- The polemical politician is leaving Congress on January 5 after her disagreements with Donald Trump and congressional Republicans escalated over the Epstein files last year.
- But before then, Greene voiced a lot of misgivings about Trump, the GOP, and the future of the MAGA movement, which she revisited in interviews for a New York Times Magazine article published last week.
- Greene outlined the ways she thinks Republicans under Trump have failed to deliver on the MAGA promises they made to voters last year, squandering the united control Republicans have of government and betraying key MAGA principles.
Today, the controversial congressional career of Marjorie Taylor Greene comes to end — at least for the foreseeable future.
But before her exit, she got a few more jabs in at President Donald Trump. First, in a wide-ranging New York Times Magazine profile last week, the retiring Georgia representative reignited her feud with the president, admitting to being “just so naïve” about Washington politics since being sworn in and lamenting the wasted potential of the MAGA movement by a do-nothing Congress.
“How did all of this end up to a point,” she complained to the Times’s Robert Draper about her party’s handling of the Epstein files, “where it was about releasing files about women who were raped, and not the serious things that I think truly matter about helping to get our economy stabilized again? Help reduce the cost of living, fix the housing market, fix health insurance — for the love of God, what the [expletive] is the matter with these people?”
Then, following the news from Caracas, she posted the following (lengthy) denunciation on X:
As the weekend progressed, the outgoing member of Congress kept up her critiques, saying in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press that Trump is forgetting what “America First” means, and is betraying the promises he made voters: “That was part of what [Americans] voted for in 2024, they voted to tear down the system that protects the rich, powerful elites; they voted to tear down the system that consistently goes for foreign wars and regime change.”
Greene is leaving Congress due to her high-profile split with Trump — he promised to support a primary challenge in 2026 after she started criticizing him — so it makes sense to take what she’s saying now with a spoonful of salt.
But in dishing on her thinking over the last year, she also revealed some insightful dynamics about what she thinks is happening to Trump’s movement.
While she believed that “Making America Great Again” was a set of principles and beliefs — “America First, Secure Borders, No Pointless Wars, End Globalization, and Protect Free Speech” — for Trump and the GOP, that’s basically just doing whatever Trump wants; doing little of what they promised; or, even worse, doing the opposite.
It’s a theme that she’s talked about not just in this magazine story, but also in interviews and public comments she’s given over the last few months: that when MAGA voters finally delivered Republicans unified control of the federal government, the party wasted that time and fumbled what little they did pick up.
From foreign policy to affordability to, finally, the Epstein files, 2025 appears, to her, to have been MAGA’s lost year.
MTG thinks her colleagues are happy with doing nothing
For the last few months, Greene has been pretty clear that she doesn’t think the majority of her colleagues in Congress are actual MAGA believers. She’s bemoaned how easily Trump critics or saboteurs have laundered their reputations, landed in the White House, or made it into his inner circle. And she’s claimed that most elected Republicans would rather not do anything at all than implement a real MAGA agenda.
“The Republicans that I work with…look at [Trump] like a speed bump. Many of them can’t wait to get him out of the way,” she told Tucker Carlson on his podcast in October. “So many times for our party…they get on board and they campaign and they say ‘America First’ and they try to utter and mimic these Donald Trump talking points. But when it actually comes to getting to work and delivering those talking points into action for the American people…what are we doing? We’re sitting at home.”
The October to mid-November government shutdown, in particular, seems to have turned her most against her party.
“I really have no respect for the House not being in session. And I have no respect for Speaker Johnson not calling us back to Washington because we should be passing bills…that reflect the president’s executive orders, which are exactly what we voted for,” she told Carlson. “We should be at work on our committees. We should be doing investigations…We should be passing the discharge petition that Thomas Massie put in to release the Epstein files…[and] we should be passing our appropriation bills to actually fund the government and fund important projects.”
She expanded on this idea of Republicans squandering their power in appearances on cable news, including when she praised Nancy Pelosi’s “ability to get things done” as speaker on CNN after Pelosi announced her retirement. “I wish we could get things done for our party like Nancy Pelosi was able to deliver for her party.”
And she revisited it in her interviews with the Times: the feeling that neither she, nor the House, had any real say in implementing an agenda because Speaker Mike Johnson and GOP leadership would only allow Congress to act as an extension of the White House.
“I want you to know that Johnson is not our speaker,” she told the Times in December. The speaker “is literally 100 percent under direct orders from the White House. And many, many Republicans are so furious about that, but they’re cowards.”
Instead, when Congress and Trump did get to work, they betrayed MAGA
Paired up with the sense that Congress just wasted a year of unified control of government is Greene’s charge that when Republicans did act, they really only ended up betraying MAGA values and voters.
She describes her last year as one spent as a referee or parent: “What have I been doing since he became president? I’ve worked very hard to keep everybody inside the guardrails of what we campaigned on: ‘No, this is what we said. This is what we promised. Now we have to deliver. And not through executive orders or red-meat rants on social media,’” she told the Times. “And I always go back to the people that showed up at his rallies, because those are the people that should matter. Those people should matter over those big crypto donors or the AI big-tech people.”
What do those guardrails look like? She’s specified those red lines over the last few weeks, and how she thinks Trump and congressional Republicans have crossed them:
Instead of disentangling America from foreign wars, the administration infiltrated Venezuela and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro, launched airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen, bombed Iran, and continues to prop up Ukraine against Russia. Instead of cutting foreign aid, the US sent billions more to Israel, Egypt, Ukraine, and bailed out Argentina.
“I don’t know how that’s America First,” she told Carlson about that last one. “But what we have going on right now, I mean, seriously, look at it. It’s a revolving door at the White House, a revolving door of foreign leaders and prime ministers and presidents all with their hands out demanding money and demanding attention and demanding America do this.”
She had a similar critique of the president’s military actions in Venezuela, telling NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday that Trump “campaigned on Make America Great Again, that we thought was putting America first…‘America First’ actually means ‘for the American people.’ … They voted for this administration, and their small-dollar donation should matter. And MAGA has its own enemy list. And the enemies of the world are not on their enemy list, and they’re tired of being ignored.”
Instead of making life more affordable for Americans, Trump doubled down on tariffs, allowed Obamacare subsidies to expire, and called affordability concerns a Democratic “con job,” — all betrayals of MAGA voters, Greene argues.
Meanwhile, Trump was happy to implement cryptocurrency and AI policies that were friendly to billionaire donors and supporters, while allowing for more foreign student visas and obstructing the release of the Epstein files.
To be sure, there are probably other deeper personal and strategic reasons for Greene’s break with Trump and retirement from politics for now. It is probably not a coincidence that this is happening as Trump’s approval ratings sink to their lowest levels of his second term, after Republicans faced off-year election losses and look likely to lose more next year, and as Trump’s MAGA coalition — at the elite and at the popular level — seems to fracture and pick sides over the future of the GOP.
But for all the fanfare of a year dominated by Trump and his movement, Greene’s reflections suggest that at least for one of its true believers, MAGA wasn’t as successful as it set out to be in its first year in office. And on top of that, she’s suggesting that there are voters who will care about this, are paying attention, and might not be forgiving in 2026 and beyond. It’s a clarion call for a movement she considered herself a founding member of, and one she thinks has been led astray.
