Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Big Breakup
On Dillon’s show, Greene questioned Trump’s approach to deportations (“This has to be a smarter plan”), Argentina’s recent American bailout (“Huh?”) and the priorities of his base (“I don’t think these people are being served”). She was, she said, no longer willing to “wear the Republican jersey”. Dillon suggested Greene might run for president in 2028. “Oh, my God, I hate politics so much, Tim,” Greene responded.
“I know, but you are a member of Congress.
“Well, I saw a few people say, ‘She’s running away,'” Greene continued. “What I’m doing right now is I really want to solve the problems. And I’m sincerely angry on behalf of all Americans, even if they’re Democrats.”
“Marjorie Taylor Greene, ladies and gentlemen, our next president,” Dillon said in conclusion. “Sorry, JD Vance.”
Betting markets quickly opened on Greene’s departure from the Republican Party and, separately, her candidacy for the Republican presidency in 2028. For a time, in the latter case, she was behind Vance and Marco Rubio in the odds. Far-right activist Laura Loomer denounced her several times on X: “I have never seen a more opportunistic woman before. » Josh McKoon, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, told me he found Greene’s publicity tour clever. “There is a debate about where the Republican Party is going in the future,” he said. “Someone who has a broader footprint and has introduced themselves to more voters, I think, will have more say in what that future looks like.” But, McKoon admitted, he wasn’t entirely sure what MTG was doing. All he knew, he said, “is that if she believes it, she will share it.”
Greene grew up in Cumming, Georgia, a predominantly white community northeast of Atlanta. His father ran a construction company, Taylor Commercial, and dabbled in pseudoscience. He once published an essay titled “The Taylor Effect,” in which he claimed to have discovered “an undeniable correlation” between stock prices and “the relative positions of the sun, earth, and moon.” His childhood included water skiing, Thriller nights and being manager of the school football team. “She was a good girl,” Leslie Hamburger, a friend from the time, recalled recently. “She was popular, but she was very focused on getting good grades. I think she ran for class president, but I don’t think she won.” Another student brought a gun to school — “He took our whole school hostage,” Greene later said — but no one was hurt. Greene became the first person in her family to earn a college degree, at the University of Georgia, where she married a tall, business-minded classmate named Perry Greene, with whom she raised three children in suburban Atlanta.
However, in her late 30s, Greene no longer seemed moored. Around 2012, she went to work at a CrossFit gym owned by James Cox Chambers, Jr., grandson of an Atlanta billionaire named Anne Cox Chambers. He was a passionate socialist – another camp of his excluded “cops, active duty military, landlords and capitalists”. Greene, meanwhile, had recently been baptized at an Atlanta-area megachurch. During the ceremony, she read excerpts from the Bible about martyrdom. She looked, to Chambers, like a “rich housewife who was a little bored.”
Greene invited Chambers to his family’s large house north of Atlanta, and elsewhere he saw her “drinking alcohol by the pool,” he recalled, “hanging out with guys who were working out at the gym, avoiding her husband.” I learned that two of these men had affairs with Greene. One of them, Craig Ivey, now presents himself, on X, as “the polyamorous tantric sex guru”. (Ivey declined to comment for this article.) A former roommate of Ivey’s from that period told me that Greene made small talk on the way up to Ivey’s room. The other man Greene had an affair with around this time told me she “never talked about politics” and didn’t seem to have any career ambitions. The relationship lasted a few months. After they split, Greene texted him: “You make me feel like the only reason you ‘invested’ in me is because I slept with you. And now you’re washing your hands of me.” (I was the first to report these matters, prompting Greene to text me the article: “If we have another toilet paper shortage, I won’t wipe my ass with it.” She copied her lawyer, Lin Wood, who said the story was “intended to smear her with false accusations, half-truths, misrepresentations, out-of-context statements and agenda-driven lies.” Wood then turned against Greene, calling her a “communist.”)
