A former GOP strategist has lifted the lid on why firebrand Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, once one of Donald Trump’s most die-hard loyalists in the House, has increasingly taken to knifing her own party under the second MAGA presidency.
Jeff Timmer—executive director of anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, and who previously helmed the Michigan Republican Party—told the Guardian he believes the noted conspiracy theorist’s screeching 180 “can be attributed more to a woman scorned than the evolution of human goodness in Marjorie Taylor Greene.”
Greene has faced intense criticism, even ridicule, in the past for marching in lockstep with Trump and his fantastical claims. She previously backed his unfounded assertions that the 2020 election was stolen and allegations of corruption under Joe Biden to the Democratic Party being behind the Russiagate and Jan. 6 “hoaxes.”
But she’s now emerged as an often lone voice of dissent within the GOP amid the deepening turmoil of the president’s second stint in the White House. While Timmer’s comments to the newspaper didn’t dispute that Greene may have a genuine bone to pick with her colleagues in her party, he questioned whether her motives of late have been entirely selfless.
“They didn’t want her to run; she’s getting a pound of flesh,” as he put it to reporters Sunday, in reference to reports earlier this summer Trump had declined to back Greene for a 2026 gubernatorial run in her home state. GOP leaders were reportedly concerned she might win the primary, but lose the general election.
“‘You wanted to put your thumb on me and thought I’d just play the loyal soldier?’” Timmer went on. “‘Well, I’m going to defy you on some key things like the Epstein files or healthcare and Medicaid’.”
Greene has indeed taken to blasting the White House over its handling of developments in the late sex trafficker’s case, lending full-throated support to a legislative petition, co-authored by her fellow Republican Representative Thomas Massie and their counterpart across the aisle Ro Khanna. It would force the House to hold a vote on pressuring the Justice Department to release fresh investigative documents on the disgraced financier’s crimes.
That move has proven all the more controversial due to widespread suspicions that the Trump administration may be suppressing the release of further findings because the president himself features prominently in the case files. So far, Greene has to date trodden carefully to avoid criticizing the MAGA leader outright.
She has also blasted Republican leadership amid the ongoing government shutdown for a lack of guidance and attention to the issue of Obamacare subsidiaries expiring at the end of December. Unless they are renewed or extended, insurance premiums will more than double for America’s most vulnerable families at the outset of the new year.
Greene’s gathering rogue streak has clearly unsettled the president, who’s reported to have called around senior Republican colleagues earlier this month with a single question about his once most ardent supporter in the House: “What’s going on with Marjorie?”
Her bucking of the party line has meanwhile also garnered increasing attention, even praise from the far-right Congresswoman’s opponents on the left of the political spectrum. “I was wrong about Majorie Taylor Greene,” read the headline of an opinion column in last week’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“Even if you don’t agree with Greene on everything—or even most things—you have to admire her willingness in this moment to say what is true, even when other Republicans refuse to,” wrote that article’s author, Patricia Murphy. “Maybe it’s career suicide, or maybe it’s leadership.”
Others among Greene’s critics have balked at the prospect of Greene—a known propagator of wild conspiracy theories such as top Democrats being members of a satanic pedophilic cabal, or the COVID-19 pandemic being the product of a bioweapons attack, or the weather being controlled by giant “Jewish space lasers” wielded by nefarious forces from beyond the earth’s atmosphere—emerging as a champion of truth and facts-based policy.
Whatever confusion Greene’s escalating one-woman MAGA civil war may have caused among her opponents, her comments during a recent spate of interviews would appear to lend credence to Timmer’s claims that her disillusionment with the GOP can be credited in no small part to feeling stifled by the party’s current leadership.
“One day, I might just [run] without the blessing from the good ole boys club or the out-of-state consulting leeches or even without the blessing of my favorite president,” Greene wrote in a July statement announcing she would not be launching a gubernatorial run next year. “One day, I might just run purely out of the blessing of the wonderful people of Georgia, my family and friends, but it won’t be in 2026.”
“I don’t know if the Republican Party is leaving me, or if I’m kind of not relating to the Republican Party as much anymore,” she added in an interview with the Daily Mail last month. “I just don’t care anymore.”
