Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) appears to be testing the waters for a post-Trump run for president, Salon's Amanda Marcotte wrote in an analysis published on Monday morning, as evidenced by Annie Karni of the New York Times writing a largely favorable profile of her — but she has no shot at the race.
"Voters of both parties loathe most of their leadership right now, with one glaring exception: Republicans still love Donald Trump," wrote Marcotte. However, despite all of Trump's continued teasing about an unconstitutional run for a third term, "Trump is increasingly showing his age these days and, remarkably for someone so addled with narcissism, seems to even understand that he, too, will die one day."
That gives an opening for MAGA loyalists like Greene to carve out a bid to lead the GOP after him, she noted — and an obvious traditional way of doing so is "signaling and cultivating wealthy donors by cooperating with lengthy profiles in mainstream media publications like the New York Times."
On the surface, she noted, Greene has a surprising amount going for her: For one thing, she recognizes, just as Trump did, that there is room to challenge the GOP orthodoxy on issues where younger right-wingers reject it, looking like an independent thinker while appealing to podcast influencers.
"Greene wants to release the Epstein files, which doesn’t just carry the benefit of aligning with the majority of Americans; it also makes her look like she’s willing to stand up to Trump," Marcotte wrote. "She opposes Israel’s war in Gaza, bluntly describing it as a 'genocide.' She even hates AI."
Granted, said Marcotte, Greene is a "hair-on-fire nutcase of the most rancid sort" who is unable to make these pitches against her party without appeals to antisemitic conspiracy theories, and she "appears to be so deep in the world of QAnon it hasn’t occurred to her that the main reason Trump doesn’t want them released is because he’s in them." But that isn't the reason Marcotte thinks she will hit a wall trying to copy Trump's formula — after all, Trump has been willing to cross all those lines himself.
The real problem, Marcotte argued, is she's going to hit gender and identity politics issues.
"White men get away with this stuff because they enjoy a presumption of intelligence and authority that isn’t extended to women," Marcotte wrote. "When Trump says crazy stuff, his apologists claim he’s joking, or they reframe it as a super-genius idea that was too advanced for those (read: everyone) with smaller brains. The possibility that the man is simply stupid doesn’t register — because he’s a man," she wrote. "When Greene makes outlandish claims and statements, since she is a woman, people recognize it for what it is. Women aren’t afforded the presumption of intelligence."
This was made clear, Marcotte said, in polling in Georgia. The same swing state that narrowly flipped to Trump in 2024 after he lost it in 2020, never even remotely entertained the trial balloon of Greene challenging Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff; an internal GOP poll showed her losing that matchup by 18 points. It was enough for Greene to abandon the idea.
"Greene has a lot of qualities Republican voters apparently like," Marcotte concluded. "She’s entitled and loud, and she can be mean. But that’s what they want from men. They still think it’s unseemly in a woman."
