Marjorie Taylor Greene: MAGA’s No.1 heretic

“I was a true believer. Bottom line. America First. But MAGA is – I think people are realising – it was all a lie. It was a big lie for the people.” — The Kim Iversen Show, January 28, 2026

Marjorie Taylor Greene is losing her religion: the cult of MAGA and its reigning deity, Donald Trump. As outrage builds across the United States over what the former Republican Congresswoman from Georgia correctly calls the Epstein files “cover-up,” and as fury and disillusionment spread inside Republican and MAGA circles, her political stock has never been higher. 

Greene is widely known as MTG, much as her initialled longtime political enemy, the New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is known as AOC. She is no longer merely a gun-toting dissenter cast out from the Make America Great Again fold by the Dear Leader, crying alone in the wilderness. 

She is styling herself as a heretic prophet. Gathering adherents across what she labels the “political industrial complex”, Greene is making overtures to her former nemeses on the liberal left and centre – even, astonishingly, Hillary Clinton. And she appears to be relishing her new role.

Even Jon Ossoff, the Georgia senator and rising Democrat star, spoke approvingly of Greene at a recent political rally. “Welcome to the resistance,” he said.

Green’s spectacular rupture with Trump and the MAGA movement did not begin with a podcast confession or the latest redacted Epstein file dump. It began soon after Trump’s November 2024 election victory and was stoked by his apparent unwillingness to do what he had promised all throughout his campaign: to release the Epstein Files.

By late summer 2025 the issue came to a head with the passing of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. In the autumn, Greene joined the Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna in backing a discharge petition to force a House floor vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act. That legislation required the attorney general to release government documents tied to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

The manoeuvre cut out both party leadership and the White House. Trump made clear he did not want it to proceed. According to Greene, he personally demanded she withdraw her support. When she refused, he erupted, screaming down her office phone with staff listening, calling her a “traitor,” warning that “his friends would get hurt” if the files came out.

There had already been simmering tensions between Greene and Trump, particularly over her attacks on Israel’s war in Gaza, on Trump’s taste for foreign entanglements and on healthcare affordability. But suddenly it morphed into open war.

In November Greene stood outside the Capitol, flanked by Epstein survivors, to recount her own tale of being abused and labelled traitorous by the commander-in-chief. She framed the fight as existential. “This has been one of the most destructive things to MAGA,” she said. “Watching the man that we supported early on, three elections… watching this actually turn into a fight has ripped MAGA apart.”

On November 21, Greene announced she would resign from Congress rather than face a Trump-backed primary challenge. In the weeks before and after that announcement, she and her allies say she received escalating death threats, amplified by Trump’s denunciations branding her a traitor. The September assassination of far right podcaster and Turning Point activist Charlie Kirk, she later said, made her fear she might become “the next Charlie”.

On CBS’s 60 Minutes in December Greene started revealing behind the scenes details that clearly rankled Trump, including that fellow Republicans privately mock the president. She described him screaming at her during the final showdown over the Epstein petition and issued a mea culpa for her participation in “toxic politics” and for spreading QAnon conspiracist mumbo-jumbo. She insisted the problem was no longer Trump’s staff – it was Trump himself.

The next day Trump retaliated on Truth Social, claiming she had been calling him obsessively like a spurned lover and he hadn’t had time to call her back. 

“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… Certainly not the first time she has been jilted!) Her ideas are, NOW, really BAD – She sort of reminds me of a Rotten Apple!”

She was, Trump, said: “lunatic,” “neurotic,” “whacky” and a “stone-cold liberal.”

Greene responded by embracing the conjugal metaphors. She was a “battered wife”, she said, and would no longer tolerate the abuse.

On January 7, two days after her final day in office, she appeared on The View, a TV show hosted by Trump hate figures like Whoopi Goldberg. The programme is now under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission.

“The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the president calling me a traitor for standing with women who were raped when they were teenagers,” she told the panel. “One of MAGA’s big campaign pledges was to release the Epstein files.”

When Joy Behar asked if she would go back if he begged, Greene joked about the father of her three children, from whom she separated in 2022. “Who? My ex-husband? No, just kidding. Absolutely not, the way he treated me.”

The French journalist Sonia Dridi, Washington correspondent for LCI network, has covered the White House and Congress for a decade. Greene once publicly mocked her for her accent – in her view, MTG’s break-up with Trump is a watershed moment for MAGA, even if Trump’s base is not necessarily under threat.

“She was one of his earliest and most loyal supporters,” Dridi says. “I saw her arrive at the Capitol. I crossed paths with her right when she first came up the steps. She really entered politics for Trump – because of Trump.”

That is why the split between Greene and Trump carries so much weight. “So this public ‘divorce’ is extremely significant. She was one of his most devoted followers – faithful among the faithful.”

When Greene now says MAGA was a mendacious operation, it has a powerful impact. “There are going to be more and more disillusioned MAGA supporters,” says Dridi, “precisely because Greene is openly telling people that MAGA was a lie and trying to pull those disappointed voters into her camp.”

“The fuel for that disenchantment isn’t just fatigue with Trump’s focus on foreign issues – Greenland, Venezuela, possibly Iran. It’s the Epstein issue. More voters are asking more and more questions about Trump’s links to the affair – some are angry, some are confused – and Greene is speaking directly into that space.”

It’s a remarkable conversion. Greene once embodied the unquestioning faith in the dogmas of the Trump sect. She joined in with the cult of personality built around an infallible Dear Leader. She enthusiastically adopted the posture of the true apostle, the good Christian soldier who proselytised on behalf of her leader.

At a 2024 campaign rally, Greene made the ultimate MAGA statement of belief: “The Democrats and the fake news media want to constantly talk about ‘President Trump is a convicted felon’. Well, you want to know something? The man that I worship is also a convicted felon. And he was murdered on a Roman cross.”

But then came Gaza, soaring healthcare costs, and Epstein. On The Kim Iversen Show she compared Trump to a “giant swamp creature.” The mask, she said, had come off.

“Like I could care less about Iran. I don’t care about Israel. I don’t care about Ukraine and Russia and China. I don’t care about Venezuela. I don’t care about any of them. I care about America. I care about our problems. I care about the fact that my kids, who are Gen Z, will never be able to afford life. 

“That whole generation, they probably won’t be able to buy a house. They can’t afford health insurance. They can’t afford car insurance. Most of their jobs are going to be replaced by AI. That’s the stuff I care about. But after we won the election in 2024, a few months in and MAGA started turning into MIGA [Make Israel Great Again].”

“It started turning into whatever Donald Trump – whatever country – Donald Trump said it was about.”

Suggested Reading

Why do they hate us so much?

Jay Elwes

Greene was born in 1974 in Milledgeville, Georgia. Raised Catholic, she later described becoming a born-again evangelical Christian as a defining transformation. It aligned her worldview with militant Christian nationalism.

Before politics she ran CrossFit gyms, developing a persona based around physical aggression, discipline and combativeness. She benefited from family wealth tied to Taylor Commercial, in which she had significant shareholdings, despite presenting herself as an anti-elite insurgent.

Since entering Congress in 2020, she compiled one of the most extreme records of any modern US lawmaker, promoting the QAnon and also the Pizzagate conspiracy which alleged the existence of a satanic pedophile network allegedly led by Democrats. She endorsed the execution of political opponents, including Nancy Pelosi. She warned of a “price of blood” if Trump was not reelected.

In September 2020 Greene posted an image of herself carrying a gun beside the three prominent Democratic congresswomen known as “The Squad”, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, writing: “We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense.” Facebook removed it.

She amplified antisemitic conspiracy theories, including that the California wildfires had been caused by a Rothschild-linked “Jewish space laser.” She harassed Parkland survivor David Hogg, demeaning him as “trained like a dog.” She suggested that school shootings were staged.

Before and after the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, Greene was one of the loudest congressional amplifiers of the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen”. In the weeks before the November 2020 election, she warned supporters that “the only way you get your freedoms back is it’s earned with the price of blood.” 

On January 6 itself, she voted to object to certifying Joe Biden’s victory. In the aftermath, she continued to question the legitimacy of the result, suggested without evidence that antifa or Black Lives Matter activists may have been involved in the breach, and dismissed the House select committee investigating the riot as a partisan “witch hunt.” She also voted against awarding Congressional Gold Medals to the Capitol police officers who defended the building that day. 

In February 2021, the Democratic-controlled House stripped Greene of all her committee assignments in a bipartisan vote after past statements surfaced endorsing violence against Democrats and embracing conspiracy theories.

Suggested Reading

A world dragged headfirst into the Epstein Sewer

John Sweeney

Greene was permanently banned from Twitter in January 2022 for Covid misinformation. She flouted mask mandates and was fined repeatedly.

Even now, amid her anti-Trump turn, the conspiratorial reflex remains. In the wake of the Epstein files drop, she reposted a suggestion that the sex trafficker was alive and “playing Fortnite in Israel”. She continues to rehash the rigged election theories about 2020.

The political scientist Norman Ornstein, emeritus fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is not convinced by the conversion narrative. He sees something more tactical and limited.

“Most anti-Trumpists are not embracing Greene,” Ornstein told me. Instead, he saud, they are “trying to use her anti-Trump message, which reaches a lot of Trump supporters, as an asset in challenging his lies and at least creating some uncertainty among Trumpists.”

“Of course, she has a following within the cult,” he adds. “But her influence is likely to wane now that she is out of office, and a bid for the GOP nomination is not likely to go anywhere.”

“Will she face death threats and other attempts to silence her, coming from the Trump orbit? And if so, will it change her in any way? Will she drop some of her conspiracy theories and become more ‘mainstream’? I doubt that very much. So her voice in opposition is welcome, but not a gamechanger.”

Mike Rothschild, author of Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, and a writer for Conspiracy Watch Global, is even more unsentimental.

“I’ve generally felt about MTG that she’s positioning herself to take over the mantle of leadership in the GOP,” he says, “but only once the fallout from Trump clears.”

“She can steer clear of politics for a year and a half, then re-emerge in mid-2027 as the sane and family-focused alternative to JD Vance. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to get involved politically in anything anymore and just live a normal life. She could probably build a big audience as a podcaster, but her book MTG was a complete bomb.”

“She’s still a conspiracy theorist, and still supports a lot of what Trump did. There’s a niche for her in the anti-Epstein, pro-child, mostly pro-Trump sphere – it’s just a question of whether she grabs it.”

A survey of Greene’s frequent outings on X and podcast ramblings prove that she is still hammering her conspiracist themes of foreign government control, and continuing with her obsessive antipathy for Israel, a professed liking for Russia and her repetition of January 6 lies. 

Suggested Reading

Steve Witkoff, the world’s worst diplomat

Emma-Kate Symons

“Every Hollywood movie you watch, who are the bad guys? Russia,” she told Kim Iversen in January. “For so long, Russia’s the bad guys and the villain is Russian and we’re supposed to be hating Russians, but yet Russia hasn’t done anything to me. I don’t feel offended or hurt by Russia. As a matter of fact, I don’t even think about Russia. I’m pretty impressed they’re such a Christian country.”

​​Joni Askola, a Finnish geopolitical analyst and Kyiv Post writer is wary of being “fooled by Marjorie Taylor Greene turning on Trump”.

“She is still a pro-Russian traitor and a conspiracy theorist,” he says. “She isn’t finding a conscience, she is just fighting for control of the grift. Do not rehabilitate these horrible people. They deserve zero support.”

And then there is JD Vance.

In January in the midst of her ongoing battle with Trump, Greene conspicuously publicly praised the Vance, defending him against the Muslim-hating conspiracist and Trump favourite Laura Loomer. The two have form. Back in 2023, Greene commented that Loomer “is a bitch” who “says she is spreading all this truth, but… she’s just spreading her legs”.

Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show in October, Greene was asked how Loomer came to be a Pentagon adviser. “This is a woman that can’t even legally buy a gun because she had such serious mental problems,” she said. “Who listens to a person like that? No one should!”.

Fast forward to 2025 and Greene said: “Laura Loomer is viscously [sic] attacking @JDVance for delivering a message to Pro-Life Christians at the March for Life. Her attacks say far more about her than anything about the Vice President, who is a married father of 3 beautiful children with his wife, Usha, expecting their 4th child. 

“As a Pro-Life Christian myself, I am thankful our Vice President’s stand for the innocent lives of unborn children and delivering a message about the abundance of love, joy, and fulfillment of being a parent.”

This was more than a gushing profession of devotion to Vance. It read like a pointed sketch of post-POTUS MAGA: Trumpism without Trump. 

And then in mid-February, she made perhaps her strongest statement on X so far. “All of you MAGA influencers and the rest mocking the seriousness of women who were trafficked and raped as teenagers and young women look like cult fools,” she told her 5.3 million followers. “Good luck trying to get women to vote for Republicans in the midterms you insensitive clowns.”

It was yet another sign that MTG has exited the “cult” and turned her back on the fountainhead. But even so, she has not renounced the theology. If anything, she appears to be positioning herself to shape, or perhaps even lead, whatever comes after it.