Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Playing the Long Game

Late on Friday, in a statement that took everyone by surprise, Greene announced that she would be resigning from Congress in January. Once one of Trump’s most vocal allies, she had been fighting an increasingly bitter war with him in recent months, attacking him on everything from health care to the Epstein files to foreign policy. Trump, she has argued, is betraying his movement, selling out his voters as his administration ignores rising costs, attempts to hide embarrassing secrets, and props up a failing government in Argentina and a murderous one in Israel.

She hit these points again in her resignation letter. “Most of the Establishment Republicans, who secretly hate and who stabbed him in the back and never defended him against anything, have all been welcomed in after the election,” she wrote. “If I am cast aside by MAGA Inc and replaced by Neocons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Military Industrial War Complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class that can’t even relate to real Americans, then many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well.”

If Greene is surrendering, she’s not exactly admitting defeat. Nor should she, now that Trump is a lame-duck president and the future of his MAGA movement is very much in doubt. It’s not too early to begin imagining—or in Greene’s case, positioning oneself for—a post-Trump politics on the right.