The vindication of Majorie Taylor Greene

Ten weeks ago, Donald Trump called Marjorie Taylor Greene, his former ally and a former Georgia Republican congresswoman, a “LOSER.”

Greene shot back that Trump was a “neocon puppet for Israel.” Both of them do this a lot these days.

Last week, it was Republicans who were big losers in the midterm elections. The president might have been the biggest loser of them all.

Greene knew why.

“Look, if you're in the administration and you're ready to… run for president, you need to continue taking in the lessons that were sent by the American people on Tuesday, and it was really the same lesson that was sent in 2024,” she advised in a video post the day after the midterms.

Greene laid out what she considered core issues that led to the 2024 re-election of Trump, and then, as borne out in the exit polls and vote counts, the Democrats’ 2026 sweep.

“No more foreign wars, (Americans) don't support the war in Iran,” Greene said. “We don't want to fund foreign countries and foreign wars. We don't want to fund Israel, we don't want to fund killing children in Gaza.”

“And we want to put Americans first,” she added.

The deeply unpopular Iran war was at the center of why Republicans performed so poorly on Tuesday. Even before that, voters in both major parties were already souring on the U.S. backing of Israel and particularly the bloodshed in Gaza at the hands of the Israel Defence Forces, a policy that Trump has been fully invested in, as was President Joe Biden. This anger was particularly salient among younger voters and even most young Jewish-Americans.

Among Republicans, Greene was ahead of the curve on this.

In mid-2025, then-Rep. Greene, who the New York Times described at the time as “an avatar of MAGA politics on Capitol Hill,” became the first congressional Republican to call the Gaza crisis a “genocide.”

“It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct. 7 in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza,” Greene said in a social media post on July 28, 2025.

As her vocal opposition to the war grew, so did her criticism of foreign aid, which she saw as prioritizing Israel over U.S. interests. She also demanded the administration release the Epstein files, an original MAGA promise. It was then that Trump began machine-gunning MTG with new names: calling her “wacky,” “lunatic,” and even “Marjorie Traitor Greene,” insisting that the once avid MAGAite had turned against him and his movement.

When she was elected to Congress in 2020, Greene was presented regularly by legacy media as merely the QAnon candidate, reportedly dabbling in rightwing conspiracy theories. In that same period, Trump called Greene “a future Republican star.”

Five years later, after she resigned from Congress, it was Trump who was calling Greene crazy. By then, the feeling was mutual.

Yet it was also Trump who went from promising no new wars on the campaign trail, often flanked by Greene, to later justifying his own war of choice by conjuring up questionable, but familiar, propaganda about the Iran being weeks away from having a nuclear weapon and the U.S. having to end the war with Tehran after “47 years.”

In November 2025, Greene announced that she would not run for re-election, saying she refused to be a “battered wife,” seemingly referring to Trump’s reneging on his campaign promises combined with increased attacks on her personally. Trump had already vowed to back a primary challenger against her.

"I have too much self-respect and dignity, love my family way too much, and do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the president we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms," Greene explained a year ago.

Greene was in a similar position to that of her friend and fellow antiwar Republican ally, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who did run for re-election this year and was defeated in his Kentucky GOP primary in May by Trump-aligned, billionaire pro-Israel donors in the most expensive House primary race in U.S. history.

Greene never surrendered her antiwar, anti-genocide posture, and in fact has probably become more fierce since she decided not to seek re-election. Nor has she abandoned the America First brand that defined Trump’s 2016, 2020 and 2024 presidential campaigns, a message that some Democrats successfully capitalized on after Trump discarded it.

And Greene noticed.

When Zohran Mamdani, the self-described democratic socialist mayor of New York City, participated in a debate during his 2025 campaign, the candidates were asked if he or she would like to visit Israel. Popular rightwing populist Tucker Carlson remarked to Greene during an interview that Mamdani, “was the only person in the New York City mayor’s debate to say he wanted to focus on New York City.”

Carlson noted that unlike the other candidates, Mamdani said “I’m running New York. That’s my job.”

“He gave the right answer,” Greene responded. Carlson agreed. How prescient both were.

In late October, Greene said the best way the Trump administration could ensure a win for Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed over reliably hawkish Republican Mike Rogers would be to attack Iran again before the midterms.

It’s a stupid senseless war and America hates it,” she posted on X

“We also hate neocons,” Greene added. “This is not an endorsement, I’m not a Democrat, but I’m also not a neocon Republican.”

El-Sayed himself was asked in July about a potential crossover between his philosophy and Greene’s, known to many as just “MTG.”

“So I talked to a former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on this podcast in April and it's kind of remarkable how similar some of your positions are. Like, she also has condemned AIPAC's influence and politics, called for no more US taxpayer dollars to Israel, said that the cost of health insurance needs to go down,” Dasha Burns posited to El-Sayed on her POLITICO podcast, “The Conversation.”

“Do you think you could build this new coalition with people like MTG?” the Democrat was asked.

“When you ask me about why establishment elite Democrats are so worried about me? It's because there are a lot of people who listen to her who are going to vote for me in the general election,” he replied.

Many who once voted for Trump in 2024 went for Democrats in 2026.

Democrat El-Sayed handily defeated his Republican opponent last Tuesday by running his own version of an “America First” campaign. “And when it comes to the question of foreign policy, the difference is usually AIPAC money. And if we got that money out, maybe our political consensus would match our public consensus,” El-Sayed said of the formidable pro-Israel lobby.

Greene said after the election, “I think America spoke very loudly that we don't want politicians that are loyal to AIPAC and loyal to a foreign country.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene began her Washington career as the most devoted Trump loyalist, who would go to the wall for his America First message. She still does.

It was Trump who reversed course, leading so many in the same coalition that delivered him the election two years ago to now reject him and his latest iteration of the GOP.

“Marjorie is strong on everything and never gives up - a real WINNER!,” Trump wrote in 2020.

“We never changed, Trump did,” Greene wrote in August.

Donald Trump was right. Marjorie Taylor Greene never gave up.

But he did.