Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has drawn a frenzy of speculation in recent months with a hard turnabout from her longtime conspiracy-tinted, ultra-Trump loyalist posture, striking a tone more critical of her own party, and even demanding the GOP present a solution on the health care subsidies cliff.
This has led many figures to theorize she is seeking revenge against Trump after his inner circle allegedly strong-armed her out of running for Senate in Georgia next year. But there might be something deeper at play, Jonathan Chait argued for The Atlantic: she may be playing "three-dimensional chess" to position herself for a soft coup of the MAGA movement down the line.
"Having initially judged Greene to be a wildly uninformed conspiracy theorist, I was ... predisposed to dismiss her evolution as a kind of revenge for being slighted," wrote Chait. "But having listened closely to her commentary of late, I’ve concluded that she is up to something more interesting and strategic."
Specifically, he argued, "Greene seems to have recognized that the president has broken faith with his own followers. That realization may also now be dawning on other Republicans after Tuesday’s electoral mini-rout, but Greene not only saw it happening sooner, she began planning her future around it. She may be planning for a day when the MAGA movement is not led by Trump, or even by a member of his administration, but by a leader who can speak on behalf of its disgruntled base. Somebody like her."
There are several issues on which Greene is trying to stake out her own path, from her increasingly furious criticisms of how Israel has handled the Gaza war — with attendant antisemitic conspiracy theories — to the criticism of the Trump administration for not releasing the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case files. All issues, Chait argued, are big sore spots among at least some fraction of Trump's base.
The endgame of all this, Chait suggested, could be a run for president.
"Greene has reportedly confided in colleagues that she has designs on the top office, apparently firm in the belief that she is “real MAGA and that the others have strayed,” wrote Chait. Maybe that will never come to pass — "But for a politician who may or may not know what she is doing, Greene is positioning herself for a future that, not long ago, would have appeared as absurd as a Trump presidency once did."