The announcement by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, that she would be resigning her seat in Congress just after the first of the year—and just before the fifth anniversary of the storming of the U.S. Capitol—sent a powerful message.
It is one that President Donald Trump missed entirely.
He’s not alone in that.
Most observers, even the careful and astute ones, missed it, too.
Greene announced her departure from Congress following an escalating feud with Trump, a president she slavishly has followed since her election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2020. She was so devoted to Trump that she even wore her red MAGA ballcap to a State of the Union Address.
She broke with her president, though, over his determined campaign to prevent the Jeffrey Epstein files from being released. She made common cause with the women who had been sexually abused by the late Epstein when they were underage girls, demanding justice for them in more and more forceful terms.
She also criticized Trump and her fellow Republican members of the House for their inaction on issues of affordability, particularly when it came to health care.
It was not like Greene was alone in this.
Before his Attorney General Pam Bondi informed the president that his name was littered throughout the Epstein files, Trump had loudly and often called for the public release of those records. Justice for the survivors demanded it, the president and his MAGA base asserted.
He also made bringing prices down the centerpiece of his 2024 presidential campaign. He argued that runaway inflation was pushing the American Dream out of reach for too many Americans.
And Trump had vowed, going back to his first run for the presidency in 2016 and his first term in the White House, that he would replace the Affordable Care Act with a health-care plan that would be better and more affordable. Doing so was essential to making America great again, he said.
But 10 years later, there isn’t even a wisp of a plan to extend and make less expensive health care for millions of Americans from Trump. Worse, he and his allies in Congress have maneuvered to close hospitals and eliminate health-care options in rural America, which is home to the heart of the MAGA movement.
Worse still, he and his Republican amen chorus forced an expensive federal government shutdown because they wanted to slip massive increases in health-insurance rates past the American public. Those increases will hit MAGA America with disproportionate force.
Nor has he kept his promises regarding affordability. Inflation now is much higher than it was when he took office 10 months ago.
Many of the increases can be directly attributed to Trump’s policies. His imposition of tariffs in a willy-nilly, impulsive and often vindictive fashion has spurred rather than curtailed inflation. At the same time, his on-again, off-again trade wars with once-dependable trading partners have made it difficult for farmers and others to sell their products, choking off income and revenue streams across the country.
Again, the weight of this broken promise has fallen more heavily on the president’s supporters than anyone else.
Then there’s the Epstein files.
The significance of that story for the MAGA faithful goes far beyond the sordid, depraved nature of the crimes involved. To the MAGA membership, the Epstein saga symbolizes both the power of the elite to escape consequence for the most horrific crimes and the moral rot at the core of a country many of them now struggle to recognize.
It’s not surprising that the Epstein files provided the straw that broke the elephant’s back for Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The language she used in her resignation announcement—comparing herself to “a battered wife”—echoed those themes of violation and victimization.
Trump responded by calling her a “traitor,” either missing—deliberately missing—her point.
What Greene was pointing out was she was standing up for what MAGA believed in. For what Trump promised.
Trump’s base has sustained him throughout. Until now, he hasn’t directed his fire at one of his own.
That’s changed. Now, he’s fighting with members of the Indiana Senate, U.S. Rep. Tom Massie, R-Kentucky and … Marjorie Taylor Greene, all of whom are MAGA devotees.
Greene isn’t leaving Congress because she broke faith with MAGA.
She’s leaving because Donald Trump did.
That distinction matters.
