DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. Since she was elected to Congress five years ago, no one has been a more combative advocate for Donald Trump than Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. No one, that is, until lately. Greene defied the president by joining Democrats on legislation to force the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. And she's criticized Trump's policies on tariffs, Israel, cryptocurrency and not extending subsidies for the Affordable Care Act policies, a key issue in the government shutdown.
And on Sunday, a day after President Trump announced the U.S. military assault in Caracas to arrest Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Greene appeared on NBC's "Meet The Press" and condemned the operation as exactly the kind of foreign military intervention he and the MAGA movement have campaigned against.
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MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE: I am not defending Maduro. And of course, I'm happy for the people of Venezuela to be liberated. But Americans celebrated the liberation of the Iraqi people after Saddam Hussein. They celebrated the liberation of the Libyan people after Gaddafi. And this is the same Washington playbook that we are so sick and tired of that doesn't serve the American people, but actually serves the big corporations, the banks and the oil executives.
DAVIES: That was Marjorie Taylor Greene on "Meet The Press." Trump has condemned Greene, calling her a traitor to the MAGA movement. And he's rescinded his endorsement of her. In November, Greene made the surprise announcement in an 11-minute video that she would resign from her congressional seat in the middle of her term. Greene's last day in Congress was yesterday. Her turnabout is so drastic, it's giving political pundits whiplash as they see her appearances on CNN, "60 Minutes," Bill Maher and the ABC daytime show "The View."
For some insight into Greene's defection and what it means for Washington politics and the MAGA movement, we turn to Charles Bethea, who's been writing about Marjorie Taylor Greene since she first ran for office in 2020. Bethea is a staff writer for The New Yorker who focuses on the South in his reporting. Before joining The New Yorker, he wrote for a variety of publications and was an editor at Outside Magazine. His latest story in The New Yorker is titled "Marjorie Taylor Greene's Big Breakup." We recorded our conversation yesterday.
Charles Bethea, welcome to FRESH AIR.
CHARLES BETHEA: Thanks, Dave.
DAVIES: You know, since the president's action in Venezuela over the weekend got so much attention - and as we noted, Marjorie Taylor Greene condemned it publicly - do you have any sense of what this means for the MAGA movement, what it tells us about Marjorie Taylor Greene?
BETHEA: Well, certainly her place within it, it remains really stunning to hear this woman, MAGA's longtime conspiracist in chief in Congress, acting as a fact-checker, and in doing so, making some pretty fair points - in this case, about the contradictions in Trump's rationale for going after Maduro and the forgotten lessons of Iraq and Libya. I mean, she's not a policy wonk. But you can hear that she's learned some things about American history and policy since arriving in Congress five years ago as someone, at the time, who genuinely didn't know who fought in World War I. That's according to a Republican operative in Georgia I spoke to.
The thing about Greene that hasn't changed is her intuitive and early understanding of what matters most to the MAGA base of the Republican Party. This is her special talent, which has been demonstrated repeatedly and is, I think, being demonstrated again with this Venezuelan action and her response to it. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy put it to me recently in this way, he said she's the canary in the coal mine of the GOP.
Or put another way, I think you could say she is herself the MAGA base's average voter. She doesn't have to fake it, so there's little to no daylight between what she thinks and what the base wants. So I think you're going to - a theme of my story and a theme of her tenure in Congress is watching the party move towards her position on a number of things. And I think perhaps we're going to see that with this issue in Venezuela as well.
DAVIES: All right. We'll see how it unfolds. You know, you know so much about her. You've written about her for a long time. How surprised are you at this remarkable turn in her political posture?
BETHEA: I mean, I am surprised and I'm not surprised. I mean, if you go back to her start in politics, I mean, it wasn't that long ago. Before that, she was somebody who had sort of had this family business that she was kind of loosely connected to, a construction business. She worked in the CrossFit world. And we can get into that kind of fascinating part of her life. But she wasn't political, according to the many folks I spoke to in my reporting over the last few years.
And so to watch her become political and sort of take on challenges as a politician and learn in real time, I think we're just continuing to see now her evolution as a person who's learning and growing in this role, which she also has decided to back away from. But even there I think that where she is now, as somebody who's leaving Congress, isn't necessarily the end of her political journey.
DAVIES: Not leaving public life, yeah.
BETHEA: No.
DAVIES: The split with Trump got a lot of public attention with the dispute over releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files. In September, she signed onto that discharge motion in Congress to force a vote on the bill that would require their release. But I guess, for a lot of us, we didn't notice that she was already moving away from Trump on some other issues, right?
BETHEA: Yeah, yeah. I mean, so there have been some stories in very prominent places recently which have cast Greene as this kind of conscientious objector who's turned on Trump purely due to principle. That principle is portrayed as Christian. And the moment where the scales kind of fall from Greene's eyes, and benevolent Christianity overcomes her, is the murder of Charlie Kirk last September. In this retelling, which Greene has encouraged, she recoils from Trump's pretty vicious response to Kirk's death, in which he says he hates his opponents. And she instead chooses peace and love.
Some have argued, I think with merit, that this is a kind of reputational reframing, even a whitewashing - or perhaps greenwashing, if you'll forgive the pun - which allows Greene to steer the narrative in her favor towards a kind of martyr role. But I don't really - I'm not particularly compelled by this framing. It feels, at best, incomplete. And I say that with both the timeline of her disputes with Trump in mind, as well as reporting both by myself and other outlets on Greene's ambition for higher office.
So if we go back to the early part of this year, we know - or I know from my reporting - that she was interested in being Trump's VP. That didn't come to pass, of course. She's interested in becoming his Secretary of Homeland Security. That doesn't come to pass. And finally, he discourages her from the third option, which is her running for Senate this year. He shows her a poll in May in which she's far behind Jon Ossoff, the Democrat incumbent. So this, I think, is when she really leaves the MAGA ranch.
She posts a long message on X in May in which she critiques Trump's expensive and interventionist foreign policy. She writes, and I'm quoting now, "I represent the base. And when I'm frustrated and upset over the direction of things, you better be clear, the base is not happy." In June, she becomes the first Republican in Congress to call the killing in Gaza a genocide. She says that Trump's AI policy is dangerous. A month later, she says she doesn't want anything to do with the Republican Party and so on - building up to the Epstein files standoff, at which point Trump decides to call her a traitor in November.
So I don't think, to be clear, I don't think that Trump's thwarting of her ambition and the resentment that causes is the entire answer for her sort of tacking away from Trump and Trumpism and his policy, but I think it's a big one. Resentment, I know from my reporting of the last five years has been a strong current throughout her entire story, more than Christian love has been. And I think that spending more time with her constituents this past year, especially during the shutdown, did bring her into a greater awareness of their pains and needs.
DAVIES: Right. Now, in the five years she's been in Congress, has she ever made substantive public criticisms of Donald Trump's policies before this year?
BETHEA: Certainly not calling Trump out by name. I mean, she's never been one to throw her weight behind foreign conflict and foreign entanglements. But this year, and really the middle part of this year, is when we hear her with increasing volume and increasing frequency start to make this sort of drumbeat about a number of things. Not just Epstein, not just foreign policy, health care - all these things. And so my thesis, and this is backed up by my reporting and my talking to people close to her in Georgia and elsewhere, is that this is informed both by learning about the issues and informed by her resentment, increasing in May, with that poll that Trump shows her saying essentially, you know, this Senate thing - it's not for you.
DAVIES: OK. Now, the feud between President Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene really becomes more widely noticed in November when she appears with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's abuse at a press conference in front of the Capitol, spoke movingly about it all. What is your sense of how those relationships affected her and this move of hers?
BETHEA: Yeah. Well, just to paint the sort of picture there with that presser in mid-November, right after Trump called her a traitor, she's wearing all black. She's surrounded by Epstein survivors. She says that the fight to release the files has, quote, "ripped MAGA apart." And without saying his name, she turns Trump's insult around and calls him a traitor by saying that a real traitor is someone who sells out America's interests for his own gain. At that very moment, Trump was himself preparing to host the Saudi crown prince at the White House.
As for the question of the sincerity of her commitment to this issue of releasing the files, I spoke with Thomas Massie for my story and Representative Ro Khanna from California, Republican and a Democrat, who worked very closely with her. And both stressed the deep sincerity of her connection to this issue.
And I think one of the fascinating things about her arc is that the Epstein files issue is really - it can connect all the way back to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which is the thing that everyone first heard about in relation to Marjorie Taylor Greene. And it's this insane sort of cosmology that essentially boils down to a belief that pedophilic global cabals is running the world. But it also spoke to this idea that's only sort of, I think, gotten embraced by more and more people, not just QAnon people, that there is a global elite that controls too much and that is abusive. And in this case, the Epstein files sort of bear out that central notion.
So while I think she had real sincere emotion about what had happened to these women, it also didn't fully corroborate her sort of - her initial ideology move that brought her into politics, this sort of - this crazy QAnon stuff. But it did reaffirm the central idea that sort of motivated her from the start.
DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Charles Bethea. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest story is titled "Marjorie Taylor Greene's Big Breakup." We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're listening to the interview I recorded yesterday with New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea about the political rift between President Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene - until recently, one of Trump's most outspoken supporters.
In November, President Trump attacked Marjorie Taylor Greene in a social media post, called her Wacky Marjorie and then went on a whole riff about her at a North Carolina rally. I believe this was in December. Let's listen to a bit of that.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: She goes around saying, he doesn't call me back. He doesn't - I said, Marjorie, I can't call you back. I got to - I think, Marjorie, I just can't call you back. I'm sorry. And I wouldn't call her back. And she goes on to a rant - he won't call me back anymore. Sorry about that. You know, you can only go so far. Yeah, once a month, once every week or two weeks, but you can't - you're highly neurotic. Her, not me, but I'm neurotic, too. I think I'm probably very neurotic, too. I always say controlled neurosis is good. Being neurotic - no good. But if it's controlled, that's OK. Gives you some energy.
But what the hell happened to Marjorie Traitor Greene? It's unbelievable, but she dropped out because I wasn't going to endorse her. And the person I would have endorsed was going to kill her in the polls, so she dropped out. And then they talk about how brave she is. No, brave would be to stay. And, you know, it's one of those things, but she dropped out. I can't believe it, that people can change so much. But you can't go from being a strong conservative to a stone-cold liberal unless you were lying.
DAVIES: And that was Donald Trump in December, speaking about Marjorie Taylor Greene. Charles Bethea, it's interesting. You know, he spends more than two minutes focusing on her in that clip, and we actually shortened it. It was a little longer than that. But there's no mention...
BETHEA: I don't doubt it.
DAVIES: Yeah. There was no mention of the issues that, you know, Greene was raising about, you know, Affordable Care Act subsidies or the Epstein files or any of that. Says that - you know, Trump says, well, she wanted to be called back too often, and she was angry that he would not endorse her. I'm interested in what your understanding is of how she and Trump communicated over this period, what they said or texted to each other.
BETHEA: Well, throughout her two and a half terms, they were in contact pretty regularly, texting, calling. You know, she would appear at rallies with him. Representative Thomas Massie from Kentucky, the Republican who's quite close with her and not one of Trump's favorites, told me that one of the remarkable things about her relationship with Trump up until recently is that she was more honest with him than just about anybody. And I think that the honesty, of course, is what ultimately got her in trouble.
And I think here, you're not hearing Trump sort of push back on the substance. You're hearing him use this sort of gendered critique, using the word neurotic and neuroses repeatedly as a way of just sort of casting her as shrill and, you know, this sort of shrill, emotional woman rather than pushing back on any of the issues. Because on the issues, she made some good substantive points that I think a lot of people in her district and beyond, notably - pointing to her possible ambition for higher office - agreed with. And this is why you saw Bernie Sanders and Whoopi Goldberg and all these other people, you know, just coming out of left field to give her compliments throughout this period.
And Trump, as I understand it from reporting of my own and reporting I've read, you know, doesn't - he's not as responsive to her. He's not calling her back. He's not responding to her texts until he really blows up at her in November, the last time they have any meaningful communication, and ignores - yeah, go ahead.
DAVIES: What was that? What did he blow up at? What do we know about that, him blowing at her?
BETHEA: She has said that he sent her an unspeakable - that's how she put it - an unspeakable text in response to her, I think, very reasonable concerns that she brought up to him about threats being leveled at her son, other family members, her business.
DAVIES: Because of Trump's criticism. Yeah.
BETHEA: Because of Trump's calling her a traitor. I mean, treason. There's really no higher, no worse thing to level at somebody, I would say - I mean, a politician - to call them treasonous. But she has had something like, by her own account, over 700 threats made over the last four and a half years to her or her family. She carries a gun around with her, purportedly as protection. She has lots of big bodyguards.
So anyway, when Trump says these things about her, it increases the level of peril that she feels as she goes around in the world. And there was an unspeakable text, as she described it. There was no sympathy from Trump. I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine Trump being sympathetic, just the person that we've come to know. But she doesn't get any of that, and that's when communication ends. And according to some reporting by The Times, Marjorie says that Trump also expressed concern about friends of his, I think was how he put it, who would be damaged by the release of the Epstein files.
DAVIES: So let's listen to another clip. This is from Marjorie Taylor Greene's appearance on CNN, speaking to Dana Bash, one of their political reporters. Let's listen.
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DANA BASH: Congresswoman, you posted on X that President Trump is, with his comments, fueling a, quote, "hotbed of threats" against you. Obviously, any threats to your safety are completely unacceptable. But we have seen these kinds of attacks or criticism from the president at other people. They're - it's not new. And with respect, I haven't heard you speak out about it until it was directed at you.
GREENE: Dana, I think that's fair criticism. And I would like to say humbly, I'm sorry for taking part in the toxic politics. It's very bad for our country. And I've - it's been something I've thought about a lot, especially since Charlie Kirk was assassinated, is that we - I'm only responsible for myself and my own words and actions. And I am going - I am committed, and I've been working on this a lot lately, to put down the knives in politics. I really just want to see people be kind to one another. And we need to figure out a new path forward that is focused on the American people because, as Americans, no matter what side of the aisle we're on, we have far more in common than we have differences.
DAVIES: That is Marjorie Taylor Greene speaking to CNN's Dana Bash. Charles Bethea, that's not words that we have heard Marjorie Taylor Greene say much, that people need to be kind to one another. What was your reaction to hearing that?
BETHEA: Yeah. The kindness, the humble apology - I mean, it was remarkable. I know that that - having talked to some people close to her, that actually really pissed off a lot of people in her camp, hearing her sort of, like, you know, bow down and sort of own it. It was great. Liberals loved hearing it. When I heard it, I mean, as with a lot of things that Greene says and does, it doesn't entirely square. Right after - she brings up Charlie Kirk there. Right after Charlie Kirk is murdered, she calls for a national divorce, which is her preferred term for a civil war. She also says that there's nothing left to say to Democrats.
So she's clearly toggling back and forth in her mind between what I think is perhaps, I would argue, her more honest response - the national divorce stuff - and then a more sort of, like, take a deep breath, maybe sit down with advisers and decide what to say to CNN. As it becomes clear that she's moving away from Trump, she's building up a little bit more of a following, what's the more effective political statement in that world? And so that - that's - I think there's more of a calculation, I think, there.
DAVIES: We're going to take another break, so let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Charles Bethea. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest story is titled "Marjorie Taylor Greene's Big Breakup." He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea about the political rift between President Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene, until recently, one of Trump's most outspoken supporters. After clashing with Trump over the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, tariffs, Israel, cryptocurrency and Affordable Care Act subsidies, Greene announced her resignation from Congress in November.
Her last day was yesterday. But she appeared on "Meet The Press" Sunday to criticize President Trump's military operation to arrest Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, saying it was the kind of foreign military operation MAGA supporters voted against. Bethea's new article in The New Yorker is titled "Marjorie Taylor Greene's Big Breakup." We recorded our conversation yesterday.
So, Charles Bethea, you've been reporting on Marjorie Taylor Greene for a long time. You live in Georgia. I mean, this is kind of home turf for you. She says she grew up in a working-class family. Tell us a bit about her background.
BETHEA: Yeah. So she's born in Milledgeville, Georgia, famous for being where Flannery O'Connor, the writer, spent most of her life. But she grows up in Cumming, a very white suburb of Atlanta. Her father, Bob, was the son of a Michigan steelworker. Her mother is from Milledgeville, so that's how they end up in Milledgeville. But Bob and Delle, her mother, meet in college.
Bob doesn't finish school. He heads to Vietnam instead, works a series of blue-collar jobs until he's able to ultimately start a small contracting business in Georgia that becomes, eventually, Taylor Commercial, a successful, regionally well-known construction company that would later play an important role in his daughter's sort of self-mythology as a businessperson. She goes on to University of Georgia. She's the first in her family to finish college. She meets her future husband there, and they spend the next couple decades raising three kids in the suburbs and then eventually taking over this construction company.
DAVIES: Now, you know, traditionally, people who are elected to Congress have often spent a long time in local politics. I mean, it's a big deal to win a congressional seat. It happens sometimes. Rich people can get seats more quickly nowadays, but still, you don't just walk into Congress. She first made plans to run when she was, I think, 45 or so. So what did she do between, you know, getting married and becoming a political aspirant?
BETHEA: So in 2011, she gets baptized in an Atlanta megachurch. I think she's looking, according to people who knew her at the time, she's looking for sort of a rootedness in her life. So she tries religion. She gets baptized. She talks about martyrdom during the ceremony. Then she sort of goes into this, I would say, religious version of exercise, which is the CrossFit phenomenon, which was kind of becoming a huge, global thing in 2012.
At that time, she has this sort of remarkable meeting with this guy named Jim Chambers. Chambers is the son - or grandson, rather, of the media billionaire Anne Cox Chambers, now deceased, who was a huge donor to the Democratic Party. Chambers himself was a socialist revolutionary who would have an anti-cop tattoo on his neck and prohibit capitalists and police and active military from his gyms. So, you know, sort of stating the obvious, a very unusual boss for the person we know as MTG to have at this stage of her life.
But Chambers told me that she really had no politics back then. And she certainly wasn't bothered by his revolutionary politics. He describes her to me as a wealthy housewife who seemed a little bored. So she's trying to quench this boredom, I think, through competitive exercise, through pool parties and through affairs with a few men at the gym, where she's working, at Chambers' gym, who also tell me that she has no obvious political interests, never talks about politics.
Instead, she's blogging about fitness, about her routines and also about her state of mind, which in a few posts she describes sort of having low self-confidence and struggling with that and looking for a way to flip a switch, as she puts it. So she finishes, I think, 62nd in the world in her age group in the CrossFit Games in 2015 and then makes this shift more towards this sort of online life, where she begins writing for a variety of very far-right websites.
DAVIES: You mentioned extramarital affairs. And you write that you spoke to two people who confirmed that they had had extramarital affairs with her. You actually wrote about this before she was elected to Congress, I believe, in October of 2020. I mean, you'd learned about some of this. Some folks would say, you know, that's kind of personal business, really. Does it belong in political reporting? Why did you feel this was important to include?
BETHEA: Well, I think, as Chambers put it to me, it's only relevant in so far as a commentary on her purported Christianity. She runs for office as a Christian, and she's living a life that for a while there, undermines that. I mean, the church that she went to, the pastor, actually, was known for his sermons about marital fidelity. So it's this sort of, you know, living one way and talking another way. And it's that hypocrisy that was important. But it was still something of a footnote in my original reporting, but I think it was something that stuck with her and upset her.
DAVIES: So, like, between roughly 2017 and 2019, she goes online and kind of discovers what?
BETHEA: I mean, she discovers what a lot of folks would soon hear about. This thing, the QAnon conspiracy theory and a lot of these kind of insane theories that are becoming popular online at the time, you know, purports that there's this global cabal of pedophiles that's running the world, that's preying upon children - and that there's this anonymous patriot, Q, who will sort of drop these clues onto the internet that will sort of create a path and lead the way to defeating this cabal. And as soon as Trump becomes president, a lot of folks, including her, involved in the QAnon conspiracy theory believe that he has sort of been sent. This Messiah-like figure has been sent to defeat that cabal. And so she describes his presidency as a, quote, "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out."
DAVIES: So in 2019, she gets seriously interested in politics and becomes sort of a citizen activist. She goes to Washington, for example, and taunts David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland high school shooting from Florida, who was in Washington lobbying for gun control. And Marjorie Taylor Greene gets a cameraperson and films her kind of hectoring him about his failure to stand up for gun rights. Somehow, she gets from that posture to winning a seat in Congress, which is not easy to do. How did she get there?
BETHEA: Well, when she's there in D.C, I think this helps to explain her motivation. She gets turned away from the offices of a number of senators. She only actually is successful in getting a meeting with Congressman Thomas Massie, who had become a friend of hers. She hands him her business card and says she plans to run for Congress. A few months later, she meets with a consultant about running in a district close to Atlanta. This consultant is struck by a few things. He's struck by the sort of volatility that he reads in Greene's appearance, in her demeanor and a lot of the things she's saying, particularly this video that she shows him of this teenager, of her walking behind the teenager and sort of harassing him.
He sort of interprets everything that she says in their first meeting as suggesting that she thinks that, like Trump, she's uniquely positioned to save America from socialism. That's how she'll put it in her first campaign, and then eventually, she tweaks that to communism. However, she wants to run in a district that - the 6th District in Georgia at the time - that is fairly diverse, well-educated and probably isn't going to be as interested in or turned on by these videos that she's kind of best known for, where she's harassing people.
DAVIES: And that's the district that she lives in at the time, right?
BETHEA: It's the district she lives in at the time, naturally. So - it's close to Atlanta. And so, you know, this seems like it's going to be a real push to get her to win. But he signs on, and they work together for a few months. And the main tack that he takes with her to try to make her candidacy work is to tell her to tie herself as best she can to her father's company, which, as I mentioned earlier, she and her then-husband had purchased from her father. It was a successful company. It was on the - the advertisements were on the radio. If you were a Republican, you probably heard these ads and could thus sort of intuit from them and her purported connection to them that this was a successful businessperson. Well, according to the consultant and others that I spoke to, she was not a businessperson really at all, other than the sort of signing her name on the documents filed in - with the secretary of state's office, saying that she was connected to this company.
And so she gets lucky, I think. I mean, it's not all luck, but she gets very lucky in that a seat in another district - one much better aligned to this person, Marjorie Greene - opens up when the longtime Congressman Tom Graves decides to retire from the - Georgia's 14th District.
And she immediately makes her move. She moves there. She finds a house there. And she doesn't have to run from the kind of paranoiac conspiratorial stuff that she's found a following with online. She can lean into that, and so she does. And she leans into not just that, but also implied violence towards the left in the campaign ads that she puts out, one of which sees her holding a gun standing next to members of the leftist members of what's called The Squad, including AOC. And that really appeals to a constituency that feels, I think, marooned and left out and on an island and wants a powerful, even angry avatar.
DAVIES: We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Charles Bethea. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest story is titled "Marjorie Taylor Greene's Big Breakup." We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea about the political rift between President Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene - until recently, one of Trump's most outspoken supporters.
So Marjorie Taylor Greene arrives in Congress in January of 2021, which is, you know, right when the January 6 assault on the Capitol occurs, in which Donald Trump is contesting the previous year's election. You know, typically, when freshmen arrive in Congress, they're encouraged to spend some time learning the procedures, the politics, the committee structure, all of that. Not exactly was - that wasn't her approach, was it?
BETHEA: No. No. She immediately tries and fails to impeach Joe Biden - not for the only time; she'll do this a few times - for - this time for his supposed abuse of power in allowing his son Hunter to serve on the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, when he - when Biden was vice president. And then she moves into, you know, a whole bunch of sponsoring or co-sponsoring a bunch of bills that give you a sense of her priorities. And I think this would hold true for the first few years. These bills have names like the Fire Fauci Act, the English Language Unity Act and the Old Glory Only Act, which sought to prohibit the flying of Pride flags at U.S. embassies.
These are all, I would say, kind of feelings-oriented legislation that point towards her eventual introduction of the Gulf of America Act that I'm sure listeners are more familiar with. This was actually quite recently, and it laid claim to the Gulf of Mexico. But of course, this and all of those other ones, most of which were stalled in their journey through Congress, did little to nothing to change any material reality for her constituents.
DAVIES: In 2021, she was stripped of her committee appointments, right? Now, why did that happen?
BETHEA: She was stripped. And this required - Democrats were joined by, I think, 11 or 12 - I don't remember the exact number of Republicans. Notably, Republicans who are no longer in Congress, but people like Adam Kinzinger, who really staked out a sort of line of demarcation they wouldn't cross with people like Greene and with Trump. And they pointed to all of the offensive and troubling things that she'd said prior to Congress. There were, I think, over a hundred statements that they said were disqualifying for somebody. I mean, they couldn't, of course, kick her out of Congress. But for someone to hold a committee seat in Congress, these were things that were, you know, a bridge too far, rhetorically. And so she was effectively removed.
DAVIES: Right. So losing your committee - for a congressperson to lose her committee appointments would take away all of their clout in normal times, in the normal, you know, course of business. Not her.
BETHEA: No, I mean, because thinking of her as a traditional legislator misses the point. She pushes a shift in Congress towards brand-building, narrative-shaping, headline-making over legislative productivity, second only to maybe Trump. She normalizes a more confrontational, attention-driven model of politics that really prioritizes, as I said, conflict and provocative rhetoric over everything else.
And so she acts almost as an avatar. And for people in her district, I have to say, for many of them - not all of them, but many of them - the - having an avatar who is speaking the language of their resentment, thumbing her nose in the direction that they want to thumb their nose, this feels satisfying. They don't expect much from politics. And this is a narrative that aligns, too, with, I think, a lot of how Trump's base has felt about him. But she does more than that. This idea that I mentioned earlier of her being the canary in the coal mine of the GOP, this is another reason why she's able to, I think, gain stature in her party.
DAVIES: Well, what do you mean by that?
BETHEA: So Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, described her this way to me when we spoke for my story in The New Yorker. This framework, the canary in the coal mine, he meant that she'll often take up an issue before the rest of the party, frequently drawing criticism, at least initially, for doing so. And then the party will follow her there. So, for instance, she was among the very first to visit the January 6 insurrectionists in jail, to protest their supposedly poor treatment there. She visits them in early 2023. She does this investigation. She puts out this report, Unusually Cruel is what it's called, an eyewitness report from the D.C. jail.
A lot of other Republicans really stayed away from such overt sympathy for the people who stormed the Capitol and attacked police officers there. But as we know, eventually history is revised on the right. And J6ers become sort of martyrs in the eyes of many, and Trump pardons them. There's that example. There's also the example of trans issues. She's one of the first. When she arrives in Congress, she puts a sign outside her door that proclaims there are only two genders. That sign, I should note, is still there, as of a few weeks ago when I last walked past her door.
Many other Republicans, including folks who are now closely aligned with Greene, like Nancy Mace, were initially strongly in support of LGBTQ rights and equality. But they followed Greene on this issue, and Mace is now using slurs for trans people. Trump, of course, uses transphobia to help return him to the White House. So, you know, in all these ways, she's getting out front, and in doing so, sort of being vulnerable and opening herself up to criticism. But ultimately, I think she's proven to have sort of a very keen sense of where the base is and what the base wants. And this is true, too, of the Epstein files.
DAVIES: Do you know if she still believes the 2020 election was stolen?
BETHEA: I think she does. That's one of the things that she has not come back around on. That would be fascinating. It doesn't seem, now, outside of the realm of the possible. But no, I've not seen her come around on that one.
DAVIES: Yeah.
BETHEA: And that is a good point to bring up. I mean, as these kind of hagiographies, if you will, take hold in which she's portrayed increasingly as this martyr who can somehow sort of straddle the political divide, she still holds onto a lot of ideas that are easily factually disprovable and a lot of notions that are grounded in hate, such as her positions on trans issues.
DAVIES: We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Charles Bethea. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest story is titled "Marjorie Taylor Greene's Big Breakup." We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea about the political rift between President Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene, until recently, one of Trump's most outspoken supporters.
So we're kind of left with what to make of all of this. Is this a sincere change of heart? Is it political expediency? And, you know, you write about some Democratic members of Congress whose views of Marjorie Taylor Greene changed as they worked together on the Epstein files. And an example is Debbie Dingell, the congresswoman from Michigan.
And that's particularly striking because in September of 2021, she was having a news conference with Nancy Pelosi and others about women's health. And Marjorie Taylor Greene shows up on the Capitol steps and just shouts at them for, like, 10 minutes. And, finally, Debbie Dingell comes back and gives it back to her. And they yell at each other from 15 to 20 feet away, and this gets reported in the news.
And this is what struck me, was Marjorie Taylor Greene's post afterwards aimed at Debbie Dingell. She writes, all House Democrats are evil and will kill unborn babies all the way up to birth and then celebrate. You might fall down the stairs when you're unhinged and hypocritically preaching about being civil, going to church and killing babies. You're a joke. That was September of '21. And then more recently, after they collaborated on the Epstein legislation, they hugged on the House floor. Ro Khanna, the Democrat from California, seems to speak kindly of her. What do you make of these relationships now?
BETHEA: I sat in the House chamber on the day that the Epstein Transparency Act was passed. And I saw not just Dingell, but a whole host of other Democrats walk over from their side of the chamber to the center where she sat, where Greene sat, often alone wearing black, which felt like a choice, and offering - I couldn't hear what they were saying. I talked to some of them afterwards, though. And they were offering thanks, appreciation, words that acknowledged the bravery and the courage that Greene had exhibited in doing what she did, which, of course, brought her into Trump's crosshairs.
I think that the embrace of the Epstein issue, I want to give her full credit for the sincerity that seems to be at the heart of that. As I've already said, it connects back to the QAnon stuff. But I think it also connects to the relationships that she formed, that Ro Khanna spoke to me about, with the survivors. He's not somebody who has any natural affinity for Greene's politics, obviously. But he was an eyewitness to relationships that he saw between Greene and these women that were real. She wasn't willing to give up on them in their fight for some kind of justice.
DAVIES: So you give her full credit for sincerity on...
BETHEA: Yeah.
DAVIES: ...The Epstein survivors. You did talk to people in Georgia and other political operatives about what might be behind this. For example, does she have plans for higher office? She says no, right?
BETHEA: She says no, but she also doesn't entirely rule it out. I mean, if you read closely her resignation letter, Greene noted the sort of prerequisite for her potential return to politics, which struck the kind of populist tone she's been using over the previous few months. She wrote, the common American people would need to, quote, "finally realize and understand that the political industrial complex of both parties is ripping this country apart." So she's obviously setting herself outside of that complex, outside of Trumpism and pointing in a new direction towards an appealing place without partisan rancor and violence. Or at least, so it seems.
But how serious is she about coming back into the political arena? I did speak to someone close to her who said that she was done with all that. He pointed out that she can now enjoy an outdoorsy and exercise-filled life, which we know she enjoys. She also has a lot of money, something like $25 million in the bank, some of that from her construction company, some from well-timed stock trades. So she can enjoy that life, but she has this platform that she's built. She has more followers than any other female Republican in Congress online.
And so it seems hard to believe that at age 51, with that following, with this sort of successful, I would say, so far movement to at least open the doors to another path and a way out of MAGA - this America first, America only path - that it seems compelling to believe that that's open to her. And I did hear - and I don't want to put too much emphasis on this 'cause it essentially qualifies as rumor. But I heard from someone close to her who said that she was thinking of running - thinking was how he put it - thinking of running for president in 2028. I obviously don't know the answer, and it's quite possible that she doesn't either.
DAVIES: As Marjorie Taylor Greene kind of steps away from Trump, I mean, one might think that she would anger her MAGA base, might anger her own constituents. How is she thought of in her district now? Do you know?
BETHEA: Yeah. Well, the - one of the last appearances she made as a congressperson was in Murray County, a rural county in Northwest Georgia, to protest alongside about a thousand of her constituents the proposed building of a biowaste facility that could potentially cause significant harm to the air, the water and certain property values. So I went up and saw her speak in a community center in early December. And it was really something to see the demagoguery at work and to see how passionate her constituents remained for her. I didn't - I ran across no one whose anger at her for leaving eclipsed their love of her as a representative. And in fact, there were chants - don't leave us. And I saw people screaming for selfies. It was almost like a retiring rock star kind of vibe.
And she gave this rousing 11-minute demagogic speech in which she leaned into ad hominem attacks on the panel of experts who'd been assembled to defend this facility. She went after what they were wearing. She tried to undermine the science. And she got - she just got a thrilled response from all of the people there. And it was - nothing about that suggested to me that her days as an effective politician are over. And if anything, I think people left there, some of whom hadn't voted for her before, thinking, this is a person I could vote for again, or for the first time. So I don't think we've heard the last of her.
DAVIES: Charles Bethea, thanks so much for speaking with us.
BETHEA: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.
DAVIES: Charles Bethea is a staff writer for the New Yorker. His latest story is titled "Marjorie Taylor Greene's Big Breakup." Our interview was recorded yesterday. On tomorrow's show, investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau says we're seeing a national surge in violent bigotry and white supremacy encouraged by incendiary rhetoric from Donald Trump. Lichtblau's new book, "American Reich," examines the trend through events in Orange County, California, including a murder committed by a young neo-Nazi. I hope you can join us.
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
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