Flash in the Pan or the Future of MAGA?

When the news broke Friday evening that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia would resign her seat in the House of Representatives at the beginning of next year and ride off into the weather-modified sunset, my mind immediately went to another member of Congress from Georgia: Cynthia McKinney.

McKinney, a Democrat and the state’s first black congresswoman, had a congressional tenure more than twice as long as Greene’s. She served in the House for 12 nonconsecutive years total in the 1990s and 2000s. Superficially, the two Georgians had a lot in common. They were both highly critical of the foreign policy of their own party, they both publicly entertained conspiracy theories, they have both played footsie (or worse) with antisemitism, and they even suggested foul play changed the outcome of a presidential election—McKinney with the 2000 election, Greene with the 2020 election.

But what unites Greene and McKinney beyond their home state and their horseshoe-theory connections are their roles as bombastic members of Congress. They were attention-seeking stars who rocketed into the stratosphere only to burn out quickly as they became alienated from their own parties. 

In McKinney’s case, her claims about the Bush administration having foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks brought her a primary challenger in 2002 whose main argument to Democrats was that McKinney’s conspiracy-peddling detracted from her ability to be an effective representative. McKinney lost the primary, came back two years later to win her old seat for a final term, then left the Democratic Party to run for president as the Green Party’s nominee in 2008. McKinney has since become a pariah, aligning herself with antisemites and dictators while engaging even more wild conspiracy theories and standard-issue bigotries.

Whether that fate awaits Greene remains to be seen, but the nature of her departure says a lot about how politics operates differently now from the time when McKinney’s regular output of outrage was an outlier. Attention, not legislative acumen or policy chops, is the coin of the realm now, as recent flashy but flash-in-the-pan politicians like Alan Grayson, Madison Cawthorn, Matt Gaetz, and Cori Bush can attest. But for Republicans, at least, that approach has its limits when the attention starts to damage Donald Trump.

Even before she was elected in 2020, Greene’s penchant for rhetorical outrage defined her. Just a month after she took office, the House voted to strip her of two committee assignments. That was in response not only to Greene’s past support for the QAnon conspiracy theory but a litany of outrageous statements, including one of her campaign ads, which showed Greene holding a rifle next to images of Democratic members of Congress and calling herself the “squad’s worst nightmare.”

But this rebuke hardly isolated Greene from her Republican colleagues and, in particular, House GOP leadership. Kevin McCarthy forged a “powerful alliance” with Greene, the New York Times reported not long after McCarthy became speaker of the House after a drawn-out, multiballot vote in January 2023. Despite her reputation up to that point as a fly in the congressional ointment, Greene became a solid vote for McCarthy and was back on committees once Republicans were back in power in 2023. Indeed, her gadfly-ness seems to have boosted her career in Republican politics.

All the while, Greene was fairly unrepentant about saying and doing outrageous things—the sort of things that had made her a major villain to the left, a headache to the center-right, and a popular secondary character in the world of MAGA. She once stated that, had she been running the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump supporters “would have won.” (A statement she quickly walked back, calling it a “sarcastic joke.”) She declared that businesses that refused to admit people unvaccinated against COVID were engaging in “segregation.” She perpetuated a dubious claim that schools were allowing kids to pretend to be cats and use litterboxes. And then there was her tweet, upon the death of Pope Francis, that “evil is being defeated by the hand of God.”

None of those statements hurt Greene’s standing within the party. Her combative style did, however, starting with her removal from the House Freedom Caucus over her fights with fellow members. Her unsuccessful push last year to oust Speaker Mike Johnson did not win her much more favor with her colleagues, either. “We don’t need to hear from her anymore,” Rep. Carlos Gimenez told reporters at the time. “She is there just for the attention. She just wants to raise money off of this. And again, she doesn’t represent the Republican Party.”

But her steadfast support for Trump seemed to, well, trump everything else. Greene was given a plum speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention. She called Trump the “founding father of the America First movement” and said that “as God as my witness, he will finally give us the country we deserve.” At his final rally in Georgia before Election Day, Greene gave an address urging voters to deliver the state for Trump. And no one could forget the bright red ballcap Greene wore in the House chamber for the president’s joint address to Congress just this past March, which read in white, capital letters: “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!”

But while Greene may have found favor with Trump during the four years he was out of the White House, she soon became a liability for the president once he was back in office. Her pressure to release the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files from the Justice Department’s investigation into the convicted child abuser drove a wedge between the two. Earlier this month, Trump dropped the hammer, calling her “‘Wacky’ Marjorie” and withdrawing his endorsement for her reelection.

Greene won the battle, since Trump failed to stop the discharge petition forcing a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and that bill passed the House overwhelmingly and then the Senate by unanimous consent. But Trump seems to have won the war, given that Greene will exit the House a year before her third term ends. Even with all the chatter that Trump is already a “lame duck,” he’s still the GOP’s top dog.

What’s changed for loudmouth attention seekers since McKinney’s days is that it remains more plausible that Greene does not spin out into obscurity like her Democratic counterpart. Instead, this move could launch her into a second act. She can be the lone truth-teller about how the “Political Industrial Complex of both parties is ripping this country apart,” as she wrote in her statement announcing her resignation. She may be the true heir to the MAGA movement, uncorrupted by power and still holding true to its populist ideals. Her recent popularity within the mainstream press for her public stand against Trump suggests she could have a media career ahead of her.

That is, if we keep giving her the attention on which Greene has always thrived. That choice is ours.