One of the acts that brought Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) to national prominence was when footage emerged of her chasing down the gun control activist and school shooting survivor David Hogg, accusing him of being funded by George Soros, and boasting that she was carrying a gun.
That is very far from the only utterly deranged thing Greene has said or done over the years. As David Faris points out, among many other things she’s expressed QAnon beliefs, suggested that California fires might have been started by Jewish space lasers, voted to overturn the 2020 election, and said numerous prominent Democrats should be killed. And since “being howling mad” is basically a requirement for winning a Republican primary in the age of Trump, Greene was elected to the House of Representatives in 2020.
Yet now Greene has emerged as something of a Republican voice of reason, at least by the standards of MAGA in 2025, perhaps the lowest bar imaginable. While the president is posting an AI-generated video of him literally bombarding the American people with diarrhea from a fighter jet, and both Young Republicans across the country and Trump’s nominee for Office of Special Counsel, Paul Ingrassia, are embroiled in separate Nazi texting scandals, Greene is urging House Speaker Mike Johnson to reopen the government and signing on to a Democratic-led effort to release the Epstein files. She’s even talking about … health insurance premiums being too expensive? Focusing on kitchen-table issues relevant to working families like the one and only Charles Ellis Schumer?? The mind reels.
Now, I of course do not have access to Greene’s private thoughts. But I can hazard a few guesses as to what is going on.
First and most obviously, per The Wall Street Journal, a few months ago Trump pushed Greene out of a potential run for Senate in Georgia, reportedly showing her polls that she would lose by double digits. She also claimed that a “very established ‘Men Only’ Republican firm” was blocking her from running for governor. Trump was likely correct about her chances, but that could also have sparked resentment and backlash. No ambitious politician wants their career to stall out in the House, where ordinary members almost never get to wield power.
The second is that unlike most elected Republicans, who are generally scions of intergenerational wealth, decanted out of a Federalist Society cloning tank, or straight-up murderous neo-Nazis, Greene evinces some slight connection with the way normal Americans live. In a post on Twitter/X, she wrote that “when the tax credits expire this year my own adult children’s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE,” attaching a screenshot claiming that subsidized premiums would increase by 114 percent, which is accurate according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And those subsidies were passed under Biden; they are set to expire because Republicans refuse to extend them.
Imagine that: a Republican politician tacitly admitting to the consequences of Republican policy. Though Greene does not follow her line of reasoning to the obvious conclusion—that the only ways to make health insurance better are more regulation, more subsidies, more expansions of government programs like Medicaid, or all three—it’s a vanishingly rare GOP concession to reality.
Finally, and I suspect most importantly, there is a personality angle. The best profile of Greene that I’ve read is by Michael Kruse at Politico, and it shows her not as someone with a dedicated commitment to conservative ideology, but someone with a bone-deep craving for attention that borders on the pathological. Her “seat in Congress is less the fulfillment of a dream than the culmination of a desperate, yearslong search for an identity that fulfilled a yearning for affirmation and attention,” he writes. “Over the course of the past 10 years, she morphed from an affluent, all but apolitical, middle-aged attendee of an evangelical megachurch to an aspiring, publicity-seeking CrossFit persona to a right-out-of-the-gate hectoring lawmaker who now literally wears her grievance on the mask on her face.”
I think that’s right. And such a person does not have Paul Ryan’s unblinking reptilian dedication to snatching food and health care away from widows and orphans. Such a person might even be convinced to do the opposite, under the right circumstances. After all, giving people health insurance is a pretty reliable way to earn their attention and approval!
Let me be clear: Greene is still a reactionary menace. She has not directly criticized Trump, and in her posts about Obamacare subsidies, she also claimed “the ACA made health insurance UNAFFORDABLE for my family,” said Ukraine should be cut off from support, and emphasized there should be “NO FUNDING FOR ILLEGALS,” something that doesn’t happen.
What her slight bending toward reality indicates, rather, is that Trump’s second-term policy agenda has almost no constituency at all. This is an administration and a congressional caucus bent on domination and cruelty for its own sake. They do not care about America’s position in the world, or the millions of children who are going to die because Elon Musk took away their food, or their tuberculosis or HIV or malaria medication, or the rural hospitals on which the most loyal MAGA voters depend for routine care that are going to close by the hundreds because of the Big Beautiful Bill.
And that in turn might be useful for Democrats. One of Trump’s historically strongest soldiers defecting on key policy items, and arguing that “I see Republicans losing the House if Americans are continuing to go paycheck-to-paycheck,” is a crack in the armor of Republicans, who only hold the House by a tiny margin. Pointing out that such a famously crazed person is simply correct about Obamacare subsidies, as Rep. Ro Khanna recently did, is rhetorically useful as it makes the the GOP mainstream seem even crazier.
In a political party that has become a personality cult, and whose policy is written by sadistic psychopaths, perhaps it takes a different flavor of madness to perceive reality, however dimly.