Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) insists she hasn’t changed, but the conservative troublemaker is increasingly dividing herself from her party on all issues by Jeffrey Epstein To Health care subsidies confuse and anger their fellow Republicans.
Greene forged her political identity in Congress as a passionate Trump loyalist, defending the president and the protesters on January 6, 2021, and attacking Democrats at every turn.
But with Trump back in the White House, Greene has found himself on the opposite side of many of the president’s positions and on something of an island among Republicans.
In a telephone interview for this story, Greene said she is not the one who has changed, citing her criticism of congressional Republicans and their lack of action on health care in her primary campaign in 2020.
“I am 100 percent the same person today as I was when I ran for Congress,” Greene said.
Greene said it was “ridiculous” to suggest her positions put her on an island in the GOP. “I actually represent what many Americans wholeheartedly support.”
“My job title is not cheerleading for Republicans in Congress. I’m not talking about the president. I’m talking about Republicans in Congress. And Republicans in Congress are the ones who need to come up with a plan to improve health insurance,” she later added.
Still, several of Greene’s House GOP colleagues and GOP sources told The Hill that they are more rattled than ever by Greene’s positions and wish she would pursue a different strategy to achieve her goals.
“Whether it’s Gaza, whether it’s Epstein, whether it’s now the ACA [Affordable Care Act] Credits, she was the 180-degree opposite of Trump,” said one House Republican. “In fact, she was more Biden than Trump.”
Greene described Israel’s actions in Gaza over the summer as “genocide.” She was one of only four Republicans who joined a dismissal motion to release files related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, contrary to the White House’s wishes. Last week, she pushed back against GOP leaders’ shutdown messages by expressing concern about the expiring ObamaCare tax credits that could double insurance premiums for millions, saying, Republicans have no plan to address the problem.
In a media campaign last week, she once again broke against Republicans and Trump – including a surprising criticism of the Trump administration’s mass deportations while pointing to her experiences as the owner of a construction company.
“We have to do something about the workforce, and that has to be a smarter plan than just rounding up every single person and just deporting them,” Greene said on an episode of The Tim Dillon Show Podcast published on the weekend. “I’ll face resistance, but from now on I’ll just live in reality.”
Democrats are moving away from their pattern of denigrating Greene and now praising her stance on health care. One Press release of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee quoted a spokesman as saying, “Marjorie Taylor Greene is right.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) showed a screenshot of her social media post in a press conference.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) downplayed the significance of Greene’s concerns in a news conference last week.
“Congresswoman Greene is not on the judicial committees that deal with these specific issues, and she probably didn’t hear some of it,” Johnson said.
Greene dismissed the frustrations of her colleagues, who had hoped and expected her to be more of a team player in the Republican three-way meeting.
“This frustration with me only exists here in this political bubble,” Greene argued, pointing to calls to her office that day about her stance on health care: Of 224 calls, 175 were supportive and 40 were against, she said.
Greene claims she is a staunch Trump supporter, even though she does said NBC News She is not a “blind slave” of the president. However, she declined to say whether she has spoken to President Trump recently.
“I don’t talk about my relationship with my mom and how often I talk to her, and I don’t talk about how often I talk to my kids and what day I talk to them,” Greene told The Hill. “I don’t have to explain it. You don’t hear me running out and saying, ‘I spoke to the president today.'”
Greene did mention During an appearance at Steve Bannon’s War Room earlier this month, he expressed his concerns about Trump over the phone.
However, she has been open about her conflicts with the president’s staff and advisers, often saying that Trump would get bad advice or misinformation if he disagreed with her on an issue.
After an unnamed White House official distributed a statement to the press warning that signing a dismissal petition to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files “would be viewed as a very hostile act toward the administration,” Greene said in an interview with Real America’s Voice that whoever said it was a “coward.” because he attacked members like her who defended Trump after January 6th.
Greene was also discouraged from running for Senate by people close to Trump. For example, the Wall Street Journal reported in May that Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio had commissioned a poll that showed she was trailing Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) by double digits. Greene said At the time, she wanted “nothing to do with the Senate” and criticized the aides and aides who leaked the poll and private conversations, insinuating that they were working against her because they were not on her payroll.
Greene refuted the sentiment that she is not a team player and is not working against the president, pointing to her votes for the “One Big Beautiful Bill” of Trump’s tax cuts and Medicaid reforms, as well as for the GOP’s stopgap Continuing Resolution (CR).
“I voted for the team party bills that I didn’t necessarily like. I didn’t like them. I wasn’t particularly keen on the one big thing – I thought there were some things that I really liked, but there were others that I didn’t like,” Greene told The Hill. “I never want to vote for another CR again, it makes me want to throw up, but I voted for the two CRs this year. I support the president by voting for a CR. That’s what he wanted.”
“And that’s why I don’t understand that they’re criticizing me for standing up and saying – going back to what I’ve always said – health insurance is crushing Americans and we have to do something about it,” Greene said.
At a House Republican political meeting last month, she also made a surprise announcement that she would transfer $240,000, a hefty sum, to the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Many of Greene’s most notable recent departures from Trump and other Republicans have come in the months since her longtime spokesman and deputy chief of staff, Nick Dyer, left office in May. Dyer was widely known in the press corps and on Capitol Hill and landed on The Hill’s 2024 Notable Staffers list. list.
Greene said the personnel change will not affect her messaging. “I always wrote my tweets. I always did my own communication.”
Dyer told The Hill: “It was an honor to work for Congresswoman Greene as she led the fight to remake Congress and put America first. I am proud of what we have accomplished in a few short years.”
Isaiah Wartman, another longtime aide who led Greene’s political operations since her first campaign in 2020, left her team after the 2024 election to move to the White House as special assistant to the president for personnel.
Even though Greene has repeatedly voiced displeasure over the years, Republican leaders have extended olive branches as they sought to harness her star power.
Instead of sending her into exile as a conspiracy theorist and pariah, then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) brought Greene on board, thereby legitimizing the arsonist early in her congressional career. Their alliance helped McCarthy critics in the House Freedom Caucus kick Greene out.
Greene’s support didn’t do much to save him from being ousted by a band of other Republican troublemakers. But after initially clashing with Johnson and making an unsuccessful attempt to oust him after pushing through Congress to fund Ukraine, Greene appeared to repeat the journey from antagonist to power ally.
After a “productive” meet With Johnson after the 2024 election, it was announced that Greene would chair a “DOGE” subcommittee under the House Oversight Committee – and Greene later endorsed Johnson for speaker.
She publicly hinted at higher ambitions Ponder about becoming Homeland Security Secretary before Trump appointed Kristi Noem to the role.
Still, it held hearings to cut funding for PBS and NPR, and Congress later approved the White House’s request to defund public broadcasters. The House of Representatives passed two of her bills: one to officially rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and another to require DHS to release a monthly report on foreign nationals deemed security risks attempting to enter the United States
Her Protect Children’s Innocence Act, a bill she has pushed for years that would ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth, passed the House Judiciary Committee this year. While the Justice Department submitted last month and approved In another bill led by freshman Rep. Bob Onder (R-Mo.) that aims to codify Trump’s executive order on gender-specific care for minors, Greene said she was confident her own legislation would get a vote.
But leaders can expect Greene to have no shortage of criticism. Johnson said Sunday on Fox News He had a “thoughtful” conversation with Greene in recent days following her recent criticism of health care.
And these high expectations of Republicans are at the core of Greene’s politics.
“I’m tired of Republicans in Congress not passing the agenda, not doing what they say, and not directing the way they campaign,” Greene said.
