I was more curious, like, who gets the top bunk and who gets the bottom bunk.” The mere fact that Greene is a celebrity in the GOP is a pretty grim indictment of where the Republican Party is right now.

When she was stripped of her committee assignments, Greene—wearing a mask emblazoned with the phrase FREE SPEECH—gave a speech on the House floor, the gist of which was that she’d left behind QAnon and the conspiracy theories she ran on. But as The New York Times later reported, “Her contention that she broke away … does not square with a series of posts she made in 2019 and other social media activity from that time, including liking a Facebook comment that endorsed shooting Ms. Pelosi in the head and suggesting in the same year that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been replaced with a body double.”

But lack of committee assignments has not slowed Greene from her real work—largely publicity stunts and further radicalizing the Republican base. Before Twitter banned her personal account, Greene used dehumanizing language to describe Democrats, according to political scientist Brian Klaas: “Greene just referred to her political opponents as an infestation of ‘termites.’ In Rwanda’s genocide, Hutu killers referred to Tutsis as ‘cockroaches.’ Such rhetoric is the language of dehumanization and it’s extremely dangerous—and can incite political violence.”

When not using dehumanizing language, Greene is floating the idea of what she calls a “national divorce scenario.” Secession has historically been a kind of third rail in American political discourse, but Trumpism opened the door to the basest Republican instincts. If more mainstream Republicans don’t repudiate Greene’s dehumanizing and secessionist language, it will, if the last five years are any indication, get worse. Remember when Trump refused to concede the election, and one Republican official reasoned, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time … It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20”? That was more than a year ago, and now, according to an NPR/Ipsos poll, “Two-thirds of GOP respondents agree with the verifiably false claim that ‘voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.’” The road to the death of democracy is paved with Republican cowardice.

Greene has also used anti-Semitism and racism to excite and further radicalize the base. In a November 2018 Facebook post, Greene blamed the California forest fires on a Camp Fire “laser beam conspiracy theory,” which postulated that the blaze was started by a laser related to the Rothschild family. In February 2021, McCarthy needed to release the following statement: “Past comments from and endorsed by Marjorie Taylor Greene on school shootings, political violence, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories do not represent the values or beliefs of the House Republican Conference.” In May 2021, after Greene compared the House mask mandate to the Holocaust, McCarthy released another statement, which said her “intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling.”

Greene has a long history of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and racism. According to Politico, she has “suggested that Muslims do not belong in government; thinks black people ‘are held slaves to the Democratic Party’; called George Soros, a Jewish Democratic megadonor, a Nazi; and said she would feel ‘proud’ to see a Confederate monument if she were black because it symbolizes progress made since the Civil War.” Greene also engaged in a disgusting transphobic stunt.

Twitter permanently suspended Greene for “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy.” Soon after, Greene got a 24-hour suspension from Facebook (which has a much laxer misinformation policy, as the Facebook Papers made clear). Greene was quick to try and exploit the bans, posting on Jason Miller’s far-right social platform Gettr that “Facebook has joined Twitter in censoring me.” The press release from her office included the line, “Twitter is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth.” But what Greene’s Twitter ban really shows is that tech companies have a higher standard than the United States Congress.

As a freshman representative, it’s not yet clear if Greene is actually a zealot or a craven opportunist who sees an in with the conspiracy-loving base of the GOP. Like with Trump, what’s in MTG’s heart doesn’t much matter. What does matter is that her own party won’t censure her—it was Democrats, voting along partisan lines, who stripped her of committee assignments. If you need proof that Greene is simply a manifestation of where the Republican base is right now, just look at her fundraising numbers: According to Politico, in the first quarter of 2021 she raised $3.2 million from over 100,000 individual donors (that’s an average donation of $32). Minority Leader McCarthy may say that Greene doesn’t represent the GOP, but she very much does. Perhaps the scariest thing about MTG is that she is proof that many of the terrible tropes of Trumpism aren’t going away.

Molly Jong-Fast is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.