“The Epstein files represent everything that is wrong with Washington,” she told The New York Times. “Rich, powerful elites doing horrible things and getting away with it. And the women are the victims.”
After, Greene says the president called her, irate, and the pair had what would be their last conversation. When she expressed confusion and frustration at his reluctance to release information – particularly given his promise to do so during his campaign a year earlier – she claims Trump told her if he released the files, “my friends will get hurt”.
A week later, Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking at a university campus on September 10. At his funeral, in front of tens of thousands of mourners, Trump said that where Kirk “did not hate his opponents” and “wanted the best for them,” he “disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”
Greene speaks ahead of Donald Trump at a campaign event in Atlanta in late 2024.Credit: AP
It was at that moment the fugue state Greene had been living in for more than five years finally lifted, she says.
“After Charlie died, I realised that I’m part of this toxic culture,” she told The New York Times last week. “I really started looking at my faith. I wanted to be more like Christ.”
Though Greene is not the only once-devoted MAGA Republican to publicly break away from Trump since his return to power (far-right commentators Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and podcaster Joe Rogan have also become vocal critics), she is easily the most senior elected member of the party to make calls from inside the House.
Considering Trump’s reputation for vengeance, his free admittance that he hates his enemies, and the willingness of his most rabid supporters to enact violence in his honour, Greene admitting fault “for taking part in toxic politics” is, despite her many flaws, a sign of her conviction.
Greene joins Trump at a rally in Dalton, Georgia, in January 2021.Credit: AP
But what’s even more remarkable is that to many Americans, a woman who as recently as November said she believed aliens are demons that have fallen to Earth from heaven and who is still staunchly anti-abortion and transgender rights, is seen as a voice of reason. Increasingly, people on the left are willing to listen to and work with Greene, and come out in support of her.
Democrat Ro Khanna said that whereas he once “had the same caricatured opinion of her as everyone” – that she was someone guided by conspiracies more than facts – his view changed after he worked with her. “I found her to be a person of integrity and courage, considering the pressure she faced from the White House.”
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In some ways, her about-face also offers something of a reassurance or, at the very least, a skerrick of hope that the temperature, which has been at boiling point for many far-right Republicans for so long, might be lowering slightly. That the many Americans who feel like they have lost relatives to Pizzagate, birther theories, COVID hoaxes and other off-the-wall beliefs about the deep state might yet have them return to reality.
Greene acknowledging that she regrets being part of the problem doesn’t absolve her of her role in Trump’s political success. She was instrumental in normalising some of MAGA’s most violent and vitriolic rhetoric. As The New York Times wrote this week, she had a taste for spectacle, including filing a petition to impeach the then House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, filming herself hectoring a teenage survivor of a school shooting, and admonishing participants in a Drag Queen Story Hour at a local library.
Perhaps these contradictions and complexities are what is resonating with people.
Frustrated and disillusioned voters believed “America First” would largely be a domestic endeavour. Now they hear the president say following his Venezuela intervention he is considering action against Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Iran and Greenland, while they struggle to make ends meet.
In that context, Greene is an outlier once again. She’s tearing down the thing she helped build, which could well be more politically consequential and damaging to Trump than anything the Democrats or establishment Republicans could ever say.
Katy Hall is deputy state topic editor.
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