Scott Perry, a former chair of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, which Greene joined, praised her as “a voice for regular working people.” Noting Greene’s fixations—including, say, lewd photos that were retrieved from Hunter Biden’s laptop—he told me, “They might be seen as vulgar. But this is the reality of what real life is all about—what the American people need to know. If you don’t like it, well, you need to have a conversation with yourself about how you feel about the truth.”
Greene might have seemed like a good fit for the Freedom Caucus, but she caused problems there, too. She publicly criticized Perry for initially supporting the Respect for Marriage Act, which protected same-sex marriage. She denounced Chip Roy, of Texas, for not defending those arrested for storming the Capitol on January 6th. She called Lauren Boebert, the right-wing Republican from Colorado, “a little bitch” on the House floor. (Referring to a scandal in which Boebert was escorted out of a musical production of “Beetlejuice” for inappropriate behavior, Greene later dubbed her “vaping groping Lauren Boebert.”) One former member of the caucus, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me that Greene is “a calculated, ambitious, manipulative person” who “has no limit to her dishonesty to advance her own personal agenda,” which he believed was solely the pursuit of “influence and power.”
“The apartment’s small, but it has a Criterion Closet.”
Cartoon by Natalie Horberg
He pointed to the drawn-out vote to elect a new House Speaker, in early 2023. The Freedom Caucus had opposed Kevin McCarthy, preferring a more reliable conservative. But, on the fifteenth ballot, Greene helped to give McCarthy the post. Dingell saw Greene and Boebert arguing about this in the women’s bathroom: a source told the Daily Beast that Greene yelled at Boebert for taking millions from McCarthy and then not supporting him. (According to the book “Mad House,” by the journalists Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater, Greene also smeared Boebert to Trump, falsely telling him prior to the 2024 election that Boebert was planning to endorse Ron DeSantis. Greene has not responded to the allegation.)
Greene was booted from the caucus. But, when Congress resumed under McCarthy’s Speakership, she was appointed to the Homeland Security Committee and the House Oversight Committee. According to the Times, McCarthy told a friend, “I will never leave that woman.” McCarthy told me he actually said that Greene had “kept her word, and I’ll always keep my word to her.” He said that he never promised her anything for her support. Boebert and the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, on the other hand, had wanted favors in exchange for their votes, he said. (Neither Gaetz nor Boebert responded to requests for comment.) McCarthy came to consider Greene a good-faith actor who sometimes lacks good information. “At the beginning, she didn’t like me!” McCarthy told me. “Mark Meadows lied to her about me,” he said, claiming that Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, told Greene that McCarthy had helped to orchestrate her removal from committees in 2021. (Meadows did not respond to a request for comment.) “So she assumes certain things,” McCarthy said. “But you can break through that.”
After Trump’s reëlection, Greene was tapped to chair a House Oversight subcommittee tasked with implementing the recommendations of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. It had the ring of significance. In reality, the committee had little influence. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested that it was like “giving someone an unplugged controller.” DOGE ultimately saved less than five per cent of the two trillion dollars it aimed to cut.
Last April, I attended a town hall that Greene held in Acworth, Georgia. Standing onstage in a black dress, fiercely cheerful, she spoke about DOGE, “illegals,” and the Gulf of America. As it began, a gray-haired man yelled at Greene and was dragged out by the police. He screamed as they Tased him. A disabled former marine scuffled with police; they Tased him, too, as the crowd clapped. Nine people were ultimately removed; three were arrested. “The violence of it was so chilling,” Wendy Davis, a Democrat who ran to unseat Greene a few years ago, told me afterward. Worse, she said, was seeing “some of my neighbors, who I’d hugged moments before, cheering.” This, she suggested, was “Marjorie Taylor Greene’s version of America.”
The next month, Nick Dyer, Greene’s longest-tenured staffer, then deputy chief of staff, left her office without offering a public explanation. The timing suggested one: she would soon begin defying Trump.
In November, I stood outside the U.S. Capitol as Greene approached a microphone, looking frosty. “I woke up this morning, and I turned to my weather app to check the temperature, and it was thirty-two degrees,” she said. “And my first thought was, Hell has froze over.” D.C. was Hell, of course, and its freezing over was due to the fact that Congress finally had the votes to mandate the release of the Epstein files. Surrounded by survivors of Epstein’s predations, she assailed Trump: “He called me a traitor for standing with these women.”
If the Epstein saga wasn’t proof of the QAnon theory in its deranged specifics, it seemed to confirm the central notion: that a shadowy network of élites had preyed on children. After Epstein died by suicide in prison, in 2019, calls grew to release all material related to his case: witness testimony, financial records, correspondence with powerful people. Greene began posting about Epstein in 2020, writing, “I will do everything under my power to bring down any and ALL pedophiles.” Back in 2002, Trump had called Epstein, whom he’d long known, “a terrific guy.” In June of 2024, on Fox, he said that he’d declassify the files if reëlected, but suggested that they contained “phony stuff.” Then he’d refused.
