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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is having a moment—just not necessarily the one she envisioned. The right-wing gym owner turned Georgia congresswoman should be on top of the world. Her “favorite president” is in the White House, Republicans control Congress, and the House majority is narrow enough to keep her influential. But instead, she’s disillusioned: She says she’s “had it” with the Republican Party, and she’s split with Trump himself on issues ranging from A.I. to foreign policy. Nor is she keeping quiet about her misgivings: On the contrary, Greene has continually broadcast them to her nearly 5 million followers on X, and shared her frustrations with sympathetic media.

It’s too early to tell if Greene’s laments are representative of a broader disenchantment with Trump among the MAGA base, an attempt to pressure him to keep his America First promises, or perhaps a one-woman quest to lay claim to the MAGA mantle in a post-Trump era. But whatever she’s up to, she’s raising eyebrows at a time when Trump is facing perhaps the most perilous moment of his second presidency—contending with softening poll numbers, accusations of an Epstein cover-up, and economic jitters that no attempt at data suppression can erase.

Meanwhile, Greene gave several eye-popping quotes to the Daily Mail this week. “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 said, adding: “I don’t know what the hell happened to the Republican Party.” Earlier this summer, she expressed her disappointment with Trump for getting the United States “back into foreign wars, regime change, and world war 3,” referring to the administration’s actions in Israel and Iran. “It feels like a complete bait and switch.”

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Greene insists that Trump is not at fault in all this—indeed, a person close to the congresswoman told me she still talks to him regularly, and believes he’s the best president ever. Rather, she blames the people around Trump for, in her view, forcing him to veer from his promise to end foreign wars and focus on America’s domestic problems. She openly beefs with Mark Levin, the conservative talk show host who was among those pushing Trump to bomb Iran. She scoffed when former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, an Iran hawk, got a cushy appointment as U.N. ambassador, his apparent non-punishment for Signalgate, wherein he inadvertently shared plans for bombing the Houthis in Yemen with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. She’s at odds with others who have the president’s ear as well, including Laura Loomer. (As my colleague Eriq Gardner reported yesterday, Loomer said in a briefly unsealed deposition that Greene is “very jealous of me,” and that “Trump’s staff told me that they can’t stand Marjorie Taylor Greene.”)

The problem, Greene told Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast in May, wasn’t that there was a “wedge” between Trump and the base, but that Washington and the Republican establishment were thwarting Trump’s agenda. Three months later, though, either the wedge is real, or Greene has found herself on an island.

The Georgia congresswoman is used to isolation. Shortly after she came to Congress, in 2021, having been elected as a QAnon conspiracy theorist and devout Trump supporter, the Democratic-led House revoked her committee assignments for her prior antisemitic comments and violent rhetoric about Democrats. (In self-defense, she gave a speech on the House floor saying that she’d been duped by the right-wing internet.)

Two years later, she was also exiled from the hard-right House Freedom Caucus because of her feud with fellow member Lauren Boebert. But she also made moves that brought her into the fold, breaking with hardline colleagues to back Rep. Kevin McCarthy in his protracted, 15-ballot race for speaker that year, a mutually beneficial pact where he vowed to “always take care of her.” He didn’t last the year, of course, and she openly feuded with his successor, Mike Johnson, whom she wanted to oust from the chair despite frustrations from candidate Trump. After Trump’s reelection, she backed Johnson to keep his gavel, and was appointed to head the Oversight subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (the House’s version of DOGE). She had Elon Musk’s phone number and vowed to do his bidding on the Hill. Her power was only growing.

But DOGE turned out to be a bust—especially on the Hill. Musk and the Office of Management and Budget moved swiftly on their own to shrink the federal workforce and shut down disfavored agencies and programs, bypassing Congress. Greene held hearings, notching some viral moments, but that was about it. Her political capital seemed to be waning, too. When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp decided against running for Senate, Greene considered jumping into the race but was told by top Trump aides that she couldn’t win—The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio, who said he couldn’t work for her, clocked her at 18 points behind Democrat Jon Ossoff.

She also considered running for the open governor’s seat, but now implies she’s been blocked from doing that, too, by a network of “good ole boy” donors in Georgia. “And one day, I might just run without the blessing from the good ‘ole boys club, or the out of state consulting leaches [sic] or even without the blessing of my favorite President,” she posted on X last week.

While she continues to praise the president at every turn, Greene has been breaking with him more and more—occasionally in dramatic fashion. She said she wouldn’t have voted for the House version of the Big Beautiful Bill if she’d known it contained a moratorium on states regulating artificial intelligence. (That provision was later removed by the Senate, and she voted in favor of the final version.) After Trump signed a trio of executive orders on A.I. two weeks ago, she railed against them on X for what she called a lack of “guardrails” that could have “devastating” consequences on the environment, the water supply, and the workforce, adding that the country’s approach to A.I. policy needed to be “careful and wise.” She was one of 12 Republicans to vote against the GENIUS Act, a priority of the president’s that would regulate stablecoins, over fears that the legislation would move the U.S. to an entirely digital system of currency and enable the government to, in her words, “take control” of people’s bank accounts.

She has also spoken out forcefully against the administration’s handling of various right-wing causes célèbres, most notably the drama surrounding the Epstein files, which she wants released, contra Trump’s Justice Department. This week, she posted a chart of arrests made in connection with a number of other preoccupations in her party—Benghazi, the “Ukraine Impeachment Hoax,” the “Russiagate Collusion Hoax,” etcetera—all of them amounting to nothing, to her dismay. “Don’t talk about it if you aren’t going to do it,” she wrote.

But it may be Trump’s foreign policy that has most frustrated Greene. In a 90-minute interview with Tucker Carlson at the end of June, she declared, “I turned a corner this past weekend where I’ve had it.” Trump had just bombed three nuclear sites in Iran, which Greene had been publicly urging the administration not to do. “Six months in, there’s literally nothing we can do and we ended up bombing a foreign country,” she said. “That upset me so much.”

Since then, she’s become an outspoken critic of the G.O.P.’s unequivocal support for Israel, and the only Republican on the Hill to call the country’s actions in Gaza a “genocide.” This from a representative who pushed to censure Rashida Tlaib for referring to Israel’s war in Gaza as a “genocide” a few weeks after October 7. This summer, she was the only other rep who voted “present”—alongside Tlaib—on a resolution condemning antisemitism. Every other voting member supported it.

All this represents quite a journey for Greene, a conspiracy theorist and partisan provocateur throughout, who has stood consistently with Trump, even when the party seemed poised to abandon him after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Her status as one of Trump’s most steadfast defenders placed her deep inside Trump’s inner circle and helped make her one of the most celebrated lawmakers within his base, propelling her to easy reelections in her scarlet red district (she won by nearly 29 points last cycle). Her combativeness has also made her a prolific fundraiser with a devout following of her own. The question for Greene is whether they’re devout enough to stand with her in the cold. As she told Carlson of her constituents, “I’m sure some of them are mad at me right now.”

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