‘So I did, gladly’: Marjorie Taylor Greene blindly pledges allegiance to Trump despite admitting Republican failure
Ever the truest of believers, Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s vaudevillian devotion to Donald Trump reached new heights this week, as the Georgia Republican admitted to voting against her own principles simply because the president-elect asked her to.
“I am one of the most conservative members of Congress, and last night I voted for a bill that ordinarily I would never vote for,” Greene wrote on X in an embarrassing screed. “However, the man that took a bullet to the face and won the presidential election…asked me to vote for it, so I did, gladly.”
This latest display of pseudo-religious fealty follows a normalized, hardcore pick-me pattern for Greene, who earlier this year compared Trump to Jesus Christ at a Las Vegas rally. “The man that I worship is also a convicted felon,” she told supporters, linking Trump’s legal troubles to Christ’s crucifixion.
Greene’s absolutist allegiance to Trump emerged in stark relief during this week’s funding crisis. She initially blasted House Speaker Mike Johnson for crafting “dirty swamp deals behind closed doors,” only to reverse course when Trump’s team got involved in negotiations.
The whiplash-inducing pivot highlighted Greene’s willingness to abandon her stated conservative ideals at Trump’s behest, even as the president-elect’s demands fell flat with other Republicans. When Trump and ally Elon Musk torpedoed Johnson’s original bipartisan deal and pushed for a debt ceiling suspension, dozens of House Republicans broke ranks to defeat the measure.
The final spending bill that passed Congress early Saturday stripped out Trump’s debt ceiling demands entirely. The Senate voted 85-11 to approve the stripped-down version, which keeps the government funded through mid-March while providing $100 billion in disaster relief and $10 billion in farm aid.
Greene’s performative loyalty stands in peculiar contrast to Trump’s track record of dismissing her overtures and disregarding her to the point of her losing self-respect. Despite her repeated attempts to position herself as Trump’s staunchest congressional ally—even floating the manifestly undeserving Musk as a potential House Speaker replacement for Johnson—she remains on the Challenger Deep end of the bench of his inner circle, if even that. The dynamic echoes Trump’s first term, when Greene’s provocative rhetoric and conspiracy vomit often created an ongoing series of migraines for Republican leadership while failing to translate into remotely meaningful policy influence.
Yet Greene appears undeterred, pledging in her social media manifesto to shut down government funding after this bill expiresexcept for military, border patrol, and “basics”—until Trump takes office in January 2025.”House Republicans, we better figure out how to get this done next year,” she wrote, without apparent irony, after admitting to voting against her own principles. “And that will require changes.”
The changes Greene envisions, however, seem less about whatever conservative policy she pretends to be pushing and more about fealty performance to Trump, regardless of the cost to her stated ideological commitments or congressional influence. For now, her political identity remains fundamentally tied to Trump’s fascist fancies rather than advancing a coherent (still less than desirable) conservative agenda or even bifurcating herself as a human capable of producing original thought.
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