This kind of professional coverture — where women rely on powerful men for their own professional status — can be heady. It’s not hard to imagine the onetime “South Dakota Snow Queen” Noem struggling with professional respect or the GED holder Boebert having few career options. And for many of them, betting on Trump did pay off. They did not just win elections and gain political appointments. They also became stars.
But history can tell you what happens when a king graces a woman with new powers: When the king tires of her, her reign is over.
Marjorie Taylor Greene at a rally with then president Donald Trump in January 2021.Credit: AP
Viewing Greene’s newfound political trajectory as bravery assumes that she had something to risk in standing up to Trump. But it is just as likely that, like millions of women before her, Greene’s status with the king had already been degraded. Trump once described Greene’s frequent phone calls with great affection. This month he described them as a nuisance and her as a lunatic. It’s a classic breakup drama.
It’s kind of a shame that Greene doesn’t seem to have found any value in feminism over her public career. Because what’s currently shaping her political fortunes can be explained rather simply by Feminism 101.
Trump’s White House is so circuslike, it’s easy to forget that it is also a workplace. And women of a certain age know what it means to get older at work. Trump’s own administration shows the two roads available. Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, is experienced, credentialled, and seems to be faring just fine in Trump’s sexist universe. She also is not courting public attention or trying to build a public brand as a political influencer. If you don’t have her gravitas, your ambition relies on favour. That’s where it gets sticky. The Trump ethos rewards gregarious, aspirational, younger women.
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Trump governs much like he once ran his beauty pageants. Women decorate his atmosphere. They must not challenge him for leadership of it.
It wasn’t lost on me that the same month Greene announced her retirement and her president dismissed her as a lunatic, Zohran Mamdani, the next mayor of New York, visited the West Wing.
Whereas Greene has been restrained even in her disagreements with Trump, Mamdani is a self-described democratic socialist who has called out the president’s “fascist tactics.” Yet Trump showered Mamdani with praise. He glowed up at him beatifically, looking to all the world like a young girl in a Renaissance painting. When the news media pressed Mamdani on his past comments and heckled him about taking an airplane to Washington instead of a “greener” option, Trump stepped in to defend him. Vociferously, even.
Yes, there was a lot of hero worship at play. Mamdani is the coolest boy in the only school Trump has ever cared about — New York City. But Mamdani is also a man.
The man Greene was relying on for her political favour fawned over a socialist before he would protect his loyal female surrogate. Women helped make Trump. Trump never intended to repay the favour. Some women will figure that out sooner than others.
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At the end of the day, fantasies of Greene’s political evolution are overblown. Her own words show that she has no remorse for the immense damage she has done to this nation, to its discourse, to its political legitimacy. Yes, she offered a mealymouthed apology for her role in our “toxic politics”. But on the whole she is, like many conservative women, a beneficiary of the very feminism that she reviles. She has long thought that being a tough girl rumbling alongside the boys will earn their loyalty, when all it ever does is earn women the right to throw themselves on the sword for men who never deserved their sacrifices.
To her credit, Greene is a survivor. She took a hard look at her political fortunes and appears to be betting on herself. As some reporting indicates others in the House are also looking to retire, she may end up being prescient. Or she may have mistimed the market on Trump’s political fortunes. Either way, she took the only choice she really had available to her.
There is not a real place for women in Trumpism, in MAGA or in the mainstream Republican Party, as long as they are one and the same. But Greene’s trajectory is a lesson fit for a fairy tale. If you want to control your own destiny, it’s better to be a wicked witch than a princess.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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