Why Is Marjorie Taylor Greene Like This?
On the ground in the Georgia congresswoman’s alternate universe
Listen to more stories on audm
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
I.
She was very late. A man named Barry was compelled to lead the room in a rendition of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” to stall for time. But when she did arrive, the tardiness was forgiven and the Cobb County Republican Party’s November breakfast was made new. She wasn’t greeted. She was beheld, like a religious apparition. Emotions verged on rapture. Later, as she spoke, one man jumped to his feet with such force that his chair fell over. Not far away, two women clung to each other and shrieked. I was knocked to my seat when a tablemate’s corrugated-plastic FLOOD THE POLLS sign collided inadvertently with my head. Upon looking up, I came eye-level with a pistol tucked into the khaki waistband of an elderly man in front of me. “She is just so great,” I heard someone say. “I mean, she really is just amazing.”
Explore the January/February 2023 Issue
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
Marjorie Taylor Greene arrived in Congress in January 2021, blond and crass and indelibly identified with conspiracy theories involving Jewish space lasers and Democratic pedophiles. She had barely settled into office before being stripped of her committee assignments; she has been called a “cancer” on the Republican Party by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; and she now has a loud voice in the GOP’s most consequential decisions on Capitol Hill because her party’s leaders know, and she knows they know, that she has become far too popular with their voters to risk upsetting her.
Nobody saw her coming. Not even Greene saw Greene coming.
II.
She was a product, her family loved to say, of the “Great American Dream.” There was a three-story home at the end of a shaded driveway in the small town of Cumming, Georgia, north of Atlanta; there was a finished basement in which Marge—and that is what she was called, Marge—and her friends would gather in faded nylon one-pieces after a swim in Lake Lanier.
