Back home, voters stand by Marjorie Taylor Greene after she stood up to Trump
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
By RICK ROJAS and SEAN KEENAN
A portion of the country might have looked at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as a symbol of how caustic and bewildering national politics had become, as she spread conspiracy theories and falsehoods and heckled President Joe Biden during a State of the Union address.
Back home in Georgia, some of her constituents did not always like what she said or how she said it. Plenty of others had no problem with her. Either way, voters in her district in the northwestern corner of the state largely stood by her. They respected Greene, many said, because there was never any doubt about where she stood. And they appreciated that it was usually right alongside President Donald Trump.
The toughest test of that loyalty emerged when a growing disillusionment with Trump erupted into an explosive rift, leading to an abrupt announcement by Greene on Friday night that she would resign from Congress. As blindsided voters grappled Saturday with what might have driven Greene’s decision, many of them were confident that it was not a lack of support from her district.
“I feel like she has stood her ground,” said Meredith Rosson, 43, a paralegal and the chair of the Republican Party in Chattooga County, a rural area hugging the Alabama border.
And Rosson stood with her.
Greene’s drift away from the president was fueled in large part by her persistent calls to make public files related to disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. She had claimed that the Trump administration was impeding a speedy and comprehensive release of the documents. But those arguments were part of what was becoming a broader divide, as she accused Trump of neglecting the pressing domestic concerns that had been central to his winning appeal to voters in 2024.
In response, Trump disavowed her and encouraged a Republican primary challenge against her next year. He said that Greene, who was once a leading acolyte of the “Make America Great Again” movement, was now a “ranting lunatic.”
Greene then shocked her colleagues in Congress, as well as much of the nation, and especially her constituents in Georgia, when she said she would step down in January.
“Loyalty should be a two-way street, and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district’s interest,” she said in a video announcement.
In many ways, the rift, and Greene’s subsequent resignation, have turned the political reality in her district on its head. Some who were once enthusiastic supporters have taken to calling her “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Greene,” echoing the president. Critics who had long viewed her as the embodiment of all they loathed about politics are now suddenly, if skeptically, looking at her in a more forgiving light.
But what has perhaps been most striking is that, in a part of the country where the president has deeply entrenched support, many Republicans are defying him by refusing to abandon Greene.
On Friday night, the local chapter of the Republican Party in Floyd County issued a statement affirming its “unwavering support” for Greene, praising her for working “tirelessly to support the needs and views of her constituents.”
But the county party, like many Republicans who agreed with it, stressed that it was trying to strike a balance. “Our support of Rep. Greene does not in any way, however, diminish our total support for President Trump,” the statement said.
Greene has been one of the Republican legislators who has been most adamant about calling for the release of the Epstein files. She has also strayed from others in her party over health care costs and the handling of the government shutdown, among other issues.
“She’s realized, ‘I need to do what’s right for my community and for people who are mostly in the middle ground,’” said Brandon Pledger, who owns Alibi Prohibition Lounge and Combat Market, a combined cocktail bar and gun shop in the strip of storefronts in downtown Rome, Georgia, a city of about 38,000 people, the largest in Greene’s district.
The sprawling 14th Congressional District in Georgia extends from the bustling suburbs of Atlanta across the forested foothills of the Appalachians to the outskirts of Chattanooga. It is a part of the state that has been left largely unscathed by Georgia’s evolution in recent years from reliably Republican to a swing state. (Last year, Trump won counties in the district with as much as 83% of the vote.)
Greene, who was elected in 2020, had attracted an unusual level of notoriety, first as a candidate and then as a freshman member of Congress. The attention came because she had promoted the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory, which she later disavowed, and because she had a history of making provocative and incendiary statements, including questioning whether a plane had crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, and endorsing violent behavior.
In her district, and even among Republicans, Greene has long been a deeply polarizing figure.
The campaign slogan of her Republican opponent in her first bid for office in 2020 was “All of the conservative, none of the embarrassment.” A lesser-known candidate who has already entered the 2026 Republican primary has a page on his website devoted to listing examples of what he calls Greene’s “nonstop forays into delusional paranoia,” including referring to deadly school shootings as hoaxes.
Before her resignation, Kasey Carpenter, a Republican state representative from Dalton, Georgia, saw Greene’s “decoupling” from Trump as an opportunity for the party. An exchange of conflicting ideas among Republicans was healthy, he thought. Necessary, even.
“I think people who are straight platform people, I wonder what their marriages look like,” Carpenter said. “If you’re not arguing about some things, is it real?”
Many believe that, following Greene’s departure from Congress, she will find a new act, perhaps running for another office. She joins a league of other Georgia Republicans who have been successful despite running afoul of Trump, the most notable among them Gov. Brian Kemp.
Carpenter was more concerned for the future of the district, and, in turn, the country. Greene’s resignation was a setback, he said, if only because it meant losing a flawed yet unflinching voice whose support of the president turned out to not be unconditional.
“I’m hopeful that whoever decides to run,” he said, “will not just beat the same drum.”