Now it can be told. Now that Marjorie Taylor Greene has emerged as the most effective Trump critic in politics, I’m happy to relay our distant relations.
Georgia? My uncle Bob Greene — lifelong Republican, Vietnam vet, career Army but after early retirement an assistant principal (read: enforcer) at a public school — lived in the Atlanta area for years, right next door, if not actually in, MTG’s 14th Congressional District. Coincidence?
When I pause my elation to think further, however, I do have to wonder if she is, like us, descended from a French Huguenot who arrived in what was to become Rockland County sometime in the hillbilly mists before the Revolution. Upon diligent research (hastily typing something into Google), I see she’s a Taylor, as advertised, and merely married and later divorced a contractor named Perry Greene, uh, no relation.
But a boy can dream. Can, in fact, come to admire this yellow-haired warrior, now 51 yet still jacked like the CrossFit trainer she once was. Putting aside the attention-seeking strategies of her recent-past life as a conspiracy theorist (hell, everybody’s doing it), she’s pretty much the only one of her Grand Ol’ Party with the gumption to cross Trump, to tell it like it is, that is — the government shutdown is on them, controlling all three branches as they do. To which you could add the party’s grip on the most watched TV news network and the right’s victories in the podcast and social media wars, and on and on.
Then there was her lambasting of the so-called America first agenda that bails out Argentina to the tune of $40 billion as “one of the grossest things I’ve ever seen,” adding of the quadrupling of imports of its beef, outraging American ranchers, “I can’t think of a country that’s further away from the United States of America than Argentina. It’s at the bottom of South America in the Southern Hemisphere, and we’re all the way at the top,” which drew laughter from her interlocutor, Tucker Carlson. “I don’t know how that’s America first.”
Let reason ring.
But let us not forget her threat to walk into the Capitol and read “every damn name” on the Jeffrey Epstein list “that abused these women. I can do that for them, and I’d be proud to do that.” Oof.
Topped only by her lowering the boom about the imminent soaking of her constituents as health care costs spike thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill.
You’re like a twanging voice in the wilderness, Marjorie. It’s enough to make a Greene proud.