'I Was Just So Nave': Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene's Break With Trump (New York Times/gift article)

[ificandream]

Last edited Mon Dec 29, 2025, 06:46 PM - Edit history (1)

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By Robert Draper

Eleven days after Charlie Kirk was killed in September, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the third-term Georgia congresswoman, was watching his memorial service on TV as the luminaries of the conservative movement and the Trump administration gathered to pay tribute to the young activist.

What stayed with Greene long afterward were the last two speakers who took the stage. First there was Kirk’s widow, Erika, who stood in white before the crowd filling the Arizona stadium, lifted her tear-filled eyes and said that she forgave her husband’s killer. And then there was President Trump. “He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose,” he said of Kirk. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”

“That was absolutely the worst statement,” Greene wrote to me in a text message months after the memorial service. And the contrast between Erika Kirk and the president was clarifying, she added. “It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.”

It also, Greene said, clarified something about herself. Over the past five years, as Trump’s most notorious acolyte in Congress, she had adopted his unrepentant pugilism as her own. “Our side has been trained by Donald Trump to never apologize and to never admit when you’re wrong,” she told me in her Capitol Hill office one afternoon in early December. “You just keep pummeling your enemies, no matter what. And as a Christian, I don’t believe in doing that. I agree with Erika Kirk, who did the hardest thing possible and said it out loud.”

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/magazine/marjorie-taylor-greene-trump-maga-split.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AVA.EfM_.7TcEEjiKP4aV&smid=nytcore-ios-share

earlier post:

New NYT profile of MTG

I apologize for posting this from my mobile, so I don’t have the first few paragraphs, but I have to say that I am not becoming a fan of hers, though I think it’s commendable that she’s eased up on some of the craziness that she exhibited when she first became a public figure. I keep hoping there’s more to come, but I’m not hopeful. Still, when someone with her beliefs, realizes that her views needed to be changed, it should make us more confident that our views are more normal than theirs. This is a gift link.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/magazine/marjorie-taylor-greene-trump-maga-split.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AVA.EfM_.7TcEEjiKP4aV&smid=nytcore-ios-share

[Walleye]

1. The magas just love believing in conspiracy theories, and won't let go of them

They based many decisions on phony information from a conspiracy theory

[LastDemocratInSC]

2. They crave to be seen as possessing special knowledge

that the rest of us cannot see or grasp. It fulfills a wish to be admired.

[Walleye]

3. Yep, that's it. It's a shame to be your whole life on such phony and false stories.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

4. I Was Just So Nave': Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene's Break With Trump (gift article)

How the Georgia congresswoman went from the president’s loudest cheerleader to his loudest Republican critic.

Link to tweet

https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/onboarding-offer?EXIT_URI=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2025%2F12%2F29%2Fmagazine%2Fmarjorie-taylor-greene-trump-maga-split.html%3Funlocked_article_code%3D1.AVA.dVI2.SSldBIDu0_EU%26smid%3Dtw-share&auth=login-google1tap&campaignId=7JFJX&login=google1tap

....Most significant, she defied the president and compliant House Republican leaders as she argued that all investigative material pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein should be released. “The Epstein files represent everything wrong with Washington,” Greene told me in December. “Rich, powerful elites doing horrible things and getting away with it. And the women are the victims.”.....

For Greene, the decades that Epstein spent eluding justice for exploiting and sexually assaulting countless girls and young women while amassing a fortune, and the seeming efforts by the government to cover up the injustice, “represents everything wrong with Washington,” she told me. This September, Greene spoke with several of Epstein’s victims for the first time in a closed-door House Oversight Committee meeting. She knew that the women had paid their own way to come to Washington. She saw some of them trembling and crying as they spoke. Their accounts struck her as entirely believable. Greene herself had never been sexually abused, but she knew women who had. In her own small way, Greene later told me, she could understand what it was like for a woman to stand up to a powerful man.

After the hearing, Greene held a news conference at which she threatened to identify some of the men who had abused the women. (Greene says that she didn’t know those names herself but that she could have gotten them from the victims.) Trump called Greene to voice his displeasure. Greene was in her Capitol Hill office, and according to a staff member, everyone in the suite of rooms could hear him yelling at her as she listened to him on speakerphone. Greene says she expressed her perplexity over his intransigence. According to Greene, Trump replied, “My friends will get hurt.”

When she urged Trump to invite some of Epstein’s female victims to the Oval Office, she says, he angrily informed her that they had done nothing to merit the honor. It would be the last conversation Greene and Trump would ever have.