Ex-Bush adviser takes MAGA ally to task as 'biggest joke in town' flies over her head

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) resigned because she "didn't get the joke" of all politics in Washington, D.C., according to a former Bush adviser.

Former speechwriter to President George W. Bush, David Frum, on Saturday wrote about Greene's retirement in an article called, "Marjorie Taylor Greene Came So Close to Getting the Joke," in which he suggests Greene was a true believer who lost her faith in the president.

"When Jack Abramoff dominated Washington lobbying in the 1990s and early 2000s, he observed that there were two kinds of people in town: those who 'get the joke' and those who don’t," he wrote. "Those who got the joke understood that all of the city’s talk of ideas and principles was flimflam to conceal self-enrichment at the public’s expense. Those who didn’t—didn’t."

According to the analyst, "Greene did not get the joke."

"Elected to Congress in Georgia in 2020, she became one of the loudest voices in American life for crackpot conspiracy claims: Pizzagate, QAnon, 9/11 trutherism, and a fantasy that California wildfires might have been caused by space lasers controlled by Jewish bankers. She repeated 2020-election denialism and promoted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda about his war on Ukraine," he wrote in the Atlantic piece. "For a long time, Greene’s seemingly fathomless gullibility qualified her as a MAGA leader in Congress. But the gullibility actually did have a limit. Sometime after her election, she began to realize that she’d been made a fool of."

Frum speculates that one particular belief was the straw that broke the camel's back: the belief Trump was against pedophiles.

"Of all the ridiculous things Greene believed, perhaps the single most ridiculous was that Trump, of all people on earth, was leading a heroic fight against a global network of pedophiles," he wrote. "Trump has a long and ample record on the sexual abuse of vulnerable people by powerful men. He’s for it."

According to Frum, Greene learned a lot in congress, but, "she never did get the joke on the biggest joke in town, the joke that MAGA is about anything more than manipulation, exploitation, corruption, lust, and cruelty."

"She seems to have sincerely believed the lies that shrewder players merely mouthed. She gained her own millions without appreciating that her allies were scheming for billions," he added on Saturday. "She balked at the self-abasement before every one of Trump’s whims that is indispensable to MAGA survival and success. Her failure on those scores is her one service to the country—because it helps other Americans, the joke’s ultimate victims, to better understand what is happening to them and why."

Read the full piece here.