“What I’ve been doing is being just completely honest in my statements,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said in mid-October. She was sitting beside the comedian Tim Dillon, during a taping of “The Tim Dillon Show,” a kind of Joe Rogan lite that recently featured Senator Bernie Sanders. It was a warmup of sorts for appearances that she’d soon make on center-left talk shows—“Real Time with Bill Maher,” “The View”—during a lengthy government shutdown that Greene blamed on her fellow-Republicans. She wore knee-high black leather boots, a jean jacket, and a solemn expression. Dillon had just asked Greene why she was suddenly saying things that resonated with a wider range of people, “including liberals.”

Liberals have had little to console them in the past year, and it was perplexing that one small bright spot was Greene, the MAGA congresswoman from Georgia. Since her arrival in Congress, in 2021, Greene’s initials have become as recognizable as those of the late liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—who Greene falsely alleged, a year before Ginsburg’s death, had been replaced by a body double. “MTG” is the title of a 2023 memoir by Greene, released by Donald Trump, Jr.,’s publishing house, and her initials appear on merchandise marketed to both her fans and critics: “MTG IS MY SPIRIT ANIMAL,” “DEFUND MTG,” “OMG MTG WTF.” It’s also the name of a hagiographic song by the MAGA rapper Forgiato Blow, in whose music video Greene appears steely-eyed sitting on the back of a lowrider and on a throne. “A real businesswoman, A.O.C.’s a featherweight,” Blow raps. “A southern belle, a little hood: watch her shake and bake.”

“I don’t care what occupation you have in life,” Kevin McCarthy, the former Speaker of the House, told me recently. “When people know you by a three-letter acronym, you’ve really built a following.” Even before entering Congress, Greene gained notoriety for espousing various conspiracy theories: that the Rothschilds had used solar generators in space that triggered wildfires, and that a cabal of liberal élites was eating the flesh of children. After joining Congress, she called Democrats “the party of pedophiles,” and, as some Americans fretted over the possibility of an impending civil war, she demanded a “national divorce.” John Cowan, a neurosurgeon in northwest Georgia whom Greene beat for the Republican nomination in her district, has called her Empty G, a homophone for her initials which captures a persistent belief in her vacuity.

Late last year, Greene earned a new name: traitor. In July, she’d become the first Republican in Congress to describe the killing in Gaza as a “genocide.” In August, referring to the G.O.P., she told the Daily Mail, “The course that it’s on, I don’t want to have anything to do with it.” In October, she sided with Democrats pushing to extend subsidies to the Affordable Care Act, writing on X, “No I’m not towing the party line on this, or playing loyalty games. . . . I’m carving my own lane.” She told Tucker Carlson that Republicans “are literally slaves to all the big industries in Washington.” She described Speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership during the shutdown as “basically pathetic.” (Johnson characterized their relationship as one of “intense fellowship.”) Trump’s adviser Dan Scavino unfollowed her on X.

“She had no interest in politics,” a Georgia G.O.P. operative said. “She obviously never studied history. And she’s speaking to a lot of people who don’t know history.” He went on, “You may think she’s a moron, but she gets where people are on things.”Photograph by Elijah Nouvelage / Getty

During his 2024 campaign, Trump had expressed a willingness to release files related to the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and sexual predator. Then, back in office, he reneged. Greene was among a small but strident group of Republicans in Congress who refused to move on. “The truth needs to come out, and the government holds the truth,” she said, in September. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer called Greene “courageous.” Whoopi Goldberg, on “The View,” labelled her “the voice of reason.” “I never thought that I would say this,” Bernie Sanders said, “but you have somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene saying, ‘You know what? I was elected by my constituents. That’s who I’m beholden to, not the President of the United States.’ ” Trump, for his part, called her “Marjorie Traitor Brown.” During the fallout, she announced that she was resigning from Congress, effective on January 5th. It’s not clear what her future holds. “It’s all so absurd and completely unserious,” Greene wrote, in her resignation letter, referring to current politics in Washington. She imagined Trump supporting her opponents in her next primary: “I have too much self-respect and dignity to defend the president against impeachment after he hatefully dumped tens of millions of dollars against me and tried to destroy me.”

On Dillon’s show, Greene questioned Trump’s approach to deportations (“That needs to be a smarter plan”), the recent U.S. bailout of Argentina (“Huh?”), and the priorities of his base (“I don’t think those people are being served”). She was, she said, no longer willing to “wear the Republican jersey.” Dillon suggested that Greene might run for President in 2028. “Oh, my goodness, I hate politics so much, Tim,” Greene replied.

“I know, but you are a congresswoman.”

“Well, I’ve seen a few people saying, ‘She’s running,’ ” Greene continued. “What I’m doing right now is I very much want to fix problems. And I am genuinely angry on behalf of every American, even if they’re a Democrat.”

“Marjorie Taylor Greene, ladies and gentlemen, our next President,” Dillon said, in closing. “Sorry, J. D. Vance.”

Betting markets soon opened on Greene’s leaving the Republican Party and, separately, on her being the Republican Presidential nominee in 2028. For a time, in the latter, she trailed only Vance and Marco Rubio in the odds. The right-wing activist Laura Loomer denounced her repeatedly on X: “Never seen a more opportunistic woman before.” Josh McKoon, the chairman of the Republican Party of Georgia, told me that he thought Greene’s publicity tour was canny. “There’s a debate about the direction of the Republican Party going forward,” he said. “Someone who has a broader footprint and has introduced themselves to more voters, I think, will have more to say about what that future looks like.” But, McKoon confessed, he wasn’t entirely sure what M.T.G. was up to. All he knew, he said, “is if she believes it, she’s going to share it.”

Greene grew up in Cumming, Georgia, a mostly white community northeast of Atlanta. Her father ran a construction company, Taylor Commercial, and dabbled in pseudoscience. He once published an essay called “The Taylor Effect,” in which he claims to have discovered “an undeniable correlation” between stock-market prices and “the relative positions of the sun, earth, and moon.” Her childhood included water skiing, “Thriller” watch parties, and serving as the manager of the school soccer team. “She was a good girl,” Leslie Hamburger, a friend from that time, recently recalled. “She was popular, but she was very focussed on getting good grades. I think she ran for class president, but I don’t think she won.” Another student brought a gun to school—“He took our entire school hostage,” Greene later said—but no one was hurt. Greene became the first person in her family to graduate from college, at the University of Georgia, where she married a tall, business-minded classmate named Perry Greene, with whom she raised three kids in the Atlanta suburbs.

By her late thirties, though, Greene seemed unmoored. Around 2012, she went to work at a CrossFit gym owned by James Cox Chambers, Jr., the grandson of an Atlanta billionaire named Anne Cox Chambers. He was a passionate socialist—another gym of his barred “cops, active military, landlords, and capitalists.” Greene, meanwhile, had recently been baptized at an Atlanta-area megachurch. During the ceremony, she’d read from the Bible about martyrdom. She seemed, to Chambers, like a “wealthy housewife who was a little bored.”

Greene invited Chambers to her family’s large home, north of Atlanta, and, elsewhere, he watched her “drink liquor poolside,” he recalled, “hanging out with dudes who worked at the gym, avoiding her husband.” I learned that two of those men had affairs with Greene. One of them, Craig Ivey, now refers to himself, on X, as “the polyamorous tantric sex guru.” (Ivey declined to comment for this piece.) A former roommate of Ivey’s from this period told me that Greene made little small talk on her way up to Ivey’s room. The other man with whom Greene had an affair around this time told me that she “never talked politics” and didn’t seem to have career ambitions. The relationship lasted a few months. After they split, Greene texted him: “You make me feel like the only reason why you ‘invested’ in me was because I had sex with you. And now your washing your hands of me.” (I was the first to report the affairs, which prompted Greene to text me, of the piece, “If we have another toilet paper shortage, I wouldn’t wipe my ass with it.” She copied her attorney, Lin Wood, who said that the story was “intended to smear her with false accusations, half-truths, misrepresentations, out-of-context statements, and agenda driven lies.” Wood subsequently turned on Greene, calling her “a communist.”)

She remained married until 2022, when her husband filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. She is now engaged to Brian Glenn, a correspondent for the far-right Real America’s Voice TV network, who is, like her, an enthusiastic consumer of raw milk.

In 2021, the House voted to strip her of her committee appointments over various troubling remarks, including her skepticism that a plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.Photograph by Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty

Chambers found Greene’s behavior noteworthy only in light of her professed Christianity. During the time they knew each other, she didn’t seem to mind his revolutionary politics. “I never heard anything of a political nature from her,” he said. Fitness was her focus. Greene, who is about five feet two, was able to deadlift three hundred pounds, and in 2015 she finished sixty-second in the world among her age group at the CrossFit Games. “She was fit,” Chambers said. “But not some great talent. It was just how she was getting her rocks off.” Chambers thought that she’d end up “trying to get her team to Southeast Regionals.”

Instead, she went online. She found an audience there, and it grew as she embraced ideas affiliated with the far right. Between 2017 and 2019, writing on social media and for sites such as American Truth Seekers, she claimed that the Clintons were complicit in the murder of journalists, that Barack Obama was conspiring with North Korea, and that a mass shooting was secretly intended to prompt increased gun control. She endorsed the then nascent QAnon conspiracy theory, which fixated on the idea that the world was run by a global pedophile ring, and that Q, an anonymous insider, was working with Trump to overthrow it. In October of 2017, Greene said, “Q is a Patriot.” Referring to Trump’s Presidency, she added, “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to take this Global Cabal of Satan worshiping pedophiles out.” In 2018, responding to a Facebook comment about hanging Hillary Clinton and Obama, Greene replied, “Stage is being set. Players are being put in place. We must be patient.” (She later said that someone else had been managing her account.) In a YouTube video that year, she blamed the Clintons for the 1999 plane crash that killed J.F.K., Jr.

Greene showed a taste for spectacle. She filed a petition to impeach Nancy Pelosi. She filmed herself hectoring David Hogg, a teen-age survivor of the Parkland school shooting, and admonishing participants in a Drag Queen Story Hour at a local library. “You’re, like, ‘Gee, I wonder if that is going to work,’ ” McKoon, the Georgia G.O.P. chairman, told me. Years before, on a WordPress blog, Greene had reportedly described having “negative thoughts” and wishing she had a “switch to turn [them] off.” With political theatrics, she seemed to have found it. On Law Enforcement Today, a police-owned media outlet to which Greene contributed, her bio described her as “a proud Whiskey Patriot, entrepreneur, business owner, writer, commentator, speaker, defender of the Second Amendment, shooting enthusiast, CrossFit athlete, wife, and mother redeemed through grace.” (Greene declined to speak to me for this story. A spokesperson, presented with a list of the story’s assertions, said, “This appears to be nothing besides a slanderous hit piece,” adding, “I would encourage you to cancel this story, as nearly every statement that you have set forth is untrue.”)

In early 2019, Greene visited the U.S. Capitol with a group of gun-rights activists. She was turned away by Republican senators. But the group did meet Thomas Massie, a congressman from Kentucky, who would become a friend. “She handed me her card and said she was going to run for office,” Massie told me.

“I wanted to show you how silly you look when you go out.”

Cartoon by Elisabeth McNair

That spring, a campaign consultant in the Atlanta area received a call from Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. “He says, ‘I have this lady who asked me about running for office,’ ” the consultant told me. (Raffensperger declined to comment.) Greene soon hobbled into the consultant’s office on crutches—a CrossFit injury, apparently. She made the consultant’s “spidey sense” go off, he recalled, saying that he detected volatility. She excitedly showed him the Hogg video. “It was silly,” the consultant said. “He was an eighteen-year-old kid. But she thought it was important.”

The consultant kept listening, though. “She had a kind of Batman complex,” he said. “Seeing herself as uniquely positioned to save America.” She wanted to represent a district in North Atlanta, where she lived. This was going to be tough: its residents, diverse and well educated, seemed likely to recoil from disparaging remarks she had made about Muslims, among other things. Economic arguments, the consultant asserted, would be more effective with these voters. Her family’s construction business, which Greene’s father had sold, in the two-thousands, to Greene and her husband at the time, presented an opportunity. There was a potential downside, however, to highlighting the company: it had built low-income public housing. “She was connected to government money,” the consultant said. “How do you answer for that?” Still, he decided that it was worth the risk. “I told her, in any way that’s intellectually defensible, tie yourself with that company.”

The consultant said that, when they’d first met, Greene wasn’t mentioned on Taylor Commercial’s website. “So she went back and retroactively added her professional criteria there,” he went on. “Puffed it up.” For a few years, the company listed her in filings as its C.F.O. “She may have technically been an officer in paperwork filed with the secretary of state, but she was just not involved,” he told me. “She just wasn’t a businessperson.”

After two months or so, the consultant cut ties with Greene, who’d been ignoring his guidance. He had crafted and timed a campaign announcement for her, but, days before it was scheduled, she revealed her candidacy on a radio show that was about to go off the air, blindsiding him. “There was no website live,” he recalled. “No infrastructure. No media coverage. Seven people were listening. I was pissed.”

That December, Greene pivoted to the Fourteenth Congressional District, a conservative region of northwest Georgia. Trump had won by fifty-three points there in 2016, and Greene’s paranoid pugnacity seemed like a good fit, if voters could stomach an outsider. “The conventional wisdom was that it’s going to be really hard for her in northwest Georgia,” McKoon told me. “You think, People are only gonna elect one of their own.”

Greene faced eight men in the primary, including Cowan, the neurosurgeon. But she had a financial advantage: she gave more than a million dollars to her own campaign. Cowan blew up a watermelon with an assault rifle in one ad. But Greene went further, appearing in her own advertisement holding a rifle beside images of the leftist lawmakers known as the Squad. She won. In her victory speech, wearing a bright-red dress with flared shoulders, she assailed the fake-news media, the political establishment, Antifa, B.L.M., cultural Marxists, and George Soros. Katie Dempsey, a state representative, was with Greene when Trump called to congratulate her. “He talked more than she did,” Dempsey told me. “She was just smiling.” In the general election, Greene took seventy-five per cent of the vote; by then, her Democratic opponent, reeling from a freshly filed divorce, had fled to his parents’ home, in Indiana.

Eleven days later, Greene was in D.C., filming herself doing burpees on the carpeted floor of a hotel room. The pandemic was under way, and she was making a political statement against lockdown orders. “In DC, NOTHING is open bc of Democrat tyrannical control,” she wrote. Commenters pointed out that multiple gyms were open nearby, including one right around the corner from her hotel.

Greene arrived in Congress eager to impress Trump. On Joe Biden’s first full day in office, she filed an article of impeachment against him. (She later described Biden in her memoir as “a criminal sitting in the White House.”) She co-sponsored the English Language Unity Act, which would have made English the official language of the U.S.; the Old Glory Only Act, which would have banned the flying of Pride flags at U.S. embassies; and the Fire Fauci Act, which sought to fire Anthony Fauci. The bills captured her feelings-oriented approach to legislation. Last year, the Center for Effective Lawmaking ranked Greene the two-hundred-and-seventh most effective G.O.P. lawmaker in Congress, out of two hundred and twenty-eight. But legislating may not have been the point. This past January, she introduced the Gulf of America Act, announcing, “It’s our gulf.”

Like Trump, Greene seemed to relish trolling people, or at least the attention it elicited. In 2021, the House voted to strip her of her committee appointments, over various troubling remarks, including her skepticism that a plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. Her office subsequently put out a press release calling her “one of the most talked about Republicans on Capitol Hill.” The talk seemed suboptimal. The CrossFit brand formally condemned Greene for spreading “loathsome and dangerous lies.” (A former competitor told me, “She was always nice and pleasant. It’s weird to see who she’s become.”) Twitter suspended her account for spreading vaccine misinformation. The next month, she attended a conference put on by the white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Mitt Romney called her a “kook,” and the Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger called her “insane.”

Before entering Congress, Greene, who is about five feet two, was able to deadlift three hundred pounds. In 2015, she finished sixty-second in the world among her age group at the CrossFit Games.Photograph by Scott Olson / Getty

Greene had backed away from QAnon early in her term. “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” she said. But she was not chastened. She soon instigated a shouting match with House Democrats, including Debbie Dingell, on the Capitol steps. “I don’t agree with her much, but she is not afraid to get into anybody’s face to express her viewpoint,” Dingell told me. Greene’s approach paid off. In her first year, she raised more than seven million dollars without corporate PAC support. By 2022, she and Trump were discussing the possibility of her being his future running mate.

Scott Perry, a former chair of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, which Greene joined, praised her as “a voice for regular working people.” Noting Greene’s fixations—including, say, lewd photos that were retrieved from Hunter Biden’s laptop—he told me, “They might be seen as vulgar. But this is the reality of what real life is all about—what the American people need to know. If you don’t like it, well, you need to have a conversation with yourself about how you feel about the truth.”

Greene might have seemed like a good fit for the Freedom Caucus, but she caused problems there, too. She publicly criticized Perry for initially supporting the Respect for Marriage Act, which protected same-sex marriage. She denounced Chip Roy, of Texas, for not defending those arrested for storming the Capitol on January 6th. She called Lauren Boebert, the right-wing Republican from Colorado, “a little bitch” on the House floor. (Referring to a scandal in which Boebert was escorted out of a musical production of “Beetlejuice” for inappropriate behavior, Greene later dubbed her “vaping groping Lauren Boebert.”) One former member of the caucus, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me that Greene is “a calculated, ambitious, manipulative person” who “has no limit to her dishonesty to advance her own personal agenda,” which he believed was solely the pursuit of “influence and power.”

“The apartment’s small, but it has a Criterion Closet.”

Cartoon by Natalie Horberg

He pointed to the drawn-out vote to elect a new House Speaker, in early 2023. The Freedom Caucus had opposed Kevin McCarthy, preferring a more reliable conservative. But, on the fifteenth ballot, Greene helped to give McCarthy the post. Dingell saw Greene and Boebert arguing about this in the women’s bathroom: a source told the Daily Beast that Greene yelled at Boebert for taking millions from McCarthy and then not supporting him. (According to the book “Mad House,” by the journalists Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater, Greene also smeared Boebert to Trump, falsely telling him prior to the 2024 election that Boebert was planning to endorse Ron DeSantis. Greene has not responded to the allegation.)

Greene was booted from the caucus. But, when Congress resumed under McCarthy’s Speakership, she was appointed to the Homeland Security Committee and the House Oversight Committee. According to the Times, McCarthy told a friend, “I will never leave that woman.” McCarthy told me he actually said that Greene had “kept her word, and I’ll always keep my word to her.” He said that he never promised her anything for her support. Boebert and the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, on the other hand, had wanted favors in exchange for their votes, he said. (Neither Gaetz nor Boebert responded to requests for comment.) McCarthy came to consider Greene a good-faith actor who sometimes lacks good information. “At the beginning, she didn’t like me!” McCarthy told me. “Mark Meadows lied to her about me,” he said, claiming that Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, told Greene that McCarthy had helped to orchestrate her removal from committees in 2021. (Meadows did not respond to a request for comment.) “So she assumes certain things,” McCarthy said. “But you can break through that.”

After Trump’s reëlection, Greene was tapped to chair a House Oversight subcommittee tasked with implementing the recommendations of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. It had the ring of significance. In reality, the committee had little influence. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested that it was like “giving someone an unplugged controller.” DOGE ultimately saved less than five per cent of the two trillion dollars it aimed to cut.

Last April, I attended a town hall that Greene held in Acworth, Georgia. Standing onstage in a black dress, fiercely cheerful, she spoke about DOGE, “illegals,” and the Gulf of America. As it began, a gray-haired man yelled at Greene and was dragged out by the police. He screamed as they Tased him. A disabled former marine scuffled with police; they Tased him, too, as the crowd clapped. Nine people were ultimately removed; three were arrested. “The violence of it was so chilling,” Wendy Davis, a Democrat who ran to unseat Greene a few years ago, told me afterward. Worse, she said, was seeing “some of my neighbors, who I’d hugged moments before, cheering.” This, she suggested, was “Marjorie Taylor Greene’s version of America.”

The next month, Nick Dyer, Greene’s longest-tenured staffer, then deputy chief of staff, left her office without offering a public explanation. The timing suggested one: she would soon begin defying Trump.

In November, I stood outside the U.S. Capitol as Greene approached a microphone, looking frosty. “I woke up this morning, and I turned to my weather app to check the temperature, and it was thirty-two degrees,” she said. “And my first thought was, Hell has froze over.” D.C. was Hell, of course, and its freezing over was due to the fact that Congress finally had the votes to mandate the release of the Epstein files. Surrounded by survivors of Epstein’s predations, she assailed Trump: “He called me a traitor for standing with these women.”

If the Epstein saga wasn’t proof of the QAnon theory in its deranged specifics, it seemed to confirm the central notion: that a shadowy network of élites had preyed on children. After Epstein died by suicide in prison, in 2019, calls grew to release all material related to his case: witness testimony, financial records, correspondence with powerful people. Greene began posting about Epstein in 2020, writing, “I will do everything under my power to bring down any and ALL pedophiles.” Back in 2002, Trump had called Epstein, whom he’d long known, “a terrific guy.” In June of 2024, on Fox, he said that he’d declassify the files if reëlected, but suggested that they contained “phony stuff.” Then he’d refused.

Greene might have seemed like a good fit for the hard-right House Freedom Caucus. But she criticized Scott Perry, and called Lauren Boebert “a little bitch” on the House floor.Photograph by Tom Brenner / NYT / Redux

Greene warned that keeping the files concealed would fracture the MAGA coalition. In September, she signed on to a discharge petition, a procedural tool that would allow a vote to go forward without committee and leadership approvals. “I don’t know that Trump has anyone in his Cabinet that’s as honest with him as Marjorie,” Representative Massie, who created the petition, told me in October.

Too honest, apparently. In November, Trump told reporters, “I don’t know what happened to Marjorie.” A week later, he withdrew his support from her, writing, “All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!” Greene apparently hadn’t anticipated Trump’s fury, which manifested, she said, in an “unspeakable” text to her in response to concerns she shared about her family’s safety. “My sense is she was surprised that he turned on her,” Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman, told me.

Khanna had never known what to think about Greene. On the one hand, he’d been troubled by “the Jewish-space-laser thing,” a reference to her conspiracy theory about the Rothschilds. On the other, she was friendly with the Democratic congressman Jonathan Jackson, the son of the civil-rights icon Jesse Jackson, who ran for President as a left-wing populist in the eighties. The younger Jackson told me that Greene had chatted with his father during his swearing-in, and the two subsequently corresponded. He described Greene to me as “very kind to my father in his older age and illness. She reached out to FaceTime him on a few occasions. She liked how my father fought for the people.”

Greene helped Kevin McCarthy win the House Speakership. “I don’t care what occupation you have in life,” McCarthy said. “When people know you by a three-letter acronym, you’ve really built a following.”Photograph by Chip Somodevilla / Getty

In July, Massie reintroduced Khanna and Greene. “In the five months we interacted, I reassessed my opinion of her,” Khanna said. The three worked together to release the Epstein files. Khanna consolidated Democratic support while Massie lobbied Republicans. Greene sought Trump’s backing. “In our conversations, she was never disloyal to Trump,” Khanna told me. “She would keep maintaining, ‘I don’t think this thing is about Trump. I’m going to convince him to do the right thing, and I think he will.’ ” Eventually, Trump endorsed the files’ release, though he didn’t seem enthusiastic. “I think he realized the Senate was moving,” Khanna said. “Massie thought we had about seventy Republican votes, and Trump saw that. Imagine seventy Republicans voting in defiance of Donald Trump—that would’ve been worse for him.”

Around noon on November 18th, Greene entered the House wearing black. There were only a few other members in the chamber. She sat with Massie, Khanna, and the Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace. When her turn came, she stood to address the room. “This should have been the easiest thing for the President of the United States,” she said. In the end, the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed; only one Republican opposed it. Dingell, who had engaged in the 2021 yelling match with Greene, approached her. They hugged.

Three days later, Greene announced her resignation from Congress, in an eleven-minute video. Sitting in front of a Christmas tree, wearing white, she said that Trump would probably have orchestrated a “hurtful and hateful primary” against her. She wrote in an accompanying letter that she’d been “cast aside by MAGA, Inc.” She told her followers, “There is no plan to save the world or 4-D chess game being played.” Put in terms of her previous cosmology, there was no Q.

Theories circulated about Greene’s broader split with Trump. A G.O.P. source in D.C. pointed to her sudden criticism of Trump’s tariff and immigration policies. “It could be her ex-husband saying, ‘Costs are going up at the construction company and you’re not going to get as big of a dividend.’ ” As for her rebuke of Israel, he told me, “I think she’s fed up with there being one or two votes each month denouncing antisemitism.” In fact, he added, she’d said as much to members of the House leadership team. A longtime Georgia G.O.P. operative told me that he assumed her shift was the result of belatedly learning about the issues. “My theory is she’s not actually a dumbass anymore.”

It was also possible that her ambition had been thwarted too many times. Greene was interested in leading the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s second term—and, later, in running for the Senate. Last May, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had helped “ease” Greene away from the Senate idea with a poll showing her far behind the Democratic incumbent, Jon Ossoff. “She thought she should have been considered for Vice-President, and then she thought she should be in the Cabinet,” a prominent former G.O.P. official in Georgia told me. “They pissed all over the Senate race—so she’s not exactly felt rewarded.” Debbie Dooley, the Georgia-based president of the America First Tea Party, called Greene “a woman scorned.” Essence Johnson, the Democratic chair of Cobb County, partly in Greene’s district, said, “She’s going whichever way the wind is blowing.” Ossoff told me, “Trump is a sinking ship. If you’ve staked your identity on loyalty to Trump, there’s a fast-approaching sell-by date on that.”

On Truth Social, Trump had also threatened to support her challengers in a primary, a tactic that had pushed plenty of Republicans into retirement before. Still, Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, and Raffensperger, its secretary of state, both opposed Trump’s attempt to overturn his election loss in the state, in 2020, and were easily reëlected. “She’s entirely safe up there,” Charles S. Bullock III, a political-science professor at the University of Georgia, said. Massie argued that attacking Greene could hurt Trump. “Marjorie represents the conscience of the populist wing of the party,” he said. “Attacking her shrinks the tent.” But, for Greene, running for reëlection might have been dangerous. In mid-November, police confirmed multiple credible threats to her family—which she blamed on Trump’s attacks. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing and the firebombing of Josh Shapiro’s home, there was reason for a controversial politician to exit public life.

After Greene pushed for the release of the Epstein files, in a break with Trump, he called her “Marjorie Traitor Brown” and threatened to support her opponents in her next primary.Photograph by Elijah Nouvelage / Bloomberg / Getty

She certainly didn’t need her congressional salary. According to filings, Greene makes a million dollars a year from her family’s company and is also active in the stock market, where the value of her holdings has increased by nearly five hundred per cent since 2021. In May, the investment-research site Quiver Quantitative reported that Greene was worth around twenty-two million dollars. “If anyone can help my mom @mtgreenee locate her mysterious $22 MILLION bank account everyone keeps talking about . . . we’d really appreciate it,” her daughter Lauren posted on X. This month, Greene also becomes eligible for a congressional pension.

Greene’s departure from Congress belongs to a broader fracturing of the MAGA coalition. “There’s a real power vacuum, which everyone knew would happen when Trump eventually had to leave power,” Rachel Blum, a political-science professor at the University of Oklahoma, told me. “But it’s arriving early, and there’s a real opening for someone who can step forward and clearly articulate a vision that picks up and adds to what was attractive about Trumpism.” Coalitions can form around many things: isolationism, nationalism, immigration, antisemitism. Elon Musk, J. D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and others are all testing out variations on Trumpism. “There’s a real battle to be had between the parts of the Party that still have more traditional positions and these other figures, including Greene, who is among the better spokespeople for America First,” Blum said.

What accounts for Greene’s appeal? More than most politicians, she resembles an average voter: she has a hodgepodge of recently formed opinions that seem grounded in real belief, if not always in fact. The Georgia G.O.P. operative compared her to the President. “It’s like how Trump doesn’t know who fought in World War One,” he told me. “She kind of came into this tabula rasa. She had no interest in politics. She obviously never studied history. And she’s speaking to a lot of people who don’t know history or the context of the current American policy, either.” He went on, “You may think she’s a moron, but she gets where people are on things.”

Her choice of words often chafed Party leaders. In May, 2021, she tweeted, “Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.” Kevin McCarthy criticized her for this comment at the time, leading her to retweet someone calling him a “feckless cunt.” But he told me that she “understands and listens to the base more than a lot of elected officials.” He pointed to trans issues. After entering Congress, Greene put up a poster outside her office that read “There are TWO genders: Male & Female. ‘Trust The Science!’ ” Some of her Republican colleagues were more open to trans rights at the time—Nancy Mace said, that year, that she “strongly support[s] L.G.B.T.Q. rights and equality”—but they eventually moved toward Greene’s position. Mace has since used a trans slur, and Trump played on voters’ transphobia to help win reëlection. McCarthy described Greene to me, flatteringly, as the “canary in the coal mine” of the G.O.P.

Throughout the fall, Greene laid out her “America First, America Only” vision. It resembled the MAGA platform, but with fewer foreign, corporate, or pedophilic entanglements. The G.O.P. source in D.C. recently heard from someone in the White House that she was “thinking about running for President.” Time had reported similar whispers. Salon predicted “AOC vs. MTG” in 2028. Greene denied the rumors. Her resignation letter did not rule out the possibility of a future White House run—or a campaign for governor of Georgia, in 2026—but it set a seeming prerequisite: that “the common American people finally realize and understand that the Political Industrial Complex of both parties is ripping this country apart.” Meanwhile, Greene wrote, “I’m going back to the people I love.” She also went surfing in Costa Rica, posting on Instagram about living #puravida while writing on X that she was still “America FIRST.” In December, when heavily redacted portions of the Epstein files were released, she wrote, “Only evil people would hide this and protect those who participated.”

This fall, Greene cited her constituents to explain her break with Trump: during one week, she said, sixty per cent of the calls to her district office concerned health-insurance premiums costing too much, and the rest were about Epstein. Residents of the Fourteenth District span three thousand square miles of mostly rural Appalachia. Many do farm or factory work. Nearly one in three people in the town of Aragon lives below the poverty line. One evening in October, I picked up Garry Baldwin, an Aragon resident, from his little white house. A bespectacled octogenarian, Baldwin was working on a bathroom renovation when I’d called, minutes earlier. “Lemme throw on a clean shirt,” he’d said cheerfully. “I’ll show you around.” From 2016 to 2019, Baldwin was Aragon’s mayor. He described the mandate of the job as “keep the place halfway safe, keep people from walking off with it.” There isn’t much to walk off with, he confessed: dilapidated homes, some churches, and JC’s Snack Shack. Before taking on his nonpartisan mayoral duties, Baldwin was a security guard. His achievement as mayor, he told me, was “We didn’t go broke. I didn’t get sued.”

We passed some deer grazing in the rain and a man on a porch, who, Baldwin said, “stays in jail half the time.” A rainbow soon framed the smokestack of a defunct cotton mill. “This town lost its identity when the mill closed and nothing replaced it,” he said. “We’re stepchildren out here.” Greene had visited the area once that he knew of. “She shook hands, then left,” he said. “No help.” He didn’t much like Greene, nor did his wife. “But I can’t even get her to vote,” he said. He didn’t know what to think about Greene’s resignation: “I’m baffled like everyone else.”

Bradley Davenport, a district resident who had voted for Greene, told me, “I don’t like that she’s leaving us. She helped the conservatives in small towns that don’t have a voice.” He wanted to believe that the rumors about her future political plans were true: “She may have bigger things ahead of her. I hope so.”

Davenport and I met in rural Murray County, at one of Greene’s final appearances as a congresswoman. She was speaking at a public hearing about the proposed construction of a waste-processing facility run by Vanguard Renewables, a portfolio company of BlackRock. Locals, like Davenport, were troubled by what it would mean for their water, air, and home values. A panel of academics and Vanguard representatives tried unsuccessfully to tamp down concerns. Then Greene stood to speak. “My office has reported seven hundred and seventy-three death threats for me,” she told the crowd. “And I drove up here in my own car with my 9-millimetre.” Her constituents roared. She gestured at the expert panel: “I didn’t come in on a private plane like you guys did.”

At a press conference, Greene stood with Epstein’s victims and assailed the President, saying, “He called me a traitor for standing with these women.”Photograph by Graeme Sloan / Bloomberg / Getty

Her performance, which she later posted on X six times, was vintage M.T.G. She made ad-hominem attacks (“Some of you were dumb enough to wear dress shoes with your little farmers’ outfits,” she told the members of the panel, who had dressed in farm-casual for the occasion); she played up her construction background (“I’ve been in it my entire life”); she was vulgar (“Don’t tell us how not a single drop will never spill: that’s a bunch of bullshit”); she was populist (“This is what people are tired of . . . a big corporation coming in and taking advantage of a rural county”); and she gestured at a conspiracy involving the young man who attempted to assassinate Trump in 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania (“We’re all still wondering why Thomas Crooks, who shot Donald Trump in an ear, was on a BlackRock commercial”).

“All right, it’s y’all’s turn,” she concluded, turning to the crowd. “Give ’em hell.” For almost four more hours, until after 11 P.M., they did. But first they swarmed Greene for selfies.

It was a lovefest for a maga apostate. “Preach it, girl!” a man beside me yelled. Earlier, I’d overheard him talking to one of Greene’s aides about Trump’s feud with her. “Sometimes I think he should just shut his mouth,” the man said. Cyndie Roberson, a retired nurse, listened as the crowd begged Greene, “Don’t leave us!” Roberson is a moderate Republican who had long considered Greene “way too extreme.” Not anymore. “My husband and I said to each other, ‘Who would think that we’d fall in love with Marjorie Taylor Greene?’ ” Roberson said. “If she runs for office again, we’ll vote for her.” ♦